Market Struggles? Blame Sales!

Let's talk about Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince publicly humiliating his sales team.

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Matt starts by acknowledging that his product used to have real PMF: "we saw a lot of success with enterprise customers because our products were so good and solved real problems."

Turns out Matt is the first CEO in history to solve this math equation: Build good products + solve real problems = Revenue.

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Strangely, he now starts to insult his sales team for... hitting quota?: "This allowed many on our sales team to succeed largely by taking orders. When the fish are jumping in the boat, you don't need to be a very good fisherman."

I'm not an expert in fishing, but I have never seen fish jump INTO a boat. Pretty sure you still gotta work hard to catch them.

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Today, it turns out his products aren't as good or solving real problems: "The macroeconomic environment has gotten harder."

Well yes, many companies have realized their products are nice to haves or overpriced or were simply a ZIRP phenomena. That's why we are all doing cuts, refocusing our product teams to build better offerings for our customers!

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Uh oh: "We've identified 100 people on our SALES team who have consistently missed expectations. Tide goes in, naked fish, ramble ramble"

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So let me get this straight.

When you were hitting revenue targets and growing like crazy, your sales team were lazy fishermen who just got lucky your product was so good.

Now that you're missing targets, your sales team is responsible because they are bad at sales.

Way to say the quiet part out loud Matt 👏🏾 👏🏾 👏🏾

THIS is how you are thought of, my fellow sales savages.

When we bust our ass to make the company successful, it is dismissed as the work of the product team + fish jumping into boat.

When the market turns and the company's product and strategic errors get exposed, we are blamed and ridiculed.

This is why I built Bravado. This is why @GeneralCorp and I work together.

To stand up for salespeople in a world where their own CEO treats them like 💩

-SM