Sales role not as described in interview.
Pros
There are some great people at the company that make the job bearable.
Cons
I was told in my interview I would spend 80% of my time with repeat clients and maybe 10-20% of my time cold-calling on net-new business. This could not have been further from the truth. I spent most of my days there doing nothing but cold calling. The two main teams there sold ER software and DB tools. Both teams had very few warm leads coming in. We were lucky to get one warm lead per week. The company has been in a transition from moving most of the operations from San Francisco to Austin, TX and the marketing department lost most of their talent. The new people in place do not seem capable of implementing any real campaigns to generate results. Webinars are basically the only thing that is driving leads and it is always the same people watching them that are just joining for educational purposes. One manager is very laid back and usually allows his team to run their own business. Provided he is not in a bad mood that day. He definitely wears his emotions on his sleeve and you know if you should just avoid him for the day. The other is a bit loud and aggressive for my style and he is continuously in his employees business. If you are a seasoned sales veteran and do not want or need a manager that is consistently trying to call out on your deals, sometimes without letting you know ahead of time, you will not enjoy working here. Training was being implemented but any sales training that I attended while there was very ineffective. There was never a clear direction in the training and more often than not, it turned out to be the sales staff complaining about what we needed to have in place to be effective rather than have an actual training class. Quotas are almost never attained by anyone. Over three quarters I believe only 3-4 people hit quota. The product is good but not always up to date. One manager continuously wanted his sales staff to talk bad about the competition and make customers believe our product was superior. However, some of the products were not up to date to work with databases that have been on the market for over a year. The company touts the number of R&D employees it has but they shouldn't. The product itself is nice and most customers really seemed to enjoy it but it is not a necessary tool. The tool is basically a nail gun to replace a hammer. So of course it helps people accomplish their job faster but it could be done with something cheaper. This is the case at least for one side of the tool set the company has. I would not recommend a friend to work here. In Austin there are too many other sales and software companies that have their act together to waste any time with this company. Perhaps in a few years the company will be a better place when they have a better direction and better leaders. That is if it is not bought out before that happens.
