To Sales Team Applicants (A Dispassionate Review)
Pros
There are brilliant and wonderful people who work at C3 AI. Between the sales and solutions team, I had the privilege to meet and work with some outstanding professionals. Unfortunately, the pros of working at C3 do not extend beyond this.
Cons
I recognize that negative Glassdoor reviews should often be taken with a grain of salt. However, for anyone reading this who may be interested in taking a position on the sales team at C3, please know that I am hoping to provide you with a dispassionate case for why you should avoid working for this company. C3 suffers from two critical problems: 1) A fundamental lack of integrity at the leadership level 2) Refusal to delegate decision-making authority Point 1 Elaboration: The absence of integrity at the top of an organization bleeds into everything else, affecting how employees are treated and how the organization conducts business with customers and partners. The most important points to consider for a prospective C3 employee are the following: 1) C3 will not hesitate to terminate high performers (without cause) prior to collecting commission on closed deals. This is crucial for potential employees to understand. The primary lure for competent professionals to join the C3 sales team is the compensation. If you manage to become one of the few salespeople that closes a deal, there is a very real possibility that you will be terminated (without cause) before you are able to collect on your commission. This is the mark of an organization led by individuals with no sense of integrity. 2) In my opinion, C3 lacks transparency in dealings with employees, customers, and partners. As a salesperson, it is extremely difficult to shape, structure, and finalize deals when the leadership team seemingly arbitrarily changes important components of deals without a consistent or repeatable methodology. 3) In my judgement, there is a significant gap between advertised capabilities and actual capabilities for C3 products. As a salesperson, when you identify a new business opportunity that aligns with capabilities published in C3 marketing materials, you will often find that there is minimal alignment after speaking with the solutions team. While this is probably an issue at most software companies, it seems particularly relevant at C3. You are encouraged to develop opportunities that align with the existing applications, but the functionality of the existing applications is scoped to narrow use cases that can’t usually be extrapolated to new business opportunities. Ultimately, this leads to poor outcomes with customers and constant internal battles about “scoping” for capabilities that should already exist based on C3's marketing materials. Point 2 Elaboration: There is no delegation of authority at C3, which leads to gross inefficiencies and creates an ineffectual chain of supervisors with no ability to meaningfully support the development of new business opportunities: 1) Without any decision-making authority, the direct supervisors at C3 are reduced to dashboard managers. Ideally, a good supervisor will act (when appropriate) as an advocate or buffer for employees against unreasonable or unethical requests from executive leadership. However, at C3, managers are so scared of being fired, or so worn down from the incessant status updates, that they will not serve as allies or advocates against obviously wrong instructions or strategic decisions. If you are instructed to perform an action that you know will jeopardize a deal, you will be on an island, and your supervisors will not support you. In turn, you will also be held personally responsible if a deal falls through as a result of you performing the instructed task you did not agree with. 2) Simple processes at C3 can take unusual amounts of time to complete due to the lack of localized decision making. For example, getting a C3 MNDA signed with a business partner can take over a month, even if that potential business partner signed C3’s version of the MNDA with no comments or edits. The company is plagued by similar examples of simple, delayed processes that stymie potential business opportunities and overcomplicate internal procedures. 3) C3 managers operate in a culture of fear about making decisions. As a member of the sales team, you will not be able to get clarity from anyone in your leadership team about policy or business decisions. Nobody is willing to sign anything without executive approval, and the sales team has to communicate directly with the executives to receive clarity on decisions, defeating the whole purpose of having a direct supervisory chain in the first place. Ultimately, I would highly discourage interested applicants from pursuing a position with C3 AI. Barring a complete overhaul of C3’s leadership and philosophy, there is no reason to think that they will begin operating with integrity at any point in the future.
