Sales management and any promotion is chosen mostly on who kisses feet the best. Talent is rarely taken into account.
Beyond a severe allegation like racism or blatant misconduct, sales management never ever changes. In Loveland, the turnover is minimal so growth in sales is severely limited. In Waltham, there’s a new manager every month because they leave for better jobs.
Sales management itself has little power and are essentially in place to crack the whip, which is counter intuitive because the sales floor runs on happiness.
The company oozes hypocrisy. They say they care about retaining reps, but their guaranteed salary is below the nationwide average for SaaS by a wide margin and sales goals seem to be overshot. 90% of managers will recommend you quitting rather than take a hit on their numbers if you are new if they don’t think you can make it. They currently have a 75% hiring turnover during covid.
Find anything you want to improve? You will be told to either shut up and dial (but kinder depending on who your invincible manager is) or will be coached to be a “change agent” where you write up a PowerPoint and an essay about why something should be better. You will never hear back unless you are told it won’t happen on the outset.
The product itself was an industry leader until about 2020. It has since been lapped by roughly 15 other products that spend energy on product development instead of marketing and acquisition.
Pitching it to small businesses now feels like lying rather than helping.
They don’t innovate, they integrate. They recently integrated Canva, which is cool, and Vimeo (really, Vimeo?)
They updated their product branding in 2020, which reskinned their front end, but their backend is the same software from 1998.
They have been acquired for the third time recently, and currently, the acquisition company has cut the headcount by 18%.
For a day to day look at the job, you sit down at your desk at 8 am. You’ll have a stand up google meeting with your team. There’s one manager in loveland who has the leadership ability of a wet napkin, so those stand ups suck, but the others are fun.
Then you start your day at about 8:30, calling down a list of leads that are populated for you. The lead system is “random” until you act out of line, then the leads are awful. Recently, they’ve just been awful.
You call your lead based on an internal metric: 1.00 being a great lead, .01 being bad. You call down this list. When someone picks up, you introduce yourself and try to get them to buy a subscription. In case you are wondering, no, the sales consultants were never asked for opinions on metrics to take into account to generate this score. This was all done by the invisible hand of constant contact. If you want transparency, lol.
Every sale you get is assigned a point total: 3 for a basic, 5 for a plus, 1 extra point for a prepay, 2 extra points for a list over 10k, and some other extraneous numbers.
Those points add up to your point total. The point total is what you’re chasing. Not revenue, not sales, points.
They do this so that they can give you less commission because you are kept in the dark about the money you’re actively generating.
Here’s the kicker: if someone cancels, you lose those points. It’s entirely out of your control, but you get punished. They are trying to prevent people from being scumbags and pushing people that don’t need it into accounts, but also you are expected to get on average, 5 sales a day.
The floor has been trending at 80-90% for all of 2021, which is a red flag for anybody looking to jump on board. It’s not impossible to overachieve, but you have to blend natural talent, really good speaking voice, intelligence, stubbornness, and a general disposition of being able to pretend like you care about who you are talking to.
The average rep lasts 9 months.
