Fastly Customer Development Representative reviews

If you are looking at starting a career in tech sales and are looking at entry levels roles at Fastly such as the MDR/CDR position (at every other company it would be BDR or SDR) do not come to Fastly as you will be actively hurting your career. This is because Fastly does not have the intention of fostering and promoting talent at this level, you will not be taught/coached the skill set in order to succeed in the role, and you will not be given the the tools to succeed either. When you work at Fastly or you interview at Fastly you are given a timeline for the promotion path of the MDR/CDR role. You would begin as a MDR handling inbound enquires for 6 months, then you would move to a CDR role for a year which is outbound lead generation, then you would would move to a Senior CDR position for 6 months which is more outbound generation (no functional difference from previous role). Finally you could get promoted to a Digital Solutions Representative (DSR), which is an SMB AE role. This is a pretty long timeline, but the larger problem with it is that no one actually goes through it. Do not take my word for it go onto LinkedIn and look up Customer Development Representative, and then look up Market Development Representative. There has only been a handful of people promoted to CDR from MDR (from my knowledge 3) of these people it has been about 1 year and 3 months on average to earn this promotion, that Fastly claims should only take 6 months. If you look at the current class of MDRs the majority have been in the role for over 8 months already. No one had been promoted to the Senior CDR position, there were two who came through an acquisition and both left the company for AE positions elsewhere. This is not due to a headcount issue, ever since I have been with the company for over half of a year there has been constant external and internal job postings for all roles (MDR, CDR, DSR). Fastly in Q1 has also hired two CDRs from outside the organization rather then promoting their MDRs that should be up for the role, despite an urgent need to backfill CDRs at the company. They just refuse to interview/promote internally unless forced. This has been the largest contributing factor for 6 people who have left the CDR role in Q1 alone. There is little to no outbound selling motion, the content which is sent out is written by marketing and Sales Operations, and is based on what sales emails they enjoyed from other companies. This has gotten slightly better in the new year with marketing and legal approving content written by sales people. Outbound activity is tightly controlled with strict limits set on how many leads you can reach out to per day(15 per sequence, with a cap of 80 maximum in a sequence), This actively will stunt your ability to be able to work, and cap how much you can do in your work day, beyond being frustrating it hurts your ability to improve and learn, and makes achieving your quota a matter of receiving an inbound, something you do not control. With this in mind I hope that you look elsewhere if you are looking at starting a role in sales. There are a lot of great things about this company, it has best in class tech that their customers love, outside of the sales organization there is a fantastic culture and value of their people. If you were coming here to start a career in tech sales you will not be valued, you do not have a chance at career progression, you will not be taught to or have the resources to improve, and the fact that this has been a multi-year issues leads me to believe that Fastly just does not care.