With that said, Yardi is a highly overrated employer in my opinion (particularly for sales professionals). Here are a few of the reasons why.
YOUR INPUT MEANS NOTHING: I stumbled across another Glassdoor review where HR urged the reviewer to speak with HR about their concerns. The reality, however, is that no one at Yardi listens to feedback, and no one cares what you think unless you’re in a senior leadership role. HR and senior leadership are absolutely unapproachable and unwilling to listen. All decisions are made out of Santa Barbara, and you either fall in line with the organization’s directives, or you leave. They are a big company, and they don’t care about losing individual team members. This dynamic creates a somewhat toxic culture at Yardi that I did not expect would exist, especially as a family-owned organization.
ABSURD PRODUCTIVITY METRICS FOR SALES REPS: I won’t dive into the details here, but the expectations are laughable and shameful. Some reps have simply started filling the CRM with bad information to help make their numbers look better. Reps hate this but are generally too afraid to voice their concerns.
WORK LIFE BALANCE CAN BE A STRUGGLE: at least for outside sales positions, many (if not most) employees are stressed out, very tired, and have limited bandwidth to properly support new teammates or even their clients. If you’re going to be a successful AE at Yardi, you can expect to frequently start work early and end work late, including some weekend work. In spite of all this work, it’s highly likely that you will fail to meet your productivity goals referenced above. On top of this, they are requiring even outside sales reps (who already spend a lot of time on the road) to go into the office once per week.
INCESSANT “FIRE DRILLS”: examples of this include annual planning requirements, recruiting clients and prospects to Yardi’s never-ending sales events, scheduling meetings at conferences (expectation of 12 meetings per conference), etc. The demands from leadership are often at the last minute and have created countless late nights and weekends to keep up with the requests.
MICROMANAGEMENT from senior sales leadership. This overlaps a bit with points 2 and 4 above. Assigned territories change often at Yardi, which creates a lot of challenges for sales reps and discontinuity for our clients. This year, they asked reps to do a massive amount of research and documentation to prepare for the sales year. The timeline that was provided for this project was impossibly short, and when reps pushed back, the company doubled down and told them to make it happen. So… reps simply started filling the CRM with thousands of entries simply to fill an impossible expectation. This happens all the time: the Yardi CRM is filled with bad data as reps try to simply “check the box” to get management off their backs.
HORRIBLE IN-HOUSE CRM: Yardi’s yCRM is one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever used. For example, there is no app, so if you’re on the road for business, you have no way to pull up simple information like contact information or pricing details for a client without pulling up your computer. The amount of clicks required to do the simplest things is absurd. They are too cheap to invest in good sales software like SalesForce for their sales people, and I’ve never seen them ask for feedback from employees on how to improve the product.
YARDI IS OFTEN CHEAP AND STINGY: Yardi often schedules conferences (like its annual YASC conference) around holidays like Labor Day… many sales reps believe they do this in order to reduce the cost of the event space, even though it negatively impacts employee and client vacation plans. The per diem of $70/day (just $35/day if you start travel at 12pm or later!) is far too low given recent inflation, etc. You’re working large deals (sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars), and yet there’s a 2-drink maximum per person when you entertain a client. Salaries are comparatively low and difficult to negotiate- this has especially big implications in the Client Services division. Yardi simply doesn’t pay enough to retain good employees on those teams, nor do they offer the necessary compensation increases to incentivize reps to move into Team Lead positions with more responsibility. I could give other examples.
POOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT: Yardi talks about “taking care of our clients…” in their motto, but it's clearly not a priority for the company. Ticket response times are frequently poor, and implementations for net-new Voyager clients are brutally difficult, which forces sales reps to spend lots of extra time dealing with angry clients. In addition, the Client Services team is measured on “cases closed,” which leads to issues being marked as resolved when they really aren’t. The company is in desperate need of revisiting how customer support is handled, as this is where Yardi’s reputation struggles the most.
