Pros
PROS: Overall Bentley is a good company to work for in terms of the people, the culture, benefits, and the community involvement. I’m not clear how much of that will remain now that the organization has gone public. Compensation, in my opinion, is on par with others in the industry, maybe tending slightly to the low side.
Cons
CONS: Avoid working in sales at all costs. While it can be a good place for brand new sales people to gain some experience, sales professionals will quickly learn that compensation plans are extremely complex and lack transparency. It becomes a full time job in and of itself to make certain you are paid for what you sell, and to make certain things you were paid for earlier in the year aren’t removed later in the year as “adjustments”. Sales years and quotas start at the beginning of each year but it is not uncommon to still not have a comp plan in place, accounts assigned to you, and/or an annual sales quota set by May, or even June of that year. You end up wasting efforts early in the year selling solutions only to be told later the company has opted not to comp you on those, or those sales went to accounts we later opted to reassign to someone else thus giving that rep the sale credit. Bentley can be a great place for brand new sales people to gain much needed experience before leaving to go elsewhere. I do not recommend Bentley for more seasoned sales professionals. In my experience the sales compensation plans are extremely complex and lack transparency. It was essentially a full-time job to make certain I was actually paid for what I sold. Additionally, I experienced many cases in which deals I was paid on earlier in the sales year were removed later in the year with no notice or explanation. If I wasn't closely monitoring this (exporting raw sales data and crunching the numbers myself) I would never have known about it. Many times line items removed from my compensation were done so in error. These never would have been credited back to me again if I wasn't analyzing detailed reports on a weekly basis. Sales years and quotas start at the beginning of each calendar year however during the years I was there I recall only one time when a new annual compensation plan was put in place, accounts were assigned, and quotas were set prior to 2Q of that year. These was typically not completed until May or June. As a result, it was not uncommon to find that deals closed in the first half of the year ended up being credited to someone else due to an account assignment change or that a salesperson may not be compensated at all for a deal due to changes in the compensation plan itself from the prior year.
