As a salesperson, if you're looking to advance your career and move up to higher positions of sales, this would not be a great spot for you. Considering there are no mid-market or enterprise sales rep positions, it makes it increasingly difficult to get into that sector of the market when leaving ChowNow.
Recently, ChowNow laid off over 100 employees. This comes after two separate rounds of layoffs earlier this spring and last fall that didn't get as much buzz. Seems calculated. A massive part of these layoffs, in which we were told not to worry about happening for a 3rd time (!) was the sales department being hit. They had recently hired a new VP of Sales, who, seemingly nobody was a fan of. Three weeks after ChowNow let go of ~60% of their sales staff, they fired this VP of Sales for reasons I won't get in to. But to the recruiting, interviewing, and executive team who claim to have a "rigorous" interview process that has a "lower acceptance rate than Harvard," how do you let an individual like this not only slip through the cracks, but make decisions on which members of the team were to be let go? Embarrassing.
The product does not expand. The main product for most of my time there was ChowNow's Direct online ordering platform. This is online ordering on website, branded app, (some) marketing, etc. Our executive team figured it would be a great idea to go ahead and completely shift focus from our original intent as a company to promoting our commission free marketplace app (a wanna-be DoorDash competitor). This was completely free for restaurants to sign up for, but, the exec team sneakily put in a $1 charge on every order to the customer, which completely goes against the mission. Further, they worked to expand our Order Better Network, which is ordering through Google, TripAdvisor, etc. in which we charge the restaurant a 12% fee on every order, and were told to claim that we charge this because the companies we work with (Google, etc) charge us this %. Entirely untrue, and restaurants began catching on when other companies (who weren't drowning in debt, maybe) weren't charging a 12% fee, let alone any fee at all.
Further on the lack of expansion of product - the sales team (and even product team) begged multiple times over for specific features that virtually every restaurant would ask for - loyalty points. It made our conversations increasingly more difficult considering we were told to compare the apps we build to that of a Starbucks or Chick Fil A app - which ultimately would prompt "oh great, so you do points too?" Unfortunately, the CEO of ChowNow came up with the concept of diners paying an annual fee to become a "member" of a restaurant and receive a certain % off depending on the tier they joined. If you're a restaurant that has any sort of loyal customer base, this is horrendous for your bottom line, or, if you charge too much for specific tiers, it's a slap in the face to your customers. To the CEO - please reconsider this for the sake of your team. Rarely anybody sells that portion of the product, upper management has verbatim agreed that it is a bad idea.
Commission checks were pretty small and were based on go-live dates. Which means reps had to rely on the onboarding team to get the accounts live. Typically, the onboarding team was great, but, many times I'd take a look at accounts who were in onboarding for months who hadn't been contacted in multiple weeks - unacceptable.
Near the end there was a ton of stealing of opportunities across teams, it appears that this issue has been fixed for the team that is still there.
