Pros
Fantastic benefits, excellent work culture, really great teams, and lots of opportunity to learn and grow your knowledge across all over the salesforce platform that can then be highly transferrable. Lots of mentorship opportunities.
Cons
Biggest con is the career pathing and a general lack of clarity on promotions. This is coming from someone who's both been through the promotion process personally and for direct reports. 1 - Bizarre addiction to the leveling guide: At salesforce, like many big companies, there is a leveling system. each level has its pay band and corresponding titles. It is essentially impossible to jump multiple levels without leaving and boomerang back. This effectively shuts out many qualified internal candidates for opportunities for totally arbitrary reasons. While not letting an associate jump to VP makes total sense, the reality is there are many roles at salesforce whose scope of work and skill level required are essentially the same, but they exist at different levels. Team A may have a manager/senior at one level while Team B will have those exact same roles at a different level. What's worse, even if you're not looking to make internal moves, when it come times for re-orgs, you can take a massive hit to your career path for being at the wrong level. I've seen entire teams of highly experienced individuals turn into hourly employees because they were hired at the "wrong" level. I've also seen managers lose team members because they got promoted to senior, even though the nature of their job have not changed at all. At this point, you may say, okay, so get promoted and level up, which beings me to my next point 2- Measurable KPIs are not part of the promotion discussions: Some roles have very clear measurable numbers to hit, but in the world of Customer Success, that for some reason does not seem to ever be a part of any promotion conversations. While we have plenty of measurable KPIs to use, every promotion nomination conversation quickly turns into a battle of whose apples are better than other people's oranges. Think about this, the difference a Success manager and a senior success manager is mainly one can do the same job more effectively, can take on more challenging customers etc, however, from what I've seen, because we're never comparing between who has the best customer reviews, renewal rates, customer adoption rates etc, it quickly turns into which individual contributor have taken on the most strategic projects outside of their role, and who is most known to the leadership team. As a result, for ICs looking for promotion, instead of looking for ways to improve outcome with their customers, they're are more incentivized to join or lead random operational projects instead. While this is still good for the team, it doesn't tell me whether or not this IC is ready to take on bigger customers as a senior, just that this person is good at doing a bunch of things outside of their role. And of course, since these random projects, are just that, random, it is rarely a fair competition between ICs when it comes to promotions.
