Unfortunately all other reviews are absolutely honest and true (except the positive ones which are indeed driven by either marketing, HR or new joiners being requested to post them). Everything is summarized in this review's title:
- Promising: when you join the company or meet senior people (President & SVPs), it looks so great everywhere! Great people, great technology, a great carrier is possible, a lot of happy clients and an expanding market for our product... Soon to discover that everything is just "a brochure to sell" and that you've been sold a broken organization not to say an empty shell...
- Lying: work and life balance? Nope, forget about it. They will use and abuse you as much as possible until you decide to leave or them to get rid of you. The product is not fantastic, it has evolved from a market-leading-email marketing solution (part of the top 3 world leaders) to a so-called 'Message Cloud' platform supposed to connect everything and finally doing not much of it. Good earnings? Yes, except your bonus element will be highly challenged by the management regardless of your performance - too bad! Not to forget top management skills, don't be surprised if your manager keep on avoiding answering questions, he's got no clue what he should be doing as there is no communication, no strategy and constantly changing decisions from one day to the other... The number of clients they advertise on is wrong (and mostly using their emailing solution), their churn rate is highly underestimated, sales - starting with the top one - keep on selling things which don't even exist or will never be ready on time for an overestimated price compared to other better (proven) solutions on the market. Are you ready for the disillusionment? Go!
- Failing: of course the company is failing given the above. Poor top management obeying without knowing what they do, all internal processes and teams are broken from sales (no onboarding, training, materials whatsoever) to R&D (which in SmartFocus should be renamed to "Rarely Delivering") through Professional Services (not enough skills & staff). Marketing is limited to high-level market positionning but no facts. And Product Management is non-existing, everyone has a different opinion on what the product does or will do... Client support is worse every day and will be worse given savings they're trying to make and massive lay-offs coming their way.
- Dying: basically the management is desperately trying to shape a good-looking company to get it sold, but only fools would invest or keep on investing in this business. And unfortunately while losing more and more clients and staff, it's going to be critical in a really short period of time...
As a conclusion, what a shame! It was such a great company just a couple of years ago which needed product development but since then, management has changed (too) many times starting with the CEO, several wrong choices have been made (reorganizing teams, changing the strategy, doing bad and expensive acquisitions) damaging the company to an extent where the recovery would take too much time and money to be feasible...
So if you really want to join them and make money? Negotiate a good basic pay and ensure that you're either fired or made redundant after a few months as performance will not be rewarded unless you're one of the President's favorites...
