CONS: The office is really far from the city of Philadelphia. There is a requirement of 2 days a week Tues & Thurs, but because of the traffic on 76 West ( two lanes 45-55mph hwy) towards KOP it is a nightmare. It's one of the worst commutes I have ever experienced and I've lived in NYC & Atlanta. About 19 miles from Philly but easily 1hr and 30 min commute. Training for the Inside Sales/Account Executive / Customer Advisor role (The position title is not consistent) is honestly non-existent. They put every new hire from every department in the same virtual class. Their training is module based, no instructor. The reason that this is important to mention is because the actual position requires a great deal of knowledge on their solutions which can be very technical. They will pair you with a team member in sales. However this person will have a quota of their own and really no time to train you or incentive outside of them wanting to be fast tracked to management at some point in their careers. Which is understandable, however there should be someone training you where that is their specific job. It does not take a rocket scientist to correlate the success of a new employee to proper training. The leadership has never worked in the Sales role and heavily relies on other team members to answer questions and be a Point of contact for any new employee. This is problematic for various reasons one can deduce by simply putting the pieces of the puzzle together. You will be assigned 150-200 accounts, but don't get too comfortable, after you have reached out to all of them they can and will be reassigned with no warning multiple times a year for various reasons that make no sense. Once you are in the position and have scheduled introduction meetings to the accounts, the customers will tell you that they have had 5-10+ acct managers in X amount of time. This frustrates them and breeds a lack of confidence in the company. The job is to farm these accounts and grow them through fact finding missions to uncover a need for one of the solutions Flexential offers that they do not currently have. The caveat is that they have been approached countless times by countless previous reps who are no longer there. Customers' memories are long. While I was employed there of the "11 team members", half were fired/resigned. The products/solutions are not the problem, the issue is how the team is being managed from the top down. They seem to think that there is a great deal of sales acumen that is required to do this job, but it is really technical acumen. They hire a Sales Strategy specialist to conduct meetings on how to sell when they have literally hired sales people with sales backgrounds. If they spent more time training the sales reps on the technical aspect of the solutions, selling them would be easier. However, they have a 1.) Corporate Friday Sales Meeting, 2.) a Contracted Sales Strategy Meeting with a vendor, 3.) Several other meetings weekly, 4.) One on One every week, 5.) Team Sales Meetings every week and spend weeks on developing a 6.) Solutions Engineer Meetings 7.) Customer Success Meetings 8.) Other team meetings that relate to accounts you own 9.) Quarterly Days Long presentation of "QBR" for each rep...and each rep must sit through everyone's presentation (8:30AM-5:30PM) on their "prediction" of what they feel will close. Honestly I have never seen a more gross waste of time. There are not enough hours and days in the week to be successful in this role as that time is monopolized by meetings. There are so many meetings your calendar will be full and not enough availability to prospect/conduct customer meetings. You will also have meetings with Solution Engineers on your Opportunities ( these meetings are primarily just so that the SE has a firm grasp on what you want to sell). I think that the SE meetings can be handled via email. The same 2-3 people are the most successful each month as the accounts that have the propensity to spend are cherry picked for them. These are also the employees who will be coaching you and training you. They are also competing for a leadership role. As stated before, these sales are very technical, so once you have made an introductory call and scheduled a meeting for a Discovery call and have isolated an opportunity to pitch a solution. This quote has to be built by Solutions Engineers. This team will pull your opportunity out of a queue and they are incredibly understaffed. It could be a week before they even commit to pricing it out. Most of the time they have no idea of what route to take and you must manage them as well as continue to create a pipeline. This team of engineers are overworked and are not incentivized therefore their workload is a nuisance and you will feel that sentiment while you wait days upon days to get a quote. Imagine the temperament of a customer who wants to get a quote as you wait for a third party to assist you in a process that cannot be moved forward without them. In addition to the Solutions Engineer process, any pricing that is built must go to a deal desk team whose approval time is 24-48 hours and sometimes even longer. This adds another layer of bureaucracy you must fight with in order to even get anything done. The company also conducts audits of existing customers and if it's one of your accounts ( which they will be and there will be MANY). These audits will include price increases/contract language changes at renewal (which you would have to combat). These conversations are highly technical and volatile, the entire aforementioned process is repeated until satisfaction and oftentimes not to your benefit. Earlier I mentioned the ambiguity of the "Position Title". That is because you will have many roles. Even though this is a quota driven position, it is primarily Customer Service. Earlier I mentioned that you will have 150-200 accounts. The position requires that you reach out to each and introduce yourself. This will make you the point of contact for all issues. There is a Customer Success Dept. But they operated VIA EMAIL only. So put yourself in a customer's shoes, if you have an issue, what is the likelihood that you will draft an email and wait for a response?? VERY LOW. This creates an issue for the Sales rep as they're constantly getting calls/emails from the accounts on Customer Service related issues and most of them are pressing. The fix from management is to send an email to Customer Success on their behalf. In my opinion this is highly disrespectful and if someone is spending thousands per month for solutions that affect the way their businesses are run. They can at minimum be able to get a live agent at a moment's notice. This is not the case and your days will be filled with playing middle man to problems you can never help them with ALL THE WHILE hoping to sell them something in the future ( as they are also your accounts and livelihood). If you are reading this and piecing together all of these nuances then you can surely understand how impossible it is to be successful. I can go on and on about other Cons but you get the point. In January of 2024 I was given all new accounts, By February I was on a PIP plan. I spoke with my leadership about how it was not feasible to generate a pipeline that could satisfy meeting the quota. They did not care and it's coming from the top down. If you are piecing this together then you can see how this is an environment that is bound to fail. I was let go due to not meeting my goal after starting over from Scratch less than 60 days prior. To put things into perspective, these technical solution sales have a close cycle of about 8-10 weeks. This is a great position for someone who needs a job however, long term, I would not bet on it. Good luck.
