How challe...

Question

How challenging is it to meet sales targets as a new Account Executive at Elastic?

Current Employee · Accepted Answer

It is very difficult for a new rep to hit target at Elastic because the accounts or territory you will be given will have already been worked to death by every rep before you.  You will either have a named set of accounts that will include some current customers or a territory.  Either way you have to ask the tough questions .  For current customers - how many reps have owned this before me?  Why haven't they grown? Are they entrenched with Splunk or Datadog or some other competitor including Elastic's open source?  The market is saturated with competition and it's harder to differentiate.

Current Employee · Answer

New FY now, but last FY, quotas were not remotely based on real world data - classic example of "take what we need to hit our number as a company, add a buffer, and pass it down to the next level. AEs and their direct managers both largely got screwed, and hard - especially if you were new and joining a patch without a strong base.

Current Employee · Answer

Very difficult.  The way Elastic assigns accounts to reps doesn't take into account any historical context, just the renewal base.   In other words, imagine being given a current customer that is 7 years old, has had 5 different reps and has never grown or expanded.   As a new rep, what are you going to do?  How would you develop a point of view? There is no real playbook here.  Also, imagine being given a greenfield account that uses Splunk.  What do you do there?  Elastic thinks its easy to replace competitors.  It's not, take my word for it.

Current Employee · Answer

Depends on which vertical you are into.

Current Employee · Answer

You have Everything you need to know 
Unfortunately it's super hard as territories are badly organized

Former Employee · Answer

Extremely

Former Employee · Answer

As of FY ending in 2023, reps were still lucky to have quota retirement come in from consumption run rate biz aka folks who forgot to turn off/convert their monthly/annual plans into better contracts. 
Despite this, agreed with the other answers here -- differentiation in this space is tough + tougher to get people to pay for what was once a free software anyway.

Current Employee · Answer

Like any company in this sales environment you have to work hard to achieve quota but it is possible as the platform especially with the additional  in AI functionality for all three (Security/ Observability/ Search) makes it competitive and sets us apart from the competition. The patches in most cases are still large and there is a lot more ways to get into clients with the extended platform.

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Anonymous Q&A

How challenging is it to meet sales targets as a new Account Executive at Elastic?