Just thought to post my experience as an SDR at Grafana EMEA. I have been with Grafana for a while and the SDR salary in EMEA is a basic non-negotiable package. During the initial negotiation I asked for more, and they agreed with my ask after 4 rounds of interviews, I was given an offer with a lower number (non-negotiable). Later I found out more colleagues had the same experience. I joined the company due to its advertised culture of "transparency" and because of the product. The role of SDR at Grafana is controversial. The quota is easy to achieve because no one can do proper forecasting, but with a constant 20% quarterly target increase, they will soon plateau, and things will get hard. The SDR team is aligned with the marketing org. and managed by first-time managers mostly. I was shocked at how bad the managers were at their jobs compared to my previous managers. I am convinced to this day that our manager still does not understand our stack, because in the beginning when I asked them questions they would reply with "What do you think it means?". My whole time here my manager was unable to answer a single question I had, which is kind of sad. This goes hand in hand with career growth (or lack thereof). Being under the marketing org. makes it impossible to transition into an AE role. When I joined I was told that 3 successful quarters are needed to start the application process. Shortly after the process was changed to 16-24 months in an SDR role before a motion to AE can be submitted and 3 successful quarters. The worst part of the job is probably how we are treated in the EMEA team. Being a US-led company, the EMEA team keeps getting the shorter end of the stick despite constantly over-performing and delivering solid qualifications. The routing process is an abomination. We do not have the option to personalize emails for our prospects, instead, a very poorly worded automated email is being sent out from our name to prospects. The best part is that the leads are wrongly assigned 5 out of 10 times on average in the first place. So the bot will for example send a link to my calendar to prospect A, but prospect A should have belonged to John Doe. So then John Doe needs to write an embarrassing email saying that the meeting with me will be canceled due to an internal routing error. The leads will, later on, be reassigned correctly but mostly to the favor of the US team. Rarely in favor of the EMEA team. I am also not confident management knows how to really utilize Salesforce to its full potential. For a long time, we were using google docs and spreadsheets for bookkeeping. We also don't use any qualification methodology, so the process is quite messy. Last but not least is something everyone who wants to work at Grafana should know. Namely, the whole "transparency" spiel about why I joined the company is the biggest nonsense ever. Every time we try to raise issues, the management shows us a slide that says we are individual contributors. As IC's our job is to fulfill our quota and not ask questions. Collaborating with the Sales Org. (AE's for example) is labeled as toxic bad vibes. The management will do anything to stop their incompetence from being exposed at an org. level. That includes bullying us with 1:1's where we are reminded we are ICs and we should pretty much keep our mouths shut. I also have no clue what the CEO has been up to as he is mostly invisible. We also lost a lot of good people overnight, which was scary. People high up disappear from the slack channel and then we all pretend they never existed. All in all, I would not recommend this company. People also got their bonuses wired wrong. Hope it helps. #tech #grafana #sdr #emea #sales #jobreview #sdremea #sdrgrafana #
Disclaimer - I'm at Grafana Labs. As usual, we will fully review this feedback, learn from it and action it. There are parts that are painful to hear (and challenges we know about), but somewhat true and some areas that require more information, otherwise on their own, they significantly misrepresent our (clearly not perfect) approach and (honestly good - no really) intent, but read on and you can be the judge. 1st - yes, the SDR world and the entire company - Grafana Labs has been growing like crazy - from just 4 SDRs a couple years ago to over 40 this year (from under 120 employees to over 800 globally distributed - everyone is remote). We had to build, buy and customize systems for stage determination/qualification, routing, compensation and we had to constantly update territories. We’ve had to constantly make changes because the pandemic complicated everything - now all workers were remote for our customers/prospects. We had to evolve and segment our business globally, by company sizes and worked hard to create a path for SDRs where they could start by focusing on inbound leads and move up into more of an outbound role and then be eligible to go into sales or other places. 2 - SDRs in EMEA have been promoted into selling roles. Full stop. SDRs globally have also transitioned into regional marketing and demand generation roles. We actually do attempt to provide multiple paths for SDRs and we document it with a process. In fact, there have been far more SDRs promoted over the last year into selling and other roles than have churned (quit or let go). 