[godzillabrennus]

Hilarious you got sales to call you back. I had to ping their CTO after multiple attempts to have sales work with me failed. He finally got them to give me a demo of their zero trust solution. No one ever followed up with me again though. It’s like they don’t want to sell an enterprise (tens of thousands of dollars a year) subscription…

The only sales guy who called me back before the CTO got involved was Kingsley Okoroh out of their UK office. I’m in the states. He even had no idea why no one in the states would call me. Anyway, Kingsley tried hard to help, Kingsley should be their head of sales since no one else cares.

[yamtaddle]

I've had only limited interaction with their sales people, but find it interesting they weren't on-the-ball trying to sell an account that valuable, either—we were more toward the bottom end of their enterprise range, so I'd just assumed we were too small-potatoes for them, but those were by far the least-hungry sales people I've ever interacted with. It was like I was bothering them. LOL. Also some of them seemed to know very little about their offerings, market segments, et c., which was weird.

[EDIT] Oh, tens of K $ per year, not month. Yeah, that'd have been us, too. Mid tens of K $ per year.

[dismantlethesun]

I agree. I contacted Cloudflare sales for a small order of just a 100k or so per year, and they totally ghosted me after my first round of questions. No quote, no contact, nada.

I gave up and went to Fastly.

You may say my order was too tiny but even Akamai gave a response; they just didn’t have any turn key product that suited my needs.

[yamtaddle]

Yeah, CloudFlare was unique among the companies in this space that we contacted. The others' sales folks all gave way more shits, even at fairly big companies where I'm certain we wouldn't be a notably-large account. They were also by far the least-interested in tailoring their plan. "Oh you don't want to pay for this giant pile of stuff you don't need? Hm. Well. Too bad." Seemed like they wanted all-or-nothing, for enterprise plans, which leaves a big gap in their offerings between the top self-serve and the bottom end of enterprise—seems like a pretty major gap in their funnel, letting all those accounts just leave if they exceed self-serve but can't justify the very-expensive minimum enterprise plan, but I guess it's working for them?

[nolok]

Wait they're less reponsive than Akamai ? I ran away from Akamai because of their sales people and how they apparently embedded their dark soul straight into the user interface they give you to use, and by use I mean summon an akamai billing person from the depths because you're not allowed to do anything without them.

I know they're doing good but Cloudflare must be even more successful than I thought if they can afford that level of ineptitude at sales level

[rgbrenner]

Akamai is growing at 7% per year vs 40% per year for Cloudflare. Akamai is still 5x the size of Cloudflare but their growth rate is a lot more manageable than 40%.

[tachim]

exact same experience here.

[bastardoperator]

Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars? You didn't talk to an actual salesperson, you spoke to a BDR. A BDR quantifies leads and determines if your spend is worth the time. If you didn't get a call back it's because the BDR identified you as small time. I'm not trying to be rude, just pointing out how many sales teams tend to work.

[UncleEntity]

> Why would I chase 10 of thousands of dollars a year when I can chase hundred of thousands or millions of dollars?

They have someone on the hook with customers hounding them to get their system back online and it isn’t worth spending a few minutes to quote a guaranteed sale?

Something about a bird in the hand comes to mind…

[lowercased]

Unsure how it's "chasing" when people call you. I'm more than a 'warm lead' at that point. I'm calling you wanting to buy your product. And yeah, I know not everyone who calls wants to buy immediately - some are just tire kickers or getting a quote. But... again... it's not 'chasing'. It's not even 'selling' so much as 'order taking', imo.

[notahacker]

yeah, any decently set up sales team for any company selling to the whole market ought to have some sort of sales team member that's happy dealing with higher volumes of transactional sales, even if the main focus of most of the team is million dollar accounts, unless their self service programme scales to massive numbers or they don't deal with smaller companies at all.

Someone ringing up to say "I need a quote for this level of usage as I think I'm into your enterprise tier" might be asking for a smaller quote than the Big Fish the BDR has sent a cold email to who's eventually been convinced to take a meeting, but they're more likely to convert and unlikely to take lots of meetings or a particularly skilled salesperson to do it...

[bastardoperator]

I don't disagree, but I've also never seen a enterprise sales organization that caters to businesses that don't already have millions of dollars in spend sitting in the war chest. We'd all jump at 50k because we're reasonable humans that understand thats a lot of money. However, when you're on the hook for booking millions of dollars in business in what amounts to 60 working days (90 day quarters), you might think about it differently is my limited understanding.

[rgbrenner]

That’s all true but the entire point of the freemium model is to feed the paid account sales pipeline… and having a gap between the free and paid tiers where your sales people don’t want to handle the accounts destroys a lot of the purpose of having a free account tier.

I fully agree with what you’re saying but it doesn’t speak well of Cloudflare to have this gap. If they don’t want or handle accounts at this mid tier level, they should have a have a self service tier to handle it.

[luckylion]

Why wouldn't you do both? And if your sales department is maxed out by chasing the big contracts so much so that they don't have time to onboard someone spending 50k a year, get more sales people.

[hapidjus]

BDR?

[CallMeJim]

Business Development Representative.

[tobyjsullivan]

Impressively, the expansion conveys about as much information as the acronym.

"Gatekeeper" is a more accurate translation.

[notahacker]

In most companies it's more accurately translated as "lead generator" or "sender of spam emails and LinkedIn messages"

[Johnny555]

If that's the case, then they should set up a self-serve portal that these small-time customers can use to buy service if they are too small to warrant talking to an actual human.

But I don't understand why he had to talk to enterprise sales at all if he was already a paying customer, why couldn't he just check a check-box for "High JSON file transfer" and pay an extra fee, then sales could contact him at their leisure to discuss an enterprise contract that might save him money (and they can upsell him on more vendor-lockin services that he'd get with that enterprise contract)

[godzillabrennus]

Exactly! I would have bought via self serve or a channel partner but they don’t offer either purchasing option.