Where can I start... I started with great hopes in this company, really thought I made it into the ivy league of software. But even after a few days I was already seeing some red flags in the toxicity of the management but this was covered up by some AEs still making a lot of money. With the layoffs and the market being down all the flaws are coming to light: Salesforce is not adapted to the SMB segment in terms of 1. price (plus the price is not straight forward at all), implementation (Salesforce takes no responsibility in it and it case things go bad get ready for the blaming war) and UX 2. The sales cycle is long and painful, everything is a bargain which scare customers away 3. sales terms are not flexible at all (automatic renewal, long term engagement...) Thanks to this bad market placement covered for years by global growth and the fact that Salesforce is #1 CRM thanks to the enterprise segment, Salesforce just sucks at winning new logos on this smb segment. Thanks to this expect about 30% of AEs making quota this year and if you take all the names of the AE who started the fiscal year, I measured around 50% will make it to the end of the year (PiP, resignations, long term sick leave ...) But it's not the fact that most AEs make a tiny portion of their OTE which makes them leave most of the time but MICRO MANAGEMENT (SF is #1 in this): expect to be more challenged by your management than your own customers through all creative format they can find: checking your calendar, unending deal reviews (where we repeat the same things), unstopping slack messages from your manager and up to 2 level above (as no trust), ad mentions in the CRM, ad mentions in quip, on your slides... be also ready to be available at any time to check your messages or management can get frustrated. 8:30am is always the first meeting to make sure we are all awake (as they have no trust people will wake up to do their job they probably think people are 5 years old ). Expect also to forget about taking vacations when you want: only February and August - if you want to do anything outside of these periods well you'll have to wait until you leave the company because even asking for vacations outside these period will be taken as an offense - they expect you to dedicate your life to the company. Yes don't offend the management as they have all sorts of little tricks for punishment : their favourite- playing with patches and cutting the few leads you can receive. You'll be quick to find out that the favourite AEs will be blessed with God and receive inbounds all the time as well as multiple patches but with the same target. They will be treated like rockstars and on your side you will be pointed out for being so bad and unsuccessful vs them with your miserable little patch (made tiny through over Recruiting). (How unfair is that!) Some important things as well: management does not trust their AEs nor the customers - everyone are liars according to them. The thing you have to understand about sales at SF its a money game nobody cares about the customer and their success or the success of AEs it's only about pumping the most ACV fake or real (some people are very creative about building schemes to trick the system - but management does not care as "good for the dashboards") . Finally and the most disappointing of all (or funny If you don't want to cry about it) the way Salesforce uses Salesforce is outrageous: - no mailing tool (lol) AEs have to send campaigns manually 1 by 1 (like events) - some us external tools (and they pay with their own money lol) - managers don't use the dashboard to forecast. Get ready to fill in the CRM + slides + Google sheets (funny because some managers make fun of customers working on excel) - their CPQ tool is slow and buggy (most AEs setup their quote test on an excel before) -most AEs don't keep the call up to date so good luck when trying to find historic on an old account or prospect (which happens very often for customers, which btw are sick and tired of our "hi I'm the new AE let's meet" Funny for a company providing audits and ROIs to other companies not even able to analyze their own issues making teams lose soooo much time...(you can ask your AEs for an ROI perhaps) Long story short you've guessed it - not the greatest experience. Still a good logo on a resume (but for how long?) At least it proves you can survive in a toxic environment and have resilience (if you survive 1 year)
