Was a great company.... - werkgeversreview Sales Representative bij Elastic

There has been a steady incline for a few years. Many cashed out from the IPO or were pushed out. There was some bad leadership that took 2 years to get rid of while dead wood was hired and the game of politics and hot potato began. It's been 2 years to see the growth plans and no one has outlined their goals, vision or objectives. Company Calls are full of buzz word bingo or an exec reading from paper. There is little communication from the ground up. I'll break it out by segment. Sales in the west is not doing well. The west particularly has a loss of any leadership. Reps and managers are asked to help leadership show value. Lots of late nights writing ghost emails so others feel involved and many are asked to let people join their meetings despite lack of understanding of the account, our solutions or how we can help. Sales management hasn't worked out ways to spread best practices so every sales team is on their own. We all do our own proposals, RFPs, decks, etc in our own vacuum. There was MEDPICC training with no examples or understanding of the field of observability or security. When questions of real world examples came up, the trainer was overwhelmed and moved on. Execs and managers don't bring ideas to QBRs if they even show up. SDRs: The SDR organization doesn't have a routine to scale new SDRs, have milestones, help manage messaging, teach cold calling and prospecting, ensure accountability, provide mentorship, etc. Everyone's left out on their own for the sales reps to manage the SDRs. There's a new program with zero staff so SDRs are being asked to postpone their own prospecting to help out and teach the field. Most have checked out and are looking for jobs elsewhere or they have "quietly quit". Solution Architecture has a similar trajectory. There's no career/skills development where the SAs are asked to learn from each other. They are left on their own to look for answers they need with little methodology. Yes, there's an occasional training but I haven't seen the SAs grow into enterprise reps nor be held accountable for any deliverables. SAs struggle to deliver a point of view, perspective, application of a new feature, customer relationships. Product management has fallen apart since we had our head of product take over as CEO. Ash started to make progress then was promoted to CEO. The deadlines of innovation are loose with little direction. For example, we haven't had true RBAC for cloud in the 4-5 years we've had a cloud offering. Elastic wants to be a security company without true RBAC.. There hasn't been much innovation to talk about to customers. The last innovation we had was the purchase of Endgame which failed in the market. Searchable snapshots was a small step forward but not applicable to many customers. Our cloud has had a lot of issues and support goes into a black hole. Our support has to communicate with the cloud team and there's little communication. A few years back, many of the security features that were paid were put into the free version which lost a huge customer base who doesn't want to pay huge dollar amounts just for ML or support. The reps are then pushing cloud which lacks technical needs like RBAC, data onboarding, better tech support (that communicates issues from our cloud team) and a better SaaS than a PaaS model. At the mid-market level, support and the cloud has a business case which is hard to prove at the enterprise level. The cost models at the enterprise level aren't customizable for various situations. The services organization doesn't have a direction or any consolidated content. For example, we need materials to give customers but our consulting sales people have to make it up on their own on their nights and weekends. We sell technical account managers with no methodology or accountability. We've needed migration content, onboarding, customer stories, prospecting materials, sample go live plans for various use cases. None of this exists. Leadership is non-existent. Customer Success has been non-existent. We move around CSMs as paper pushers or support case chasers but we haven't hired consistently. The leader seems like a smart guy but perhaps it's Elastic that can't invest properly? Again, there has not been a plan of any methodology or vision outlined to the field. Some of our CSMs are technical, some aren't. So we flip flop on their role at any given time and only cover a couple of accounts (or maybe we flip to a ton of accounts that we can't even begin to cover). For example, a major customer issue at a $1M+/year customer. The headcount was open so the responsibilities didn't fall on the customer success management with an open head count. The customer moves on and everyone will be wondering at renewal time. Reps aren't really incented for renewals. The renewal and customer success team aren't equipped with keeping these 7 figure/year customers and we're losing many of them to new technologies, Datadog, Grafana. At the time of renewal, there will be a lot of folks willing to help but the account was lost 1-2 years prior. Sales is held accountable to a monthly forecast but the rest of the company has a laid back attitude towards deadlines. Every other Friday