Not sure what was the point of her arguing though. Just for the Tik Tok video?
It's not like you will argument yourself out of being terminated.
I also find her argument forced. "Just because I haven't closed anything, it doesn't mean my performance hasn't been good", that's nonsense, it's sales, performance is valued on sales.
Not closing a single sale in 5 months does not qualify as good performance, and you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.
from the video, I got the impression that cloudflare has a pretty standard 3 month ramp up period which, for her, ended right about thanksgiving. so it's not 5 months with no sales, it's a little over a month. and that month has two (three) major holidays that knock out ~2 weeks. so 5 months is suddenly more like ~3 weeks.
and, if every 1:1 with a manager has been glowing and then you get fired 'for performance', there's been a massive failure somewhere.
Agreed. Nobody is closing deals near the end of the year. Also it takes time as a sales person to worm your way into a company to sell them on a product. This takes good leads to follow up on. No idea if the sales agent even had that. Were there even any so close to the holidays?
Sales can be hard because you have to build relationships with companies/people. If you compare a green sales agent against an entrenched veteran they will always look bad. The veteran sales person has contacts, revolving sales from existing companies and people they can hit up to drive new sales. The newb has none of that. The amount of time she was employed was not enough to determine that.
Her account can be taken at straight value only because this company failed the firing so badly.
This should be able to be easily answered.
E.g.
"Your performance review on November 17th we discussed concern that you weren't closing any sales."
"Your peers close 20 tickets per week, you close 12."
"You made mistakes on X, Y, and Z deals costing us clients."
"A sales associate normally closes 3 deals in the first month after their 3-month onboarding."
Basically, anything concrete at all. Either tell someone they're laid off (cost savings) or if you're going to cite a cause then you should back that cause up. You can't claim at-will-employement-fired-for-no-reason when you half-ass it and state a reason with no data or facts or any management chain present to speak to the reality of the situation.
Back in the 00s, I played cards periodically with a friend-of-friend. He showed up one Friday and told all of us a story about how he's doing so well that his manager recommended him for a special 8-week program to improve his performance, with a checkpoint at the 4-week mark and the end of the program.
That's right, he was being put on a PIP (at risk of termination) and internalized it that this was a perq/reward program for outstanding performance.
It's easy to believe a manager didn't give criticism because it makes their job easier until the time they have to rip the bandaid off, then they can wash their hands of the issue.
You obviously have no clue as to the point of her video or the companies response. They could not give her an exact reason for the termination, which every employee deserves. Even the CEO admits what a crappy job they did, but all you got out of it was she was trying to argue out of being terminated. I think you should apply for a job at the company as you are great management matterall for this company...
Oof... in all regards absolutely abysmal. That not only hurts that's systemic failure and I'll take the response with a grain of salt now. If something like this happens in your organisation you just plain suck at management. You can read it between the lines that he really believes stomping his foot one time will fix it as he thought before that such a thing wasn't possible in his org. It's management blindness the whole org talks about it but the ceo never hears of it because the yes man are busy laughing at his bad jokes.
> We fired ~40 sales people out of over 1,500 in our go to market org. That’s a normal quarter. When we’re doing performance management right, we can often tell within 3 months or less of a sales hire, even during the holidays, whether they’re going to be successful or not.
Which sounds like they have an implicit probationary "we'll fire you in <= 3 mos. if you don't make a sale" that--according to the video--isn't communicated by managers or written in hiring contracts.
Or any number of other ways to keep track of employee performance that don't rely on an inherently random outcome in an enterprise sales cycle? For example, responsiveness to inbound emails, outbound volume, demonstrated (lack of) knowledge of the product or market?
I don't think we should just give Cloudflare the benefit of the doubt here but man, we can do better than generic bad assumptions.
I'm having a hard time seeing your take on this. As far as what the two off-screen folks said in this recorded video, this seemed pretty textbook. It's as humane as it can be while maintaining both correct amounts of information compartmentalization, privacy and not leaving any openings for legal comebacks.
It's less direct than it would be in a perfect world, but I can't fault anything they said.
In contrast, the employee who made the recording has recorded a company meeting while they were an employee of that company, and revealed it online. I know nothing else of this employee but already can see why Cloudflare, a company for whom security and privacy must be internal values if they are going to use them to define their external products, might not be a good fit for them.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc and if my colleagues would have told me about their abysmal experience I would've recorded it as well probably wouldn't have released it but I would've recorded it.
I’m not sure why you assume he should have known or a good manager would have known. If you made a list from scratch of the most important things for the Cloudflare CEO to keep track of, would the HR script in layoff calls even make the top 100?
I‘ve also seen bigger things than this change with one stomp of a CEO’s foot.
Hey great idea you have there, let's keep crappy companies a secret so they can screw future employees...I very seriously doubt you care one bit for her employability. By the way has anyone ever told you would have made a great "Lemming".....
Not sure what was the point of her arguing though. Just for the Tik Tok video?
It's not like you will argument yourself out of being terminated.
I also find her argument forced. "Just because I haven't closed anything, it doesn't mean my performance hasn't been good", that's nonsense, it's sales, performance is valued on sales.
Not closing a single sale in 5 months does not qualify as good performance, and you don't need 1v1s with your manager to find this.