This is a top-down toxic (lack of) culture that suffers from an antiquated weekend-warrior mentality that impacts all employees but especially sales org.
The culture here is this: we have the best products, and competitors suck. That’s it! You can join employee-founded clubs, but you’re so burnt out from your regular AM workload, endless biweekly manager forecast linearity meetings and 1000+ person canned enablement webinars that you’ll be maxed out for any extracurricular activity.
Our CEO is begrudgingly opposed to hybrid work and was pressed due to market conditions (and the reality they hired so many remote folks during pandemic) to accept it. Simply put, they’d rather you sit on zoom meetings at a desk in an office (since teams are not GEO based and scattered across US) for the sake of control rather than adapt to the times and admit that a remote workforce for inside sales teams in inevitable.
Historically they do not respect your family time around the holidays, and if an “end of month” falls on a weekend, they reward reps who sandbag deals until the last day, to harass clients to docusign over the weekend.
Managers and directors are culturally incentivized to only speak about team numbers during standups and org meetings. No sharing of tribal knowledge, what’s working, why we win/lose etc. ICs just sit and check out as management narrates the daily progress against manager goals, and dashboards we all have visibility into anyways. The only space created to supposedly collaborate with peers to sharpen your skills is allocated in the form of 1000+ person enablement webinars from recycled sales methodologies like MEDDIC where there’s no real opportunity to practice and apply the concepts. Virtual quizzes are not how anyone grows their skills. It’s from exposure to your peers and what winning looks like.
Nepotism at its finest here, path to promotion functions like a chaotic startup and there’s constant reorgs so there’s no effective way to handle this. If your VP likes you, like for example if you close a short-term deal which boosts the management number but tanks your net retention a few months later, that’s a great scenario where you’ll be praised and then two months later when your retention tanks you’ll be responsible for backfilling massive holes in revenue.
Clearly this company is a revolving door. In the last two months or COO/President, VP of DaaS, CGO have left the company, with other senior leadership on the way out. Let’s face it, even ICs can tell that our CEO does not grant leadership any autonomy to own their org’s strategic vision and execution.
You’ll be promoted one half and on a pip the next. The old saying “you’re just a number” is never truer than at this company.
For years we were forced to oversell small and medium companies all of the acquired products. Often this would look like management insisting you sneak a product SKU into a renewal to boost those emerging product dollars. With that unsustainable approach, 2023 was a year of unprecedented churn, and while our CEO goes on MSNBC to “own it” (simple, a SaaS seat-based product is in less demand when companies have less workers in those positions) you’ll be accountable for the massive churn that was transferred into your book at the new fiscal boom-shuffle. It’s Russian roulette where there’s 4 bullets in the chamber. Good luck!
