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Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next. Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done. We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away. My oh my, it was very, very good day, when I got to tell them to go f themselves.

leetrout 3y ago
This is about to be us with Heroku. Feels like software sales has just gotten worse for years now.
- calciphus 3y ago
  Just Salesforce.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  Heroku is one of those things that if someone tells me their still on it without a plan to migrate I question the executive leadership at their company. Shade of its former self, expensive, and there are plenty of better options. Really seems like the company is in zombie mode until it's eventual slow demise.
  - plufz 3y ago
    I haven’t used Heroku in a long time but I really liked the feeling of starting up a database and a container for the app with two clicks. Which are the main alternatives in that space today?
    - bantunes 3y ago
      Fly.io maybe?
    - mmaia 3y ago
      The best alternative I found is render.com It has this feeling of "just works", and documentation is pretty good.
    - realusername 3y ago
      I just use Dokku on a VPS and it works fine. Sure it might not scale but Heroku didn't either.
  - PanMan 3y ago
    I agree.. but I'm surprised how little Heroku alternatives have popped up yet.. There is new contestants, mostly focussed on more global deploys, but no "Heroku but maintained" that I know of.. yet.
    - MobileVet 3y ago
      We did a bake off 18 months ago and identified ~5 similar platforms at the time. Fly.io and Render were 2 of them. We chose Render and have been happy with things just chugging along as they were on Heroku. Their runtime seems to take up quite a bit more RAM, but the IAC is a great addition resulting in 100% consistent environments.
    - infecto 3y ago
      I am not surprised. There are a handful of competitors but I believe the ship has sailed. I am a complete AWS dunce but it's too easy for me to spin up an ECS with spot machines and run my python app on it. When Heroku hit the scene and for many years, there was no easy alternative. You had to go and provision your own machines to then setup.
      - DanielHB 3y ago
        Is it just me or ECS is relatively complicated? I mean, it is no k8, but still you need to set up a lot of stuff to get it to work.
        dkersten 3y ago
        I actually gave up on AWS forever when trying to use ECS. It was incredibly complex and it kept failing to deploy, but cloudeatch only contained log entries for it about 20% of the time. All I could do was click redeploy over and over — sometimes there were logs, usually not. And they charged me for every single deploy. After a day and a $100 bill later, I gave up and used DigitalOcean’s hosted docker instead. I had it up she’d rubbing in under ten minutes and no bill other than the actual usage costs. Now I avoid AWS as much as I can. Of course my employers tend to be on AWS so sadly I can’t completely avoid it, but I do my best and would never recommend it anymore.
  - te_chris 3y ago
    I'm working with a company who are very happy on it currently. It still works really well for them, they're ok with the cost relative to the rest of their costs.
  - swat535 3y ago
    What better alternatives are there? I saw Fly.io and it doesn't even offer a managed database, not to mention the fact that they have had serious reliability issues. Heroku is pretty battle tested and mature at this point, though the feature development has stopped, I don't doubt Salesforce is now going to use it simply as a the "cloud" offering for their other products..
- MobileVet 3y ago
  I would encourage you to find the exit ASAP from Heroku… we saw continual degradation of service and uptime during our last 2 years there.
CobrastanJorji 3y ago
One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows. It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.
- rndmswethrwawy 3y ago
  They could have, but I can promise you that if they have Tableau visualizations _at all_ at this point, they're shit. Letting something "die on the vine" is the only way to describe Salesforce's Tableau acquisition.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > the behavior of the sales rep probably made the sales rep chart for "outreach activity" tick up and the renewals rep's chart was fired because they didnt hit their target
- toyg 3y ago
  > One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salesperson performance. I can't decide whether this statement is ironic or not. Salesforce is just another big company, with committees and meetings and crisp charts that exist only to show numbers going up, not to actually identify anything as boring as actual operational performance.
- justin66 3y ago
  > It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse. Is the fate of commissioned salespeople to be eaten by other commissioned salespeople.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Sales teams often punish reps for many things out of their control. It’s pretty dumb.
stuckkeys 3y ago
Just out curiosity, what did you end up replacing it with? Looking to shop for a client. They were hyped on Tableau.
- topicseed 3y ago
  Superset works wonders
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Depending on the use cases PowerBI and Looker.
- prometheus76 3y ago
  We're a Power BI house with eight companies in a holding company. Power BI also has a high-security option, which is essential for us for security compliance requirements on our government contracts. We also have a blanket license so everyone can see the dashboards, and we're about to upgrade to Premium company-wide. It took some time for me to switch from Excel paradigm to Power BI paradigm, but once it clicked, I've never looked back.
mathattack 3y ago
The Salesforce reps just couldn’t help themselves. Too much Oracle in their DNA. Ruined the customer relationship, and encouraged the move to Microsoft and their “free” alternative.
scrapcode 3y ago
I'm in the enterprise procurement world and it's mind-boggling to me how many software companies in the past two years have forced themselves to $0 revenue from us by trying to double (or more!) their already exorbitant prices.
- anon84873628 3y ago
  Is this greed, or a struggle for them to survive?
  - cutemonster 3y ago
    It's sometimes a good move and I've seen it recommended here at HN pretty often I think. look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 "I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more"
  - scrapcode 3y ago
    With certain requirements from large corporations switching from usage or license-based pricing to models such as charging per employee in the overall organization, it's hard to imagine it doesn't involve a little greed. It makes the choice even easier when clear alternatives are much more economical. Imagine for example you're a small shop with your own budget in an org the size of Alphabet with a couple of Java servers that you purchase support to the tune of $5k/year and then they all of a sudden want to charge $1,000,000/month because there are ~200k employees within your larger organization. It gets even more convoluted when you get into hardware support, where the support itself outside of warranty can be more expensive annually than replacing the hardware and getting N years of support with warranty.

