Entry level candidates beware. Do your research - Sales and Marketing GoCanvas Employee Review

1.0
Feb 12, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

~Amazing snacks and drinks. There was unlimited Kombucha ~Some autonomy. ~There are amazing people I worked with and learned from ~The possibility to grow professionally ~I saw people wear whatever they'd like most days, even sweatpants

Cons

~Here is the truth about GoCanvas. There are too many to list. Most of the cons used to be pros. However, after GoCanvas was acquired by K1 Investments as a priority owner everything has crumbled. To give background, after the acquisition a new CRO was hired directly from the investment firm. He is now realistically the CEO without the title. He called all of the shots and the current CEO has no say. Our CEO said nothing drastic would change. Since, there was at least 10 firings to free up budget despite getting over $150 million investment money. The investment money has only benefited the Chief level team with stock options to pay them out. None of that money has gone into investing into GoCanvas. On top of all of this, the new CRO has articles from early 2000 where he threatened someone when he got caught plagiarizing on a college paper. It ruined all of GoCanvas' values by putting someone in charge who has had such a past. It went viral throughout the company. It shows because the new person in charge didn't think about the people of GoCanvas first, but only metrics. ~Sales is what creates money for GoCanvas, but there was NO investment into the sales organization. ~Inbound leads. Inbound is the engine for the profitability of the company. With that being said, the inbound leads were unfathomably bad. The marketing team has no idea what is considered a good lead. There is nothing enticing from a marketing perspective to bring a possible customer to sign up for GoCanvas compared to one of our competitors. The only reason GoCanvas wins a lot of deals, is because they are lucky that a customer signed up for only 1 software and not a competitor out of pure laziness. ~No competitive edge. GoCanvas prices are twice as expensive as our competitors, but the entire organization doesn't know why. Over the last 3-5 years, no drastic product changes proves why our prices should be more expensive, thus the team always loses out from a cost perspective. There are key functions that have never improved and it is hard to believe in the product. ~Getting fired at a blink of an eye. No matter if you've been with the company for 2 months or 8 years, there is a chance you will show up to work in the morning and get fired to save the company money. ~Career progression. There is not much progression. You can start at an entry level BDR job and hope to get promoted in 15+ months. The base pay for a BDR is only $40k for a DC area job. With a $40k job, the BDR team is expected to make well over 100 calls a day without giving the proper tools to do so. The team only receives 1 good lead at most a day. ~Unattainable Goals. It seems the goals for AE's is unattainable. I had only seen 1-3 people maximum a month hit quota even though there are over 10 people on the Account Executive team. To my knowledge, not many people ever hit quota. ~No product knowledge training. This only occurs the first week you get hired, and you never get taught the product again. Unless you are on the Professional Services team. ~Key team members resigning. All of the key team members who helped the GoCanvas engine run are leaving because the CRO is changing all of the core values that brought people to GoCanvas for the lower salary. Pure micromanaging is occurred from higher up (CRO) that is even causing the managers to have no ability to make decisions for their team. ~Company politics ~Product and sales do not interact. The product team assumes they know what is best. Maybe a certain product addition can attract 10% more customers. ~Competitive pay. I cannot emphasize this enough. ~They retroactively make commission worse for the sales team

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GoCanvas Response
6y
Hey there, I want to thank you for taking the time to share all your thoughts with the Glassdoor community! It seems from what you have shared that the beginning of your tenure was characterized by mostly pros, and I'm sorry to hear that your opinion of the team soured since then. We do agree on some things, our team is amazing, and there are opportunities to grow in skills and launch and build your career at GoCanvas. One of our GoCanvas Alumni, who began as an intern just took their dream job as a CTO after being their long tenure with us. Furthermore, K1 has brought with them a deepened level of rigor and focus. For many this has been a challenging and fulfilling journey, for others the raised standards and increased alignment with best practice have been quite difficult. There are some inaccuracies that I feel I should clear up. First, our CEO remains our CEO, and he has not abdicated his decision making responsibilities. Second, our CRO was selected by the GoCanvas Management team he was not hired by or from K1. In fact, he has never been a member of the K1 team and has not worked with them prior to joining the GoCanvas family. I may have agreed with you 18 months ago, regarding training. However we made this a priority in 2018 and since then our training team has built and delivered a series of specific training on sales skills and our product, in addition to developing our sales leaders in the areas of leadership and coaching. Of course, this remains a priority for us and there is more to come on this front in 2020, which is really exciting. Finally, with regard to our Sales team, I feel you are being unfair to your former colleagues as the stats simply don't support your view. One-third of our Account Executives exceeded their targets by 30% or more last month, a trend that has been steadily increasing. 85% of our Business Development Managers met or exceeded their targets, and all of our Account Management team achieved quota as well. Again, thank you for taking the time to share your view with Glassdoor, we wish you all the best in your future endeavors, and the next step in your career.

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5.0
Oct 16, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great management great product great benefits

Cons

Constant change-make sure you can handle it

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