Avoid joining the Sales team, especially in Dubai - Business Development Representative (BDR) Groupon Employee Review

1.0
May 1, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

50% extra employee discount, strict working hours (no weekends or overtime), timely salary payments. Strong CRM usage. Friendly coworkers.

Cons

1. Culture and Work Environment: as a new joiner, expect 0 professional training and onboarding. You'll get your work laptop and everything will be done by you with no assistance from anyone, since there is no sales training/onboarding team. The rest of the sales team will take turns training you with however they can (without a proper structure or guideline). In your first week you'll be asked to start making calls and pitch, without you even fully knowing/understanding the value prop. Then they'll start harassing you about targets and KPIs and you'll be routinely called out in your weekly team calls and in 1:1 meetings. Fail to perform in this beautiful environment - you'll be put on PIP. 2. Office: the office is a joke. It is set up in a small coworking space, with barely enough meeting rooms and private spaces to be on calls. They expect you to be on calls all the time, but give you no proper space for it. Also, you'll also be asked to make calls from your laptop using a lousy call recording software, that doesn't even work correctly and shows up as a UK number to clients, so leads will disconnect calls even before answering you. Also, there's only 2 parking spaces between a team of ~ 20, and they literally don't care where you park (nearest parking space in DWTC costs around 100 AED/day). The other (cheaper) options are a good 17 mim walk away from the office building. They'll say you can use the metro/public transport, so good luck being able to even step inside the metro from WTC during the evening rush. 3. Business model: Groupon's business model is not a sustainable long term option for 90% businesses due to heavy discounting and sky high commissions. 4. Future opportunities: there are people in the sales team doing the exact same job that they were doing 10-13 years ago. Literally no difference. The only 'growth' is the salary increase (2-4% on avg) and getting promoted to better titles (based on rigid performance metrics only). You'll get no real growth. The team isn't growing, how can your career expect to grow? Gen Zs, stay away! 5. Employee satisfaction: the UAE sales team has had 10 departures in 2 years. 2 of these were long tenured (10 years+) and 1 was mid tenured (5 years +) rest everyone left/got fired within 10 months of joining. Enough said.

Explore other reviews about Groupon

5.0
Jan 2, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Learned a great deal here. My first big guy job and the responsibilities kept me focused and motivated. I grew a lot as a person at Groupon as well

Cons

Not many cons. People are really cool.

1.0
Apr 7, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

No pro’s whatsoever. If you’re thinking about joining this company, save yourself a headache and run.

Cons

“Burn and churn” culture with minimal long-term investment in employees. Limited support and inconsistent coaching from management. Quarterly quotas frequently change, directly impacting compensation and making earnings unpredictable. Commission, if you’re lucky to get any, gets paid every 3 months- if terminated, you lose out on THOUSANDS of your hard earned money Compensation does not align with responsibilities—BDRs are often expected to perform full-cycle sales functions similar to Account Executives on a low base salary, ($40,000) Once placed on a performance plan, there is little path to recovery and increased scrutiny follows. High-pressure onboarding environment—new hires are expected to close deals quickly, with limited ramp time. Promotions appear inconsistent and not always based on performance, which can impact team morale and leadership quality. Concerns raised to leadership or HR are not always addressed in a transparent or timely manner.

3
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