Podium reviews

Sales org has been reorganized numerous times in the last few years. 3, 4, I've lost count. Going away from verticals, going back to it, removing VP's, adding VP's, adding verticals, getting rid of them. Hired a CRO that flopped and brought in changes and culture that people did not like. At a time when most companies were announcing indefinite remote work policies, Podium sales leaders were "demanding" that everyone be in the office. Demanding was their wording. Mass exodus of my colleagues likely due to this type of culture. Not just colleagues that struggled, a lot of the VERY BEST account executives. Their thought was probably that something had to change because sales was way off our target. So they also introduced additional "packages" to compete with the hundred other companies that do something very similar. These cannibalized our premium offering by only differentiating themselves in ways that didn't matter, things like number of messages, when most businesses use fewer than the lower packages. Our product used to be a premium offering and stood out from competitors, instead of improving on the core offering to stay ahead of the competition product has added auxiliary functionality that is half-baked at best. Products like feedback are developed to a minimum viable product and put on the shelf. The potential there is huge, but improvements that were promised never came and the next idea was developed, launched, and sold instead. Hard to confidently sell something so basic it is nearly useless. Every year commission structure changes. It's sold and announced as a positive but it's pretty easy to see that it's not. Now, the structure was very good several years ago and after changes was still better than most. Until the 2021 year when they were paying less than 5% on some deals (over a 5% drop) to increase to maybe 12-14% on other deals (a .5%-2.5% increase), but they also took away the old options to make 14%. Does it sound complex? There are about 6 more layers to it than that. They want to drop the people who aren't performing with this. I say fire the people that don't perform for months on end like you used to and offer a better commission plan. This is structured so even a top performer that misses one month of quota is likely to make less than they would the year before selling the same amount. Clearly not a positive change, especially because it's impossible to track your monthly earnings until all the many variables come together at the end of the month. Takes away from what should be the very clear focus of selling deals.