leetrout 3y ago

This is about to be us with Heroku. Feels like software sales has just gotten worse for years now.

calciphus 3y ago
Just Salesforce.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CSMastermind 3y ago
Heroku is one of those things that if someone tells me their still on it without a plan to migrate I question the executive leadership at their company. Shade of its former self, expensive, and there are plenty of better options. Really seems like the company is in zombie mode until it's eventual slow demise.
- plufz 3y ago
  I haven’t used Heroku in a long time but I really liked the feeling of starting up a database and a container for the app with two clicks. Which are the main alternatives in that space today?
  - bantunes 3y ago
    Fly.io maybe?
  - mmaia 3y ago
    The best alternative I found is render.com It has this feeling of "just works", and documentation is pretty good.
  - realusername 3y ago
    I just use Dokku on a VPS and it works fine. Sure it might not scale but Heroku didn't either.
- PanMan 3y ago
  I agree.. but I'm surprised how little Heroku alternatives have popped up yet.. There is new contestants, mostly focussed on more global deploys, but no "Heroku but maintained" that I know of.. yet.
  - MobileVet 3y ago
    We did a bake off 18 months ago and identified ~5 similar platforms at the time. Fly.io and Render were 2 of them. We chose Render and have been happy with things just chugging along as they were on Heroku. Their runtime seems to take up quite a bit more RAM, but the IAC is a great addition resulting in 100% consistent environments.
  - infecto 3y ago
    I am not surprised. There are a handful of competitors but I believe the ship has sailed. I am a complete AWS dunce but it's too easy for me to spin up an ECS with spot machines and run my python app on it. When Heroku hit the scene and for many years, there was no easy alternative. You had to go and provision your own machines to then setup.
    - DanielHB 3y ago
      Is it just me or ECS is relatively complicated? I mean, it is no k8, but still you need to set up a lot of stuff to get it to work.
      - dkersten 3y ago
        I actually gave up on AWS forever when trying to use ECS. It was incredibly complex and it kept failing to deploy, but cloudeatch only contained log entries for it about 20% of the time. All I could do was click redeploy over and over — sometimes there were logs, usually not. And they charged me for every single deploy. After a day and a $100 bill later, I gave up and used DigitalOcean’s hosted docker instead. I had it up she’d rubbing in under ten minutes and no bill other than the actual usage costs. Now I avoid AWS as much as I can. Of course my employers tend to be on AWS so sadly I can’t completely avoid it, but I do my best and would never recommend it anymore.
- te_chris 3y ago
  I'm working with a company who are very happy on it currently. It still works really well for them, they're ok with the cost relative to the rest of their costs.
- swat535 3y ago
  What better alternatives are there? I saw Fly.io and it doesn't even offer a managed database, not to mention the fact that they have had serious reliability issues. Heroku is pretty battle tested and mature at this point, though the feature development has stopped, I don't doubt Salesforce is now going to use it simply as a the "cloud" offering for their other products..
MobileVet 3y ago
I would encourage you to find the exit ASAP from Heroku… we saw continual degradation of service and uptime during our last 2 years there.

