The Podium SaaS product has a ton of bad Google reviews from clients who claim they aren’t seeing the benefit yet can’t get out of their 12 mo contract. Internally, they admit people can’t cancel if under contract. In 2022, Podium was hiring classes of 50+ AEs every two weeks. They end up keeping (roughly) the top 10 and fire the rest within 8 weeks. Of those 10, 5 or or so last beyond a year. You absolutely feel like cattle/just a number. Their training is long-winded & mostly a waste of time. A simple lesson that could be watched via video is stretched into 3, 1-hour long podcasts-like zoom calls. Decent OTE if you hit quota (22% of the organization hit quota in July of 2022.) Instead of reevaluating the quota, management doubles down & takes zero responsibility for having set unobtainable goals that the vast majority of their team cannot meet. AE’s make 40 min cold calls per day and will not be given SDR support unless you’re a top performer (which comes first…the chicken or the egg)? So AE’s are glorified SDR’s, doing their own prospecting. The base salary isn’t sustainable during the ramp period. One of their “rock star” AE’s boldly claimed that Podium has a “less than 2% cancellation rate.” 1) this isn’t true 2) podium auto renews & requires a *one month notice* to cancel prior to the end of the 12 month contract. That’s sketchy & an indicator of how the company culture really is despite the good talkers claiming otherwise. Think The Boiler Room / Bro Culture vibe.
