LinkedIn's Army Of Sales And Marketing Staff Just Keeps Growing

LinkedIn published new numbers yesterday on the growth of its sales and marketing business.

LinkedIn's sales and marketing business was 31 percent of its $304 million in Q4 2012 revenues, CFO Steven Sordello told investors yesterday. The company added about 1,300 employees over the year, bringing total headcount to 3,500 employees. Those numbers imply that about 1,000 people at Linkedin are employed in sales and marketing, in one way or another.

In fact, LinkedIn has a formidable field salesforce, which generates nearly 60 percent of its entire revenue:

The "marketing solutions" and "talent solutions" (ads and help-wanteds, basically) parts of LinkedIn are growing much faster than the subscription business. Talent solutions is 53 percent of LinkedIn's $304 million in Q4 2012 revenues, the highest it's ever been. Marketing solutions went up to 27 percent of the total:

Having a big sales force is the worst kept secret of tech businesses like LinkedIn, Groupon, Facebook and Twitter. These brands prefer to be thought of as tech innovators. But they make their money the old-fashioned way: through small armies of sales people who talk to clients on the phone.