I am inter...

Question

I am interested in an Enterprise role at Grafana. How is the team performing? Is it feast or famine in terms of who gets the best accounts in their patch? Is attainment reasonable? Are Enterprise companies adopting the tool?

Current Employee · Accepted Answer

Enterprise companies are absolutely adopting Grafana. Company size is not an issue for Grafana as the product is very good and built for very large and complex deployments. It is likely that Grafana will continue to take market share in the O11y space for years to come. However, the Grafana sales ops team and sales leadership have done an awful job at creating a meritocratic opportunity for sales reps. Territory is always a factor in a reps success but it is more of a factor at Grafana than most companies. The success formula at Grafana looks like this - 60% Territory, 30% Timing, 10% talent which is disappointing because it doesn't have to be this way and conducting a genuine "propensity to buy" analysis and allocating territories appropriately would fix the issue and it would have the added benefit of improving the sales culture by leaps and bounds. Grafana has entire regions that have underperformed for years. They have turned entire teams over in those regions and yet, they still go out and hire the same number of reps (sometimes more) in those territories after every one of their predecessors are managed out of the business due to "underperformance".

They do not allow for Enterprise and Strategic reps to develop a territory. Bringing a Strategic Account to a close is a 18-24 month process and some reps are given a handful of these accounts with no install base and are put on performance plan after 12 months of building the territory, only to have those deals close after they leave the company.

Companies that buy Grafana share some similar characteristics (there are exceptions to this ICP in rare circumstances)

1. Cloud native - Grafana cloud is the future of Grafana. They have all but halted innovating in the on premesis offering and there is nearly 0 difference between the on prem offering and open source. Therefore, if an account is still largely running their own datacenters, Grafana will lose to the likes of Dynatrace or to Grafana open source.

2. Devops and SRE - Technology-forward companies who have made the leap to modern SRE practices and Devops practices are far more likely to be proficient with Grafana's open source offerings and therefore likely to push the company to adopt Grafana's modern O11y platform in the cloud.

3. Software Companies - Software/technology companies are far and away the most significant adopters of Grafana Cloud and will continue to be.

4. Companies with Open Source Culture (Prometheus, K8s, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, etc) - Companies that value open source and are allergic to vendor lockin will chose Grafana Cloud over Datadog for the future of their O11y stack. Its a better tool for them. Grafana is android. Open, flexible, and able to tackle almost any use case if in the hands of an experienced practitioner. Companies that are looking for the easy button will pay for the apple version (datadog)

If Grafana did a real territory analysis and were honest with themselves about the real TAM for the product at this stage, they would be able to achieve the same revenue targets that they are aiming for with 30% fewer reps. Rep productivity would increase by 30 or 40% (its below 30%). And they would increase rep retention and customer churn would fall.

They will never do this because the people doing the rep math and hiring plans deal in fake data, built on bad models, and false assumptions. And seemingly no-one has the courage to tell them the truth. So instead, they will throw bodies at the problem as an insurance policy.

Anyone at the company for longer than 12 months knows all of this to be true.

If your territory looks like the companies I described, its a great opportunity. If not, there is a near 0% chance of sustained success.

Current Employee · Answer

Big improvements at Grafana over the last 18 months across the board on performance and balance of performance across the teams. 
Several reasons for that. 
But to set expectations, it’s not an easy sell and a very tech driven sell still. As in all other companies in enterprise sales you will have to look at the first 12 months as a time to settle in and learn. The magic happens after month 12 where performances across the AE teams go well above 100%. The company helped several AEs to become millionaires over the last quarters.

And yes… Grafana is adopted big time in the biggest enterprises out there..

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Anonymous Q&A

I am interested in an Enterprise role at Grafana. How is the team performing? Is it feast or famine in terms of who gets the best accounts in their patch? Is attainment reasonable? Are Enterprise companies adopting the tool?