Worked at a startup for 20 months selling enterprise SaaS with Gen-AI capabilities. During my first year, I was ramped up and consistently improving, but always around to 80-90% attainment mark. My manager was patient with me thank God.
Got a new GM in my territory December of '23 and that's when things changed. Every day my new manager kept ripping me on how I have "so much to work on". I was confused because this quarter I was taking off, leading all AE's in bookings, but kept working on what he said (forecasting, pipeline management, etc). This went on and I kept getting weird vibes from him and don't think he liked me or our styles didn't "mesh". I challenged him on a lot of things and Im not sure he understood why I did it (to make the company better).
Flash forward to end of Q1, I finish at 112% bookings and 190% with accelerators. Top AE.
Rewind to mid Q1, found out that my quota would go from 138k to 250k in Q2. WOW. So I called a 1 on 1 meeting end of Q1 with him and kept asking him "how are we gonna do this"? Not from a standpoint of "I dont think I can", but from a standpoint of "lets brainstorm and hit this f-ckin number together".
On April 19th get a last minute GCal invite on a Friday afternoon, I knew what it had to be, and it was... they let me go. He told me that he's been trying to work with me on things like "forecasting, etc" and hasn't seen the improvements. I said "improvements"? I was the AE of the quarter. He then used that previous conversation against me saying "you're right, I don't see the pipeline to get you to your Q2 number". (Irony is, the morning of my last day, I did a demo for a new team within one of my biggest logos, that deal alone was 100k in pipeline)
He said he felt it was in the best decision of the company to go in a different direction. And there was Nothing I could do.
My only guess is that my new manager is an Egotistical D-bag and simply didn't like me. It's not like I'm a toxic a-hole. I like to win as a team and always learn to get better. My colleagues would probably say Im easy to work with. Now I get that if you took 100 people that a few of them just wouldn't like me for whatever reason, but that's life, and in a nutshell, that's sales.
Turns out they brought in a new guy 2 days later. Felt like they (my manager and LT) had it all planned out.
My question is, how do I explain this scenario in my upcoming interviews? From a recruiters standpoint they probably call BS because it simply doesn't make sense. If you've been in this position, how did you navigate it?
(See attainment attached)
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