[BlackjackCF]

I don’t know how tech sales work so I’m speaking from an uneducated place here - but is 4.5 months enough time to close any sales?

I imagine that at least a month of that 4.5 months is spent onboarding and shadowing someone else to see how the company handles sales. I also imagine that any tech sales right now are difficult to close given the shrinking customer base due to the number of startups that are folding. And just from my experience being a customer in these engagements - sometimes these sales do take a while to close, since there’s a trial period and figuring out if the product is actually a good fit for the company before the sale goes through. You factor in the time it takes for companies to do the legal/compliance review… it probably takes minimum a quarter to close some of these deals.

Anyway, just trying to get at the fact that her not closing anything isn’t necessarily indicative of poor performance given the context.

[PeterCorless]

It depends on the average deal size for B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products like Cloudflare. Depending on whether a deal is <$5k, which is expected to close in ~1.3 months, to >$100k, which may take ~5.5 months or more.

Source: https://blog.salesflare.com/saas-sales

From my own experience working adjacent to sales for much of my career: Depending on what customer type and industry she is selling to — say, banking or Federal government sales, or sales of ARR >$1m — some sales cycles could even be superannual.

Note that many deals at Cloudflare are >$100k.

Source c. 2020: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-from-cloudfla...

Yet starter packages of Cloudflare can be as low as $20 to $200 / month ($240 to $2400 annually), though those lower tiers are likely all self-service to begin with; she likely wouldn't even be involved except to qualify them for a bigger follow-on deal size.

Source: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

[taylodl]

Devs don't typically appreciate the lead time required for sales. There's a huge latency up-front where you have to get a lot of irons in the fire. Then about six months down the road they start to pay off.

4.5 months? You're not doing that. What really sucks is she's getting laid-off and someone else is going to get her commission.

[nunez]

b2b lead time is usually 6-12 months, so it is very surprising that she was let go in 4.5 for achieving "no sales" UNLESS she did absolutely nothing (no new accounts, no account activity or advancements, etc), which is unlikely.

[caeril]

For Cloudflare specifically, it makes sense. Why they even have a sales team is beyond me.

Everything we need is available by dashboard and API. When we need to add a zone, or upgrade a zone, or buy more load balancers, or upgrade TLS on a zone, or literally anything that could be counted as a new "sale", we can do it ourselves. We ignore their "we noticed you may benefit from Enterprise, call us today!" spam, we never have spoken to a human there, and everything just works.

It's not surprising she had no sales. A salesdrone at Cloudflare is like an ice vendor in Antarctica.

[p91paul]

> We ignore their "we noticed you may benefit from Enterprise, call us today!" spam

Of course if you ignore their offers to talk with the sales team, you won't talk to them. Bigger companies than yours will be interested in their enterprise package and/or will want to negotiate volume discounts.

[6bb32646d83d]

Once a company reaches a certain size, all products used like Cloudflare go through a sales process to negotiate terms, SLA, compliance etc.

[Ekaros]

And somehow they have 1500 people in sales... One wonders...

[valval]

It’s fairly obvious you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to sales or business. Maybe offer your opinion with a bit less confidence.

[caeril]

I'm running a reasonably successful business just fine, thank you.

But salespeople are useless intermediaries when everything you need to do is supplied perfectly fine by the platform's dashboard or API. "Call for pricing" is an antipattern, "Call to negotiate our Enterprise tier" is an antipattern.

> Maybe offer your opinion with a bit less confidence

I'll offer this opinion with 100% confidence: Sales is a make-work program for people whose only skill in life is running their mouth.