My biggest problem with it is that this was clearly a sales tactic _from the start_. The initial e-mail came from a Sales Development Rep (SDR), a job that is focused on generating leads for the sales team. It didn't come from somebody in a technical role.
CF has a process that generates leads from existing, low-spend customers and funnels them into SDRs to push them towards high-spend programs. That's totally acceptable IF the limits are clear -- "Hey, your business plan only covers X amount of traffic and you're at 2X, we need to address this" -- but, if everything played out as shown here, this is a highly unethical sales process.
I don't think we should take issue with a member of biz dev leading the process. I don't particularly like some sales teams, but others are perfectly fine to discuss the scope of an account.
I do think there's an issue with not engaging in a dialogue over the billing and sticking to a script. If you want someone to pay $120k, your biz dev team better be prepared to put some effort in.
Overall, I think both sides have some culpability for the outage. It was a business risk that management either didn't understand or didn't take seriously. And it was a massively missed opportunity for Cloudflare.
My biggest problem with it is that this was clearly a sales tactic _from the start_. The initial e-mail came from a Sales Development Rep (SDR), a job that is focused on generating leads for the sales team. It didn't come from somebody in a technical role.
CF has a process that generates leads from existing, low-spend customers and funnels them into SDRs to push them towards high-spend programs. That's totally acceptable IF the limits are clear -- "Hey, your business plan only covers X amount of traffic and you're at 2X, we need to address this" -- but, if everything played out as shown here, this is a highly unethical sales process.
I don't think we should take issue with a member of biz dev leading the process. I don't particularly like some sales teams, but others are perfectly fine to discuss the scope of an account.
I do think there's an issue with not engaging in a dialogue over the billing and sticking to a script. If you want someone to pay $120k, your biz dev team better be prepared to put some effort in.
Overall, I think both sides have some culpability for the outage. It was a business risk that management either didn't understand or didn't take seriously. And it was a massively missed opportunity for Cloudflare.