Oh God where do I start. Podium would rather fire B players than let them transfer into a different role that they might excel at. and I literally mean reps who are hitting between 80%-90% of quota are being denied transfers because they arent hitting 100%. The disconnect between what leadership believes should be happening on the floor, and what the sales reps know is possible, is greater than the grand canyon. Leadership laid out a "path to quota" at the beginning of this year, which included 70% of our number being provided through marketing/lead gen/outbound SDR support. 20% coming from inbound leads in our territory, and 10% being self sourced. This has not even come close to reality. In my personal quota last month I sourced 72% of it myself, and got 0 inbound and 0 external support. When I asked management why this was happening and they couldn't move resources toward me due to the effort I was clearly giving, they mentioned that they needed to save those resources for the Top performers to make sure they stay happy and fed. The turnover rate is higher than 100% annually. Last year we hired 450 reps, and 455 reps were FIRED. Podium has a churn n burn mentality with both their sales staff and their customer base. If you don't fall within their boundaries of what "awesome" is, they cut you loose. even if you're a paying customer. Oh they also require that you come into the office even though they tell you its hybrid and we have 1/2 of our sales staff as remote employees 100% of the time. There aren't any great on site benefits. they say they have free drinks (always empty, only restock 1 time per month), and onsite Gym (shamed if you use it during working hours when you should be selling) and ping pong tables (as if this is some culture shocking phenomenon that makes working here all worth it) Some reps have even gone to management to discuss taking a break for their mental health, (one rep was contemplating suicide) and the VP told them that it was their own fault for being stressed out. That if they had bought in to the values podium has that they would be hitting quota and not feeling like this. They constantly deny time off because they don't believe that people who aren't hitting quota should have the privilege of using Unlimited PTO. They throw the word "optics" around like its candy. And they also try to enforce this pretty heavily. They want you standing at your desk, headphones on, demoing or cold calling 24/7. There was one time our CSO made a post in the sales channel about how when he was walking the floor he saw 3 reps hanging out chatting and laughing, and that in the 12 minutes he watched them they could have made an average of 36 calls between the three of them and publicly scolded them for not working harder. These reps were put on plan and fired the next month. The performance culture here will make your career end in one of two ways. A trip to a mental hospital to decompress from all this trauma, or a bullet in the brain. Oh did I mention their pay is GARBAGE? They expect full cycle AE's to be ecstatic to be earning $55k a year, while requiring 2-3 years of AE experience. Most mid market positions that an AE with that tenure could grab would be paying a base of roughly $75k-90k per annum. with OTE's in the mid 100's to top 100's. At podium its 90k OTE... an absolute travesty. But hey... at least Podium meets its Diversity and Inclusion requirements. They made it a huge point to show everyone that we hired the exact percentage of diverse people mandated, and not one person more...