3 - target setting. This will be hard to believe, but we've always entered this process in an attempt to be pragmatic. We ask - what's a reasonable amount of opportunity creation for SDRs? We look at many standards at other companies, but always want to balance quantity and quality. We do significant analytics to understand the inbound demand levels, the resulting pipeline, revenue and we have SDR-to-rep ratios. What we've found is that with growth of the business, some SDRs were able to make and blow away their targets with more quantity than others. We worked hard to calibrate, create equitable SDR lead flows and constantly create targets that were attainable, yet provide ample opportunity to showcase the best performers (and we pay on overachievement of course). So, yes, we have actually continued to raise the targets to achieve a better alignment with effort and outcome, while watching quality closely. 4 - we have a TON of work to do to help our SDRs on enablement, education and preparing for an AE role (if they want to go that route) - based on our rapid growth over the last few years, it has been hard to both hire so many people and fully educate them. We actually have added a dedicated person in enablement for SDRs. Nonetheless, today a variety of former SDRs are in selling roles and some are now top sellers in the company. 5 - we have absolutely hired and attempted to grow less experienced managers and we have a lot of SDRs that have never been in the role. This has benefits and challenges. When we started our journey to grow the SDR org, we were a tiny company - highly experienced SDRs and managers were not interested in joining us. We didn't know if we were ready for them either. So we found passionate, energetic, folks that we thought could get there - and we leaned into them. And for them, we prioritized growing their teams significantly. We needed to drastically catch up to the market demand and growth objectives. We have a lot of improvement work to do still. 6 - Part of our maturing is also spending much more time on performance management. Digging into calls, ensuring our messaging is right, coaching, etc. With our growth, this was actually so hard as we ended up with manager-to-SDR ratios that were over 10 (where managers were spending a ton of time hiring and onboarding), so we had to create new ratio policies, which frees up SDR manager time for better performance direction. 7 - Something we have spent considerable effort on is to separate constructive and destructive feedback and we have low tolerance for the latter. Our systems got complex and sometimes broke - some people were helpful and understanding and others were screaming “there’s a fire, you people are stupid for having a fire” while a bunch of people were trying to actually put out the fire. Folks that are spending more time complaining with no constructive insight are being redirected/managed and when they don't take the direction (which includes suggestions for posing their issues in a helpful way), begin to create a toxic environment where people are spending more time engaging in practices that are hurting productivity and team collaboration, we have to work on exiting them (usually this is where a post like this comes from). Net net - we do have a ton of work to do better and not only in SDR land, and we ask people to go on a journey with us, that journey will be bumpy, fun, crazy and sometimes not great and some people will get off this train/boat/plane at various fast stops.
How’s the Ent/Strat AE org doing?
Do you know how many weeks of parental leave Grafana offers? (I’m thinking of applying there so let me know if they do paid referrals and I can send u my info)
Damning insight into a dysfunctional business unit. Experienced echoed on other teams in the immediate org. Managers out of their depth, often resorting to gaslighting direct reports. Feedback not encouraged.
Are you an IC in sales there? I’m currently interviewing
Do you know how many weeks of parental leave Grafana offers? (I’m thinking of applying there so let me know if they do paid referrals and I can send u my info)
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I think you have to recognize, when you go to a startup that is growing, that shit is going to be hard and confusing. If you want order and stability go to a different kind of company. While it isn’t a guarantee, and some growing companies are very well run, your chances are better at a company that has, for example, issued a dividend in the last year. Also, as you probably know, an SDR role is a dead end by design. The company you work for wants you to move up into an AE role or get the fuck out. Other companies want you to get out too so that we can make you a junior AE. It is a brutal job which often has terrible management - lots of times SDRs who couldn’t make it to AE. The bright side is that you are learning self reliance and how to listen to your gut. That will make you a stone cold killer AE. So quit whining about Grafana and move your career forward.