Outdated or bad sales practices. For example, management thought “going for a no” instead of a yes was a good strategy, so reps would say things like “would it be a ridiculous idea for you to attend?!” every time they asked for a meeting. Another example: “you don’t know me, but I was hoping you could help me for a moment.” Hearing things like this made me cringe.
Quota attainment in SMB is really low.
The onboarding process consists of 1 week of meetings, then it’s just shadowing as many calls as possible. Since there is not a formal SOP (standard operating procedure), every rep does something different in SMB.
Internal processes can take forever. It can take up to a couple days just to schedule a sales engineer on a demo.
You are not paid commission when you close a deal—you are paid when software is implemented. This is a problem because it usually takes 3-6 months to get everything implemented.
Pricing for SMB is all over the place. Everything is massively discounted, and in most cases, you will need to wait for approval from the pricing committee.
Demos are painful. Even as the sales rep, it was hard to listen to. Basically, just sales engineers reading through a script, sometimes for HOURS at a time. It’s not relevant or tailored to the prospect at all.
In my experience, I wish I would’ve saved my time and worked somewhere else.
