It's hard to know where to start... Podium hires fast and fires fast. Turnover in the sales department was 110% in 2022 (hired 500 sales reps, 550 were fired or quit). Hand out PIPs like candy; 2 tough months and your job is in jeopardy. People got fired and quit every day, and others were constantly afraid of losing their job. Of the 30 people that I started with, only 2 were left at the one-year mark.
Sales management makes promises that they can't keep. At 2023 SKO I was told that my quota was going up 30% but that I would get a personal SDR and start going to trade shows. After 6 months, I went to zero trade shows and never got an SDR ... but was still expected to hit the higher quota. Whenever I expressed frustration about not going to trade shows and not having an SDR, I was then told that I needed to "earn" those (even though that's not what they said in SKO), so I started working 50-60 hours/week doing the job of an SDR and an AE - and was even recognized as one of the highest self-sourcing AE's in the sales org - but apparently that still didn't "earn" an SDR or a trade show. This was the experience of most of my coworkers too.
Rampant favoritism; I saw tons of way talented reps come and go that were never given the chance that others were given.
Quota attainment was really bad (usually between 20-30% each month) and quotas felt super unrealistic, and therefore the OTE was super unrealistic. Due to the super short sales cycle, leadership unfairly believes that sales reps can hit quota on any given day, so reps are discouraged from taking time off.
Expectations for SDRs were also super unreal, so SDRs were constantly quitting and getting fired. AE's never got even close to the number of sets that they were promised, and management just started blaming the AE's for not self-sourcing enough.
There's too much VC money in the business and the need to appease the VC's creates insane amounts of pressure and stress at every level.
Multiple rounds of layoffs within 12 months and benefits/perks scaled way back.
