Confluent: Go-to-Market Strategy
Former VP of Sales at Confluent
inpractise.com/articles/confluent-gtm-and-reaching-decision-makers
Former VP of Sales at Confluent
The executive has over two decades experience selling IT technology into large enterprise. The executive has spent the last decade selling data analytics software at Teradata and IBM.
Interview Transcript
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Yes it does. Zooming back up a bit, regarding the cloud product here, you mentioned that it extends their value proposition; it's way stickier. Should it change the business's profile materially in the coming years from a sales perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, or has this shift already occurred to a large extent?
In contrast, the Confluent Cloud offering allows you to provide a fully managed service with the infrastructure, often at a better TCO than the customer can do themselves. So you end up with a good TCO-driven and skills-driven value proposition because these organizations still can't attract enough of the right people to operate Kafka. So you end up covering that, too. You can go after this cohort of customers that are huge value, multimillion, kind of straight off the bat. You land in New Relic or Wix, which is also a public use case that was in my region, in Israel, a massive deal straight of the bat, multimillion type deal. Without going into the specifics of it, that kind of organization where Kafka's right at the heart is a really good use case.
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They’re still getting comped on total contract value?
Yes, on ATV, it was ARR, actually, and then a bonus for all year, so it would ultimately be TCV for the full term. Part of the issue there is that Confluent is trying to solve many different things. One of those things is that the Confluent Platform, which is the big engine of bigger deals, to having a comp plan that covers the Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud type contracts and the consumption motion around it was difficult for the sales ops team and us in particular.
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Understood. Was Confluent burning through that PLG base too fast at one point, and just going after even small PLG customers? Was that an issue?
We went to an insurer in the UK, one of the largest insurers globally based out of the UK, and it took two years for them to get into any meaningful discussion, and we went through a sales cycle with them, the entry point was like a 50K deal. It was hugely inefficient on accounts like that.
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