is off, flexible schedules, but don't worry about timelines. We had a story of a product manager who took off 4 mo for paternity leave and burned out the other so bad he had to quit leaving the field in a complete bind. Someone will disappear for paternity leave but the responsibilities will fall onto the team instead of the manager. For example, someone complains over doing their managers work and is fired. This happens a lot at Elastic. Many emails to the director of every department to get what is needed. Marketing seems to do well and we have support at regional level. I think there's vision and execution there. There has been a lot of departures due to culture on the mid-level. The impact is big without any solutions to tie over gaps in people. Partners - Again, there is a huge change with a re-org that didn't make any sense, caused a lot of chaos and will continue to decline due to the alignment. We've put all our eggs into the cloud partnerships which isn't defined. We need a product vision to align with each cloud partner and we haven't been able to outline how this would work. For example, how does Elastic fit into Google's landscape and fit with say BigQuery? We don't have enough partner enablement to support the other traditional resellers who prefer selling other technologies because of their rebate, training, and support models. We need a distributor such as Arrow but we've ghosted Arrow because of legal language without any next steps or explanation. Paperwork: We had major issues with order forms going out with wrong language because of our software issues. I still run into a huge amount of bugs. Deals were delayed with no escalation paths to resolve the issues. It seems to have gotten better but not fully resolved. We do have a good legal team (a little short sighted and needs better alignment from sales but overall, there's been a huge improvement). We have a great deal desk team, community team. Work/Life balance is great for everyone else. Sales people have to do everyone else's job + manage up + find revenue and deal with customer satisfaction. It's really a few themes that have broken the company: 1) Only sales seem responsible for deliverables. Every sales rep who leaves says the same thing "You have a big company quota, selling big company deals with help as if you're a start up (but even then most start ups have quite a bit more) 2) Leadership has gotten completely out of touch with the customer experience. There's arrogance from the top. The company all hands continuously brings up the question why our attrition rate is so high and there isn't an answer or a plan. This question came up and it was answered "There's natural attrition and most who leave aren't regrettable." This was said in the midst of many leaving who carried the company without diving into the impact of these departures. Only about 20% of sales reps are making their numbers. Enterprise is very thin on attainment due to many of the problems outlined above. Mid-market and I would suspect SMB are better but with mid-market, the number of accounts was decreased and the quota was increased to match an enterprise rep but with a much lower OTE. Good mid-market reps have left or will leave due to this. There is ambiguity on how things like Multi-year is paid so many reps have to track down their pay putting salt on the wound in the midst of declining comp plan. I spent months working with the compensation team trying to get this outlined and no one could understand some of the compensation. Some reps got a raise of a higher OTE but it turned out they were going to make less based on commission rates which was misleading. Once they understood this, they began interviewing elsewhere. 3) Elastic has lost their messaging on what they're selling. The 3+1 platform isn't crisp enough to resonate. Search is not owned by observability teams. Our security message isn't resonating with security teams. Observability and certainly security teams need more SaaS automation. There isn't innovation fast enough to compete with Datadogs and others. Our customer exec involvement is non-existent compared to Splunk. Emailing my customers with "how can I help" is not an exec relationship. Splunk migration is hard and we don't have a services plan to migrate. We don't have the support to compete on strategic deals like the others - For example, cost models (I have too many stories of our cost being way out of wack yet no one can solve it or even understand the problem), proper onboarding, support, customer success, solution architects, etc to onboard the large strategic deals. Partnerships are weak for the larger enterprise deals. Again - No communication and no plan. 4) The passionate, hard working people have left or have been pushed out leaving a lot of dead wood covering their tracks. Politics is now the name of the game. 5) They changed the comp plans so top reps will make less this year. All good reps left and they came back later and said it was error. It really angered people that he lied saying it was an error instead of owning what happened and that many reps wouldn't sign the comp plan 6) All the while, observability and security is a tough race to the bottom. Innovation and GTM strategy is key. I don't think Elastic has it.