Qualtrics Reviews

Cons

- Typical hyper-growth pains that any person who's striving for a strart-up environment would embrace, but for some it would be too uncomfortable. Examples are: Being understaffed or stretched for work-load, missing processes or malfunctioning processes that need developing or fixing, rapid and constant change, touch business or client challenges that need owning and resolving etc.

- For some functions still very dependent on the US head office which slows down progress or can account for additional challenges in cultural alignment with the European markets.

- Inflexible working conditions. No home office & no official flex time on start and end of working day.

Cons

Lots of attrition, the higher ups will cash in at IPO... Not much for everyone else. Hard to advance fast. Can't transfer offices no matter what. Not great compensation compared to other jobs. Even in Utah...

Cons

Everyone is from the same background (at least it feels like that), not much opportunity to network with people who have come from other jobs, companies, or careers

Cons

Need to improve employee training

Cons

Not even close to enough marketing efforts to support such a large sales team. Be ready to cold call the first 2-3 years within a limited territory to have any chance of making commissions. Very low percentage of reps hit quota and those who do typically receive a lot of half-baked deals from the reps that resign. Survival of the fittest and tenure pays off. Magic amount of time to survive before finding success is about 2.5 to 3 years. if you make it that long, you're typically going to be just fine. Professional services team prices themselves out of more deals than they care to attempt to help the account executives win. Only 1 of roughly 25 deals presented to PS was on point and competitive with the other bids we were up against. Lots of missed revenue because of this.

Cons

-If you don't like fast-paced, that could be a con
-There are so many amazing snacks it's hard to resist!

Cons

Metrics can be difficult to keep up with. Hiring so fast that they have a lot of entry level churn.

Cons

Politics, definite favorites within the company, criteria for advancement wasn't uniform

Cons

This will be from the lens of someone in sales (lower tier Account Executive):

1)

What happens when you have success and you are really cheap? You promote from within. Make sure to label it as a ‘strength’ though versus a weakness. This is something Qualtrics has excelled at on multiple accounts.

Sometimes promoting from within can be great. If you are in a static market, it makes sense. There is little change in the everyday business and sales process. However, if you are in a startup environment where everything is constantly changing, you're setting yourself up for a bad time.

That bad time is in full effect right now. These homegrown legacy sales managers and region leads have no idea what or why the customers of today are purchasing Qualtrics (especially as it relates to SMB, Mid-). To sum it up, their mindset is outdated. This is more than a problem. These same individuals are the people who are doing ALL of the training.

I would love a competent leader from an outside organization to sit in on one of these sessions. I do not remember the last training that was well received. It’s comical at this point. This communication gap needs to be resolved.

2)

Attrition is high. Not sorta high - I mean extremely high. Out of a group of 9 or 10 sales reps on my team from when I started, only two of the are left. Also, two of the most tenured reps in the company have also left in the last few months, too.

This is caused by many different factors, namely 1) account allocation 2) hiring too many quota carriers and 3) data in our CRM. The only individuals who hit are ones who either got really lucky with account allocation or the reps who have been here for eons and have great accounts.

While leadership says that they don’t care if attrition is high as long as their ‘best’ reps stay, that’s unproductive. The only way someone gets promoted is if they have a solid territory. The problem is that these territories are divided up arbitrarily. I've seen so much potential talent walk out that door because of unfair circumstances.

But wait, am I just making excuses? I don' know - ask the 75% of the software sales team that didn't hit their quota.

Cons

Overall, the best sales opportunities are taken and the quality of the work/jobs are not very good. They've grown the sales team way too big, leaving low quality accounts for the rest. This makes it difficult to perform against a steeply increasing quota, so expectations are unrealistic given the accounts you typically have. Only 30% of reps are hitting quota each quarter, and a very few hit OTE. As a sales rep, you have to generate your own business with zero to very little help from supporting reps and marketing. (aka A LOT of cold calling and cold emails. If you're doing it as they expect, you'll prospect for several hours a day.) You sell highly priced enterprise-level products, so it’s hard to win deals against companies that have a better SMB offering. Turnover is extremely high because sales reps are dissatisfied. Qualtrics is largely unwilling to change many of its problems, so it continues to deal with high levels of dissatisfaction and turnover. They are pushing to hire as many people as possible to look better at IPO. I wonder what will happen once they do that. Unless you are coming in as an AE 4 or Enterprise rep, where you get better accounts, go elsewhere!

Salary- you will be underpaid. For B2B sales, especially a unicorn backed by big VC firms, the base pay is well below competitive levels. People are leaving because of this.

Poor Training- they are severely lacking in sales training. Qualtrics = difficult value/solution sell. If you are young and/or somewhat new to B2B sales, it will make it more difficult to find success. If you get lucky with a good manager though, that could help balance out the deficiency here.

Tools for success- As new sales rep you won't receive a laptop until you hit your quota. The nature of the sales job basically demands a laptop for success (meetings, client meetings/sales demo's in conference rooms, etc). Not having the tools to succeed is extremely frustrating.

SDR Role- this is an awful job. You literally mine contacts, cold call and cold email, all day. There is nothing fulfilling about this role. When you're promoted, you'll become an AE 1, where you'll get poor quality accounts that you can cold call into. They've improved the process of learning to become a more effective AE, but still the job is an unreasonable, unfulfilling grind.

Sales Ops- incompetent and ineffective. Poor data, account organization/distribution, and other failed initiatives, plus an unwillingness to fix the issues is what sales ops is known for. If the q would fix these problems, they would save sales reps 1-3 hours per day of wasted time.

Disorganization- it's highly disorganized. As fast as they've grown, some of these growing pains are understandable. But this badly needs fixing.

Marketing- you will have no support from them. It’s the black hole of Qualtrics. There is incompetence and an unwillingness to spend (except for on events, where they spend insane amounts of money). Inbound leads are almost unheard of. The coordination between marketing and sales is practically non-existent. Marketing doesn't know how to do effective lead and demand gen and the results show.

In summary, don’t work here. You will be miserable like the majority. The employee experience is severely lacking in many areas. Qualtrics needs to close the experience gap. (How’s that for radical candor?) Work for a company that will place you in a position where you will have the tools, support, and opportunity to be successful. Don’t fall for the hype.