Keyence reviews

* Visiting many of the biggest and coolest companies in your territory is a firsthand look at everything Keyence isn't. * No perks, benefits or stock options. * No company car, you'll put 15-25k miles on yours per year (except select countries in Europe where it's required by law). * Monday and Friday are call center days, the expectation will be 60-100 calls per day. This is to fill up your week with the required 7-14 on-site meetings. * Beyond reasonable metric tracking. * Compared to the "industrial automation" industry, the pay is OK. Compared to the high tech, capital, or software sales industries, the pay is below average. * The lack of perks (none) is embarrassing. * Most top talent leaves the company 3-5 years after starting. Even top sellers in the best territories will routinely leave around this time. * You will literally have the same job for the first 4-6 years, selling your product in a given territory. 730am-5pm office days with 30-60+ self-generated onsite meetings per month, year after year. The first few rungs of management are the same job, with a few extra mentoring meetings mixed in each week. Move beyond that, and you can expect full-time office work.

It's going to sound like I'm just dumping on the company here, but keep in mind, Keyence was an incredibly valuable experience for me. It gave me the skills and confidence to go out and get my actual dream job. It's like a sales boot camp. Through hard work and repetition, you'll learn core business skills. Just like bootcamp though, you want to leave eventually, it's time to graduate. * First the compensation, it's good out of college, it's bad compared to the industry average. APSM's will struggle to clear 170k. IC's in other top-tier sales roles routinely clear 200k, not to mention managers in those orgs. * No benefits that would make Keyence competitive with other top-tier sales orgs. No stock options, no health account spending plan, no catering or in-office meals, no company car. You have base pay and bonus, that's it. * As you'll read a million times here, work-life balance is generally terrible. This is because you essentially work in a call center Monday Friday, and are busting butt visiting as many customers as possible the rest of the week. In many divisions hauling heavy equipment in and out of labs for a 20-minute demo to people with passing interest and no buying power. I ended up faking about half my sales calls, and still exceeding goal for years. Their core sales motion and metric tracking is incredibly broken. * I heard numerous times from management that no one left Keyence and ended up better for it. Let me tell you firsthand, along with my numerous friends that also moved on from Keyence, it's not difficult after a few years to move up. Not just in compensation, but in overall WLB and enjoying your job. * One of the biggest pitfalls of Keyence, you aren't building very many marketable skills. All their software is homegrown, so you can't put Tableau, or Salesforce, or PowerBI, or SAP, etc. on your resume. They use a 1995 looking internal CRM system that is slow and archaic. Aside from systems, the products you sell are niche. So it's tough to break out of the industrial automation space. Work on your skillset on the side, so that you can make an impactful move to a company you'll really enjoy working for. * Almost all new hires are straight out of college like I was. This allows them to a certain extend to brainwash the salesforce into thinking "this is just how things are." No one at Keyence has outside experience (or very little). It's like dating your first girlfriend. She tells you she's the best you'll ever have. If you never move on, you won't know what you're missing. * Keyence has started raising alarm bells internally recently because revenue growth has slowed for the first time in decades. The stock has tanked since February. It turns out cold calling 100 people a day in 2021 isn't how top sellers perform. As this is a top-down Japanese company, they decided recently to double down on this strategy rather than address the incompatibility it has with modern sales target personas. * Look, Keyence isn't horrible, it's a great place to start in many respects. But don't get sucked in and waste your career there, I promise you can do much better.