Not Enterprise Ready & Poor Sales Culture - Account Executive Starburst Employee Review

1.0
Mar 16, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Interesting value prop for the product at face value

Cons

Enterprise sellers - think hard before making the move to Starburst. The sales pitch to bring Enterprise sellers in to Starburst is focused on leads banging down the door and Snowflake/Databricks takeouts being abundant. Neither being the case. Across the Enterprise teams the reality is that few companies are really all in on the strategy of data federation and even fewer are abandoning their existing Snowflake and Databricks deployments. Sales management works in a Commercial mindset, prescribing what you say, how you say it, and inspecting meetings via ChorusAI. Feedback is not constructive and lends no credence to an Enterprise sellers experience or discretion. The sales process is heavy and when combined with the lack of true business opportunities creates an extremely negative sales culture where a few sellers are making a great deal of money and the large majority are having very little success and are frustrated by the constant inspection and negative feedback cycles.

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Starburst Response
3y
Thank you for your feedback. Starburst was started with the intent to turn the data warehousing model inside out. There is a lot of opportunity here, especially within the sales org - the data warehouse market is over $100B and the data lake market is another $50-100B. We are pioneers disrupting a 40+ year old industry that requires some trial and error. Every day we are focused on finding repeatable outcomes that will drive not only company success but AE success as well. We have built many aspects of our GTM, in collaboration across many leaders and conversations, to help our teams find this success broadly. Given the complexity, we ask new hires to join with an open mind as Selling at Starburst is unlike any experience you may have had previously, thus we have a strong culture around coaching. While we are still early in this process, I’m sorry this has been your experience. If you haven't done so already and are willing, I’d highly encourage you to provide this feedback directly to your leadership team. If you would like to discuss your feedback openly with me and how we can improve our GTM function, please send me an email. I'd love to set up a time to discuss with you further ways we can improve. -Javier Molina, CRO

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