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Cloudflare Fire's 100 "Order Taker" Sales Reps

Cloudflare Fire's 100 "Order Taker" Sales Reps

& how it all went down

Nic
May 02, 2023

Cloudflare Cuts 12% of Their Sales Team

Only 3 things in life are certain: death, taxes, and tech layoffs in “uncertain economic times”.

And last week’s Cloudflare earnings call was no exception.

Last Thursday, the CEO of Cloudflare announced they would be letting go of 100 salespeople, or roughly 12% of their sales team.

And we got the transcript of how it went down 👇

Here’s the TLDR version:

Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said their product was so good, it allowed “many of our sales team to succeed largely by just taking orders”.
He compared the deals to “fish jumping right in the boat” which didn’t require their salespeople to be “very good fishermen”.
The top 15% of their salespeople achieved an average of 129% of quota over the last four quarters.
They will be getting rid of 100 underperforming salespeople on the team who contributed roughly 4% of new business over the last year.
They received >250K applicants (40% sales) in Q1, which they’ll use to re-fill some of the empty sales roles.

But some people didn’t like how this went down…

The CEO of Bravado posted his thoughts on LinkedIn:

You can read the entire post here, but here’s the main points:

The CEO says their product is awesome and reached product-market fit.
He attributes the awesome product to the reason why sales reps were able to easily hit quota.
Now that the economy has gotten harder, they need to make a change.
Blame the 100 salespeople that missed expectations.

Hitting revenue targets = our product is awesome.

Missing revenue targets = blame the sales team.

Our take: Sales is a performance-based job. If you’re not pulling your weight, you can’t expect others to pick up your slack.

But this is a harsh way to make the announcement. You’re sending your ex-employees into one of the toughest tech-sales labor markets in years and warning everyone that they were under-performers.

What do you think about this situation?

Sales Tip of The Day

Remember to smile when you’re talking on a cold call. 😁

Smiling changes the tone of your voice and helps you come across as more enthusiastic and knowledgeable about your product.

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