It's sad because the problems are the exact same ones that happens at a lot of companies. A fantastic product is created which shows value to those that use it but the growth strategy around this is poorly executed and the potential dies. Management! Managers follow the old strategy of hiring on mass in the hope that this will work and zero thought is put into execution. Instead of making sure their team has the right accounts to do the job, an excel spreadsheet is compiled to put random company names together (some no longer in business) without any thought on propensity to buy, current competition, economic impact for customers industry or buying cycles. In addition, management stated it can take 9-24 months to break into an account. Building and investing in relationships was key however we saw accounts changed frequently for new members at the same time targets increased by 50% each year. The field team highlighted the simple fact that making someone work on breaking into an account for 12 months, only then to remove you is a waste of time for that individual. Culture! The culture has eroded to the point where Gitlab doesn't follow some of the core values anymore (some people have asked why they are still on there). The collaborative nature of teams has diminished and bullying and politics has come into play in many roles. Concern grows when talented employees from all parts of the business hand in their notice and nothing is said about it. Business has turned into a hire and fire company with no consideration around employees wellness. Customer Success Plans and other Tools! Whilst GitLab talks about consolidation of tools (eliminating the toolchain taxation) we strive to have as many useless tools as possible. We use customer account planning tools that don't fully work or integrate with SFDC and were purchased based on a managers view rather than the people who use it. It's also not available to the whole team so CSM, SE's, Sales members all use something different. This is because whilst we preach standardisation, each team wants to use something different. Strangely we didn't use our own product to build something but this is because of the love of dashboards and pandering to the few to the detriment of the many. You'll also be pleased to hear that SFDC at GitLab, like most companies is administered by someone who left years ago and never told the company. Simple issues don't change for years and never will, you must learn what caused things to crash and avoid them forever more. PPT!!!!! Be prepared to create an entirely new PPT each quarter for account plans. Even thought this info is in the Account Planning Tool, SFDC and millions of other places this needs to be created again in PPT. The Org chart tool is useful so management can periodically state that we need to speak to people that you'd already said you need to.
