Forrester reviews

Lack of vision Sales leadership has no idea what they’re doing. They’re insecure and continue to double-down on initiatives that are disjointed and don’t work. Sales leadership blames their high attrition on hiring people that weren’t a fit instead of realizing these sales reps were over-promised on sales commissions, under paid (hourly in the Nashville office), over-worked (Nashville hourly reps are told they can’t log overtime but are expected to work nights and weekends to close deals at the end of the quarter), and generally treated like children instead of adults. If you’re used to having sales tools that will help you meet your KPI’s, don’t look to Forrester to give them to you. They’ve massively cut back on tools with the excuse of being GDPR compliant. The truth is they’re more interested in how much things cost instead of understanding the ROI of these tools (increased sales, less attrition). Only work at Forrester in sales if you enjoy being under-paid, over-worked, and talked to like a child. Work at Forrester, generally speaking, if you enjoy corporate politics where everyone is promoted because of who they’re friends with not because they earned it. Then, those people who have been promoted know they didn’t deserve it and are terribly insecure. That insecurity typically turns into a power trip where everyone else is the problem but themselves. I don’t know about other departments, but that’s what it’s like in sales.

Forrester does hire a lot of young, bright professionals to staff its research organization, though it does little to nothing with them. None of the "opportunities" available to a research associate are linked to merit, which encourages complacency and drives most of the junior staff to leave in the first year-18 months. The pay, as documented elsewhere, is barely more than half of the industry standard, and while everyone from the head of research to the head of human resources will tell you that it's not, it is. Many RAs wait tables, bartend or tutor in the evenings and on weekends just to be able to pay rent in a low-cost suburb of Boston or Cambridge. The work that RAs do is most often unrelated to research. 90% of the job within the first year is administrative, i.e. scheduling calls, running to the cafe to buy an analyst a Snapple, etc., and while there are some analysts that value the RAs that work with them, most view them as an expendable personal assistant, and exclude them from their research process. On a more general level, there is no connection between senior leadership and the rest of the organization. This has been commented on ad nauseam already so I won't get into detail, but when you're laying off employees and shredding their bonuses, is chartering flights to exotic locations and splurging on executive bonuses really a prudent decision?