CobrastanJorji 3y ago

One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salepserson performance. That sort of failure would almost certainly show up with crisp drop shadows. It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse.

rndmswethrwawy 3y ago
They could have, but I can promise you that if they have Tableau visualizations _at all_ at this point, they're shit. Letting something "die on the vine" is the only way to describe Salesforce's Tableau acquisition.
blitzar 3y ago
> the behavior of the sales rep probably made the sales rep chart for "outreach activity" tick up and the renewals rep's chart was fired because they didnt hit their target
toyg 3y ago
> One can safely assume Salesforce has very well made internal Tableau visualizations of Salesperson performance. I can't decide whether this statement is ironic or not. Salesforce is just another big company, with committees and meetings and crisp charts that exist only to show numbers going up, not to actually identify anything as boring as actual operational performance.
justin66 3y ago
> It is a shame, however, that the behavior of the sales rep probably made the renewals rep's chart look bad if not worse. Is the fate of commissioned salespeople to be eaten by other commissioned salespeople.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Sales teams often punish reps for many things out of their control. It’s pretty dumb.

stuckkeys 3y ago

Just out curiosity, what did you end up replacing it with? Looking to shop for a client. They were hyped on Tableau.

topicseed 3y ago
Superset works wonders
marcinzm 3y ago
Depending on the use cases PowerBI and Looker.
prometheus76 3y ago
We're a Power BI house with eight companies in a holding company. Power BI also has a high-security option, which is essential for us for security compliance requirements on our government contracts. We also have a blanket license so everyone can see the dashboards, and we're about to upgrade to Premium company-wide. It took some time for me to switch from Excel paradigm to Power BI paradigm, but once it clicked, I've never looked back.

mathattack 3y ago

The Salesforce reps just couldn’t help themselves. Too much Oracle in their DNA. Ruined the customer relationship, and encouraged the move to Microsoft and their “free” alternative.

scrapcode 3y ago

I'm in the enterprise procurement world and it's mind-boggling to me how many software companies in the past two years have forced themselves to $0 revenue from us by trying to double (or more!) their already exorbitant prices.

anon84873628 3y ago
Is this greed, or a struggle for them to survive?
- cutemonster 3y ago
  It's sometimes a good move and I've seen it recommended here at HN pretty often I think. look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477003 "I've now 4X'd my pricing (from 3 figures to 4 figures a month!) and the customers got 10X better, complain less, I work less and earn more"
- scrapcode 3y ago
  With certain requirements from large corporations switching from usage or license-based pricing to models such as charging per employee in the overall organization, it's hard to imagine it doesn't involve a little greed. It makes the choice even easier when clear alternatives are much more economical. Imagine for example you're a small shop with your own budget in an org the size of Alphabet with a couple of Java servers that you purchase support to the tune of $5k/year and then they all of a sudden want to charge $1,000,000/month because there are ~200k employees within your larger organization. It gets even more convoluted when you get into hardware support, where the support itself outside of warranty can be more expensive annually than replacing the hardware and getting N years of support with warranty.