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Agreed. I had the same experience though as many others when it comes to Sales. I understand it is a complex product but they couldn't demo me anything even aft

Agreed. I had the same experience though as many others when it comes to Sales. I understand it is a complex product but they couldn't demo me anything even after 2 meetings. They wanted a 3rd meeting for the demo even though I made it clear on the 1st meeting that I am only interested in specific products (log monitoring etc) and would be good to see a demo in 2nd meeting. Too much friction in their sales process. But I guess I am not the target audience.

spmurrayzzz 4y ago
Re: not target audience — I think you're right, I am also part of that cohort (speaking as an engineer at least). This is one of the reasons why I steer away from anything that requires a demo. If an org can't present even a read-only interactive version of the product, then it likely means that there is a KPI/OKR-heavy pitch intended for management or non-engineering business stakeholders to hear (of which the upselling you alluded to is a part). The majority of the (F)OSS alternatives out there can be demo'ed with little-to-no engineering lift from prospective users. This is meaningful for the adoption story because it creates bottom-up pressure to internally pitch to relevant stakeholders— a much more powerful tool than external pitches. The fact that Datadog seems either unwilling or incapable of doing this historically, while touting one of the more expensive products in that particular vertical, suggests that the product value-add may not speak for itself (at least to a significant subset of engineers).