[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.