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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

We tried Datadog, and due to how they bill, our DD bill was more than the services being monitored. (At the time, we used a lot of short-term spot instances, which billed by the second, but DD billed by the hour per instance)

We reached out to DD to try to work something out, and they agreed to cut the bill in half, but only IF we signed up for additional services.

I will never use their services again, and will always share this story when their name is brought up.

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After a sales call that I was unimpressed with, they began calling my engineers in order to put pressure on me to re-engage.

Harassing engineers is a hard no.

Yup, they did that to our team too. Calling my coworker during the evening, emailing me and messaging me on LinkedIn at the same time. When I said "no thanks" they replied with a message to set up a meeting. Went from a maybe someday to a never real quick. They really need to rethink their marketing.

I wonder if that kind of marketing is actually quite successful. You'd think they wouldn't risk their reputation otherwise right?

Could be salespeople that are paid by contracts closed, with zero regards for the consequences to the company's reputation.

How can you secure an opportunistic and resourceful sales team that's encouraged by commission, but not corrupted by it?

What are some of the best ways to ensure the folks developing business leads don't sell out your future for their present?

What are the best incentive structues you can provide so they don't want or need to?

My company came up with a structure where we have an overall quarterly revshare in replace of bonuses for the entire company. It works where engineers get X% and sales reps get ~4 x X% of the revshare pool for each team. Of each team's bonus pool, 2/3 is given out guaranteed based off a few tangible factors and then the remaining 1/3 is given out to individuals who have performed above & beyond.

The idea behind this are a few-fold but essentially:

As an engineer (now CEO/CTO), I've hated having to wait the full year for my bonus. It's just a way to lock me in for the year when my incentive to stay should be to love the work & team. I don't want to create a place to work where you're forced to stay because of some guaranteed bonus - if you want to leave, leave & then let's hire someone who finds the work engaging + we all know performance slips as you wait for the bonus.

For the sales team, it means they're incentivized to work with the engineering & product teams to make sure they get the engineers the proper feedback in order to build a better product that they can sell more easily.

We've found this has generally built a better more team-oriented & results-oriented culture. Happy to expand but overall I think a quarterly revshare for everyone is a much better end-result (other than the fact I'm now forced to care more about making sure engineers are happy but that should be a huge focus regardless...).

Edit - also worth noting that we give everyone equity so there's still a long-term focus of building a company, not just cashing out quickly.

Google and Facebook ads support folks do the same thing, I'm guessing they have some incentive and some metrics to hit, such as number of people who they actually talk to etc.

With bills that large and when they’re on commission, it’s very logical

You can probably pervert those metrics to something that looks good in some slide decks. While actually destroying the image with most potential customers.

> I wonder if that kind of marketing is actually quite successful.

I think their revenue says it is, unfortunately.

It is, believe it or not. Hard no for me though.

It feels to me like they have a culture that enables out-of-control sales staff. Probably juicy commissions with a tendency to look the other way.

They have been harrassing our whole company, tracking people on social networks, cold calling, tons of emails.

We decided to never work with them after that. That and the horror stories of people that experienced the product itself in their former companies.

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