Serious Sales Professionals Need Not Apply - In Fact, Avoid Volusion Like the Plague! - Anonymous employee Volusion Employee Review

While I can't speak for other departments at Volusion, I can say that the sales management has created a completely toxic work environment in the following ways: Sweatshop mentality - You are judged for leaving right at the end of the work day. Sales reps are expected to work late into the evening (as late as 9pm in some cases) in order to achieve ridiculous quotas. In one instance, an employee was told that the reason he did not achieve his sales goal was because he was having lunch on a daily basis and that he should consider skipping his lunch break a few times per week to make more sales calls. Questionable sales practices - Poor quality leads, an uneducated customer base combined with high-pressure closing tactics result in high customer turnover rates and a system that penalizes sales reps financially. The companies marketing department doesn't seem to be aligned with the overall sales goals of the organization, and has invested minimal resources in better educating potential customers or creating consistent messaging and higher quality sales leads. Unfair expectations - One of the biggest issues with the sales group is the finance department's refusal to set realistic sales goals. Sales quotas are changed on a monthly basis and can jump as high as 40% from one month to the next. Employees are not given their quotas until half way through the sales month, which is stressful since sales reps have to scramble for the rest of the month to hit their quota. This pressure contributes to the high rate of burnout in the department Poor compensation - The model is set so that a rep who brings in amounts as high as $50,000 in revenue can walk away WITHOUT commission because their quota was $51,000. The house always seems to win at Volusion and there are many months where all of your hard work and long hours will be for nothing or possibly a few hundred dollars at best. In addition, the base salary is not competitive in the Austin software market. Ecommerce is a technical sale, yet Volusion seems to think that they can hire A players at B-C level salaries. Bonus - Senior management and other key departments i.e. marketing, biz dev and finance are secluded from the client facing departments. They try to involve the peons as little as possible and avoid contact by hiding behind closed doors when they have meetings with middle management. They clock out at 5pm everyday and enjoy nice perks like gym access, product launch parties and staff mixers. In one instance, the sales and support staff were not allowed to attend a launch party for Mozu, the company's enterprise software solution, which was built from the efforts of these departments. It seemed a bit unfair to leave out departments who were key to the company's success during a company-wide celebration.