Great product-market fit, but difficult sales environment
Pros
- important big data product, with a massive target addressable market, and room to grow - generally smart and hard-working people across the board; meetings start on time; processes are followed; company is run with fiscal discipline - good relationships with public cloud vendors and other partners - great sales engineers, who are extremely knowledgable and great with customers - strong product-based growth, and organic sign-ups on pay-as-you-go
Cons
The sales quotas are completely unrealistic. Also, there is an increasing number of toxic policies that adversely affect salespeople, including - - i.e. withholding certain types of earned commissions unless criteria are met - not permitting salespeople to interview for senior roles - pressure to close deals in specific months/quarters (rather than when the customer is ready) - back-loaded incentive structure (i.e. get paid less for closing 0-50% of your quota, than 51% and above) - inability to share pricing with customers without getting sign-off from sales engineers In addition to all this, there is a great deal of admin/paperwork required to run a POC, get a Quote approved, and manage Opportunities. It is very hard to get a transaction done at Confluent. The company's sales goals overall are quite demanding, sales leadership has a strict management style, and is not interested in gathering feedback from the field.
