Where to begin?
-Territories are assigned with absolutely no thought process behind them. How your territory performs is truly luck of the draw. You will also get accounts taken out of your territory with little to no notice.
-There is no incentive to build long lasting relationships with your customers due to this. Instead there is a mentality of close whatever you can while you can.
-There is no CSM/CSE aligned to any of your accounts. They all use a pool model. Customers hate the support system and complain that they get rude replies or it takes them weeks to get a response. On top of that, many CSEs are overworked and overbooked.
-In Mid Market, you will be working with 20 different SE's, just depending on which one is assigned to which account of yours. You have to prep each SE for every customer call you invite them to. Many SE's are not seasoned - they have very low sales skills and rely on you completely as the AE to tell them when to speak. They have no curiosity to help find out more about the customers problems. You'll be lucky if they don't hinder the process, never mind help move it along.
-If a partner brings a deal to Cloudflare, that customer is locked in with that partner forever. As a sales person you are de-incentivized from moving the customer to a different partner or moving them direct (even if it is what the customer directly asks for). This creates partner relationships where the partner can coast and add no value, yet still make their margin on upsells when the AE does all the work. It also creates dissatisfaction with the customer as they feel they're overpaying for partner services for nothing in return.
-Sales reps are required to handle renewals even though they do not get paid for them. God forbid you need to make changes to the renewals or the customer wants to downgrade some of their services; internal processes make that incredibly difficult and complex.
-You can pretty much make pricing anything you want it to be as a rep, which means customers are left confused on what pricing they can expect. One rep may extend a discount of 70% to a customer, and that will be the expectation when they are moved to a different rep even years down the line, creating dissatisfaction and lack of trust with the new rep that can no longer get that high of a discount approved.
-Customers complain of lack of visibility/transparency when it comes to pricing.
-Managers are hit/miss but overall I've noticed they are not very experienced, have not seen best practices at other companies, and aren't super helpful in advocating for their reps.
-Layoffs for no defendable reason, letting go talented reps who haven't even gotten a chance to fully ramp and who receive positive feedback in performance reviews
-You may get hired for one role and in 6 months be told you're covering a completely different patch and type of customer
-Pay is below average
-Severance for layoffs is extremely minimal
-no 401k match
-rising costs for the healthcare plans
-CEO is toxic, inexperienced in building strong sales organizations/processes, and regularly belittles sales org
-Many folks have left due to questionable unethical business practices, management issues, favoritism, and other worse issues... It is a widespread issue across all geographies and teams.
It is such a shame because the Cloudflare product line is incredible and the company has so much potential. But currently there are just too many issues that cannot be ignored.
