Solera reviews

Quick TLDR: - TERRIBLE pay - No support from Exec Team - No communication on company direction or goals - No resources to do your job - Lacking in all benefits - Quality of life depends on which product you are a part of (avoid anything that is not CRM) Also quick salary thing: - onboarding Specialists/Project Managers make about 55-65. Raises are below inflation rate so what you start with is where you will stay. - Data Engineers make like 35k. I thought that was a joke when I first heard it, but I assure you it is not. Let me give you a backstory so you know how things work. DealerSocket was a CRM software company that apparently was pretty sweet back in the day. In 2014 it was bought by an investment firm Vista Equity partners. In 2015 they acquired several other companies (FinanceExpress, Inventory+, DealerFire and AutoStar. Shortly after, the CEO and exec team realized they couldnt cut it with scaling up at such a rapid rate. Attrition was high with our customers and things were getting pretty disorganized. Vista removed the CEO and cleaned house on the exec team bringing in Sejal Pietrzak, their golden girl, to make DealerSocket viable again. Things got pretty great under her leadership, it took a bit of time but things really turned around. All products were getting investment and the necessary support. Our attrition dropped significantly and our products got a lot stronger. I would rate it probably 4-5 stars under her leadership. We also acquired another software called Auto/Mate in like 2019. I dont know what the plan was there but I felt bad for them since they seemed to be better than DealerSocket. Come summer of 2021, we were told that DealerSocket was being sold to Solera along with Omnitracs (a separate company outside DealerSocket). We were told that this would be hugely beneficial to our customers and us as we would get more resources. We quickly discovered that this was actually a move by Vista to combine some of their companies so they could take Solera public or make it more attractive for a sell off since Omnitracks and Solera were both underperforming. What resulted from this was a mass layoff in August of 2021. The people laid off were a combination of legacy employees who had helped build the company and new employees. They never gave us the numbers but it was around 200 people. Without these people, supporting our teams and customers become impossible. All financial resources were pulled way back and our already skeleton crews were left to clean up a mess that will take years to fix. It has become clear that the intention is to push out the people that they think were paid too much and replace them with outsourced team members. I decided to leave when much of my team was laid off. I couldnt stay behind and risk being a part of a layoff of which there was a second round in October.

First day, reality sets in when you show up to a different office from where you trained and see a half empty telemarketing floor and see never-ending rows of telemarketers just making calls on their computer dialers non stop. This position is nothing more than a telemarketing job, you will be put in your little 5x5 cubicle in a row of 20 other sales people and in one of 6 different teams, put on your headset and have your computer start calling mechanic shops non stop all day while reading from your call script you memorized during 2 weeks of training. Usually the best thing that can happen is getting hung up on, or the alternatives are mechanics swearing and threatening you because they have been called 20+ times before and have said they're not interested a bunch of times or asked to be taken off the call list before. There's many times you call people's homes and cellphones that are on the call list due to bad data leads and are never taken off even when they have been reported previously. Trying to convince mechanics to switch to a more expensive repair system then what they have used for years. Only sales people hitting quota and making over their salary are the ones that are on management's good side and get layup sales by either sending them inbound calls or giving them deals that were ready to be closed by sales people that got fired. The inside sales director thinks he's a mafia boss walking around the office trying to intimidate sales people by mean muggin' them for things like leaving on time or by standing by the exit door at the end of the day to check who's not working overtime. Inside sales manager's are all over the place; there are 6 managers and you can get everything from a manager that lets the team run itself and pretty much won't talk to you for the first 2 weeks you're there or a micromanager that requests a read receipt notification every time he sends an email and wants to know what you're doing every second you're in the office, uses his headphones from his cubicle to listen and talk over you on your calls while you talk with customers and is pretty close to physically clicking on your dialer for you to start a call if he see's you taking more 10+ seconds between calls. Work is 8am-430pm and if you don't work overtime the managers black ball you and some coworkers are even afraid to leave on time. Work some Saturdays; as there's a revolving schedule for the 6 teams and every teams gets to work every 5th Saturday. Not mandatory, but again, if you don't work Saturdays you get black balled by management. You won't believe the things that you hear people say in the sales floor, things you would get fired on the spot for in a real office environment. Managers included. Health benefits are terrible; the deductibles are so high you won't want to use them unless it's an emergency.