Pros
Decent products and name recognition. Desirable experience for recruiters that want to talk to you.
Cons
You have an upper management team using the sales playbook from when they were individual contributors 10+ years ago which doesn't work today. If you think a discovery call, demo, quote, and an evaluation gets you to the finish line here, dream on. Working for Proofpoint does not mean prospects will take a meeting because of name recognition, and there is not an army channel reps willing to sell for you, both were misrepresented during the hiring process. Most sales teams do not achieve quotas. Sales training is nothing more than a fire hose of product training which doesn't align with how to build a successful territory. Quoting is overcomplicated and designed by finance people which is not user friendly for salespeople. In addition, when you see the list price versus the target price of a product with discounts, you'll either cry or be angry (if not both) seeing how your hard work is being given away for pennies on the dollar to appease management. Moreover, sales stages are overly aggressive and do not align with the buyer's journey. If a prospect is willing to talk to you, it has to be flipped over to the channel without providing pricing to the end user (not allowed to) or mapping out the buyer’s journey. Later on, prospects will wonder why you’re calling them again after you turned the opportunity over to a reseller. Some channel reps even sabotage deals by using Proofpoint to get a lower quote on other products they’re selling to the customer. Nonetheless, smaller deals such as PSAT (Security Awareness Training) and Essentials do not need a channel partner. Unlike selling direct and being fully accountable, when the channel drops the ball (at the expense of your commissions) management wonders why so many deals end up being lost or disqualified. Essentially the Mid-Market Account Executive is nothing more than a Senior Business Development Representative to feed the Add On Team with new Proofpoint customers to sell additional products after an initial purchase. As I write this review, to make matters go from bad to worse, the rules for engagement with users versus employee count is a mess, and the internal competition for deals has salespeople working against each other, rather than working together as a well oiled machine.