Another very interesting quote:
"I pinged my friend who works at Cloudflare and shared this thread. Here are some of her insights:
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Cloudflare product is top notch, must have. Historically, this had made selling Cloudflare easy. They’re also in an industry that’s doing good. Everyone is moving to the cloud. Or wants to. However, a majority of their business is still represented by people on the cheap plans you can buy on the website, not contracted B2B customers. And usually the CF sales reps have to compete against their own freemium plans and this makes selling and acquiring new logos difficult.
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That said, it’s common knowledge that the CEO does not respect salespeople. If there are any investments to be made, it’s to the Product and Engineering teams. They recently brought on the Twilio CRO and things might change now. But until now most of the focus has been on product, not sales.
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The sales team has no strategy or resources. There is no territories or set of accounts. If you want to find business, you have to go source the internet for your own book of business. There is also zero sales enablement, sales methodology, etc. Little to no segmentation / verticals to help the salespeople focus on CLOSING business. No unified sales methodology either. Everyone is pretty much a lone wolf.
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Steep learning curve and large product suite. You’re responsible for selling all the SKUs (about 15-20 products) and the product training is abysmal. You get some training in the beginning during the onboarding bootcamp but outside of that the product knowledge you need to have is insane. Takes about 1 year to ramp up. The worst part is there is no Gong so reps have to learn everything from scratch which makes learning difficult.
Overall, Cloudflare has excelled by the sheer amount of users who use their freemium services. The product is GOOD. There is no denying that. However, the lack of sales leadership and sales investments make it difficult for the sales team to perform their job. Cloudflare sales is a culture of excellence where you are already excepted to be a top performer by the time you join. But they do not want to train you or enable you.
Laying off the 100 salespeople makes sense if they were at the bottom of the totem pole. But as of now, leadership has no plan to help the newcomers succeed and the same thing will happen if they don’t step up their sales strategy."