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this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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My one question going in was whether this was a Sales role. It’s hard to overstate how volatile a career in sales can be. You are your numbers and your income can swing around wildly. Maybe you can control your own performance but the viability of the products is out of your control and the targets set for you to be evaluated against are outside your control too. Companies use Sales to grow, not to subsist, so the second budgets are tight and a company shifts into survival mode, you’re the first to go. Culture is also volatile and high pressure, competitive, etc. I know a sales guy who closed a multi hundred thousand dollar enterprise software deal and was missing just one signature for weeks and could not reach the guy. He travelled internationally and camped out in the building lobby for multiple days until he saw him and ran up and got him to sign.
It’s hard. You can do really well but it’s hard. She’s pretty vulnerable not having actually closed anything, ever, yet. No one actually cares at the end of the quarter if you “have great meetings.”
As she mentioned, she only had a month in the least busy time of year to make a sale. Had her manager said anything or any available metrics indicated that her performance was insufficient, that would be one thing. To blindside her with a meeting with absolutely 0 proof of poor performance is 100% shitty management. Yeah, sometimes shit happens and the company can't keep staff, that's just capitalism. But they do morally and legally owe her the things afforded to laid off staff (especially in the case of mass layoffs). Them trying to weasel out of it shows utter disrespect for their employees, and it should be called out.
Yes many extenuating circumstances. Sadly she’s still open to attack since she hasn’t put any points on the board.
I understand you’re saying that this performance crap is made up so they can save money, and I agree.
But a sales position that has never closed a sale doesn’t make a good poster child for this cause of fighting back against bad performance ratings. Fact is she has not created value.
If her employment included a contract that guaranteed she could complete her ramp period, she’d have some footing.
The point isn't if she made a sale or not, it's that she was never informed of any requirement of such and was given no indication that not making a sale in her first month would lead to termination. Where are the manager notes indicating she was performing poorly? Where are the metrics that she's failing to meet? Where is the contract saying she must make a sale in the first month after the ramp period? If her performance was really the issue, this information would be readily available. The fact that it's not, and that many others had been fired the same day with the same lack of warning, shows that this is a disingenuous deflection to avoid giving her was is owed.
We can be confident that zero sales is not meeting any metric whatsoever. Of course her quota period and goals were all left out of this but salespeople don’t work without them. And the quota is never zero.
The salesperson was never informed that making sales was part of the job? Come on. I think you’re trying a little too hard. No, they don’t have a contract stipulating she just make a sale in the first month, nor did they have a contract saying her employment was guaranteed through her ramp. It’s clear she had the opportunity to make sales. She says she got close with 3 but they all fell through. They’re dicks for calling this bad performance but sadly she has no leg to stand on either.
Okay, but the point stands: if she was failing to meet whatever standards they say she was, why could they not provide those metrics during this meeting? If they can't point to a contract, numbers, or previous feedback (official warnings, record of egregiously poor behavior, PIP, etc.) that indicates she was failing to perform her job duties, they have no grounds to fire her. If it was just her being fired then yeah, this would still be incredibly shitty behavior but, unfortunately, likely still legal under at-will employment laws. However, depending on how many firings "happen" to be occurring at the same time, CloudFlare could definitely have a WARN act violation on their hands. The WARN act specifically calls out this kind of thing:
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/chapter23&edition=prelim