[latchkey]

She wasn't a good fit for CF, so maybe she would be a good fit at your company instead?

"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. Sadly, we don’t hire perfectly. We try to fire perfectly. In this case, clearly we were far from perfect. The video is painful for me to watch. Managers should always be involved. HR should be involved, but it shouldn’t be outsourced to them, No employee should ever actually be surprised they weren’t performing. We don’t always get it right. And sometimes under performing employees don’t actually listen to the feedback they’ve gotten before we let them go. Importantly, just because we fire someone doesn’t mean they’re a bad employee. It doesn’t mean won’t be really, really great somewhere else. Chris Paul was a bad fit for the Suns, but he’s undoubtedly a great basketball player. And, in fact, we think the right thing to do is get people we know are unlikely to succeed off the team as quickly as possible so they can find the right place for them. We definitely weren’t anywhere close to perfect in this case. But any healthy org needs to get the people who aren’t performing off. That wasn’t the mistake here. The mistake was not being more kind and humane as we did. And that’s something @zatlyn and I are focused on improving going forward."

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1745697840180191501

[bsder]

> 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.

1) This is complete hogwash and absolutely cements that I want nothing to do with Cloudflare.

I've worked in enterprise sales. I've also worked with sales as engineering support. I've also been the senior technical rep that sales had to sell to, too.

3 months on a newbie barely gets you up to the point that you can probably go into a client and shadow a senior and talk about a couple Powerpoint slides without completely embarassing yourself. That's it. It certainly doesn't get you the ability to handle an account or do a close.

Some of our later best salespeople looked completely useless at 3 months.

2) This is the kind of shitty "we're sorry you're offended" apology that dribbles out of every shitty CEO's mouth.

The fact that Cloudflare is STILL trying to stick with "fired for cause" after being put on blast is a gigantic red klaxon.

How many people did they treat like this before they finally got their chain yanked over it? What's the punishment for the people who did this? And how do they plan to make this right?

I don't see any of that, thanks. Hopefully some of the Cloudflare competitors are ready to make hay over this.

[latchkey]

I don't know about your specific quoted nit. I had a period in my life where I went on 100+ first dates, in a very short amount of time. I got to the point where I could tell within a few minutes if this person and I would click or not. I always finished the date though, so I also got a chance to make a bunch of friends too, which was awesome. Had I just got up and walked away, that wouldn't have been the kind and humane thing. That is where CloudFlare messed up and he admits it.

I imagine with 1500 employees + ~160 a year, over the course of several years, you get a good feeling for which ones are going to make it. CloudFlare is a relatively technical product, I'm sure they are looking for the type of sales people who are going to more than come up to speed in those 3 months. Probably someone who already has had highly technical sales jobs. Maybe she slipped through their own hiring process. That is on CF, but I wouldn't hold them to the fire for that.

I worked in the IT department for a large porn company. It was literally part of the interview process that you would be exposed to porn in the workplace. We would filter people based on their reaction to that... most of the time, it was people who were actually too excited by the prospect. The point being that is that we made the working environment clear from the start, even though it was obvious.

After a long enough period of time of being in business, CF probably has a great collection of sales people. I've dealt with some of them myself and been extremely impressed. If I were them, wouldn't want to dilute the pool. But, for someone to go into an environment like that not knowing that was the case, and then being surprised at the end... something is wrong with that, which again, he admits to above. Either that, or we have to question her motivations. Given the obvious high bar that CloudFlare exhibits in their sales teams, I'd say both are on the table for consideration.

At the end of the day, we won't ever know all of the details in this story, which makes me less motivated to take either side. It is really just a story to make you emotional and get clicks, than it is about right or wrong.

[wddkcs]

A churn and burn sales team cycle does not speak to a high bar. The companies I've worked with that have taken this approach have been the least thoughtful, and the least productive, usually relying on high pressure sales tactics that yes, most people are not cut out for.

Sales is a profession that anyone can do, because it's a ubiquitous life skill. If it's so easy for them to tell at three months the employee isn't working out, why can't they figure that out in three interviews? What critical info comes out in 90 days of work that can't be extracted during a 2 month long interview process? It's far more likely that they have no idea who will and won't turn out to be a good fit, and that these kinds of 'for cause' firings are meant to 'positively' motivate the remaining workforce, or are due to internal budgeting that is in no way related to the salesperson.

[latchkey]

https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/17462608153872140...

Zero sales in 4.5 months.

2% total was laid off.

This isn't really a sign of "churn and burn".

[wddkcs]

3 months of which was ramp, another 2 weeks of which was holiday. She was given bad manager feedback, no chance to correct, and fired without proper explanation. To her, this was churn and burn, and I wouldn't be surprised if the other 40 people fired where similarly treated.

[latchkey]

If my job is sales and I hadn't closed a single deal in 4 months, I'd have quit myself. I'd either take the blame upon myself or I would have figured that this company already saturated the market, or has a bad product that nobody wants. The easy route is blaming someone else.