Persado reviews about "ceo"

Leadership can't seem to get out of its own way. Both the CEO and COO treat customer relationships as transactional and fail to see that there is no future without real, genuine relationships with clients. The COO is objectively awful. He is stubborn and unable to acknowledge his and his team's failures throughout the years. When questioned (quite respectfully) about plans for mitigating existing issues in public forums, he would much rather lash out rather than answer questions that he and his team should have plans in place for. He lacks the strategic vision, leadership skills, and the engineering chops necessary for overseeing the development of product roadmaps and improvements. In most high-growth organizations, he would have been let go or encouraged to step down by now. The product team is okay but struggles to understand that the purpose of a product team is to understand customer needs and prioritize market / customer requirements. Often, they will try to force use cases for WIPs onto clients. Their customer engagement skills could use some brushing up on. Poor 401k match. Up to $3,000 per year and you must be employed at Persado on the last day of the calendar year in order to receive matched funds.

- Multiple restructurings and re-orgs during my time at the company (2 years). It felt like my job responsibilities were constantly changing. The role that I did at the end of my time at Persado was not what I originally signed up for. Restructurings were messy and not well thought out. - Depending on the client, there were unrealistic expectations of what exactly Persado could do for their company. Conflicting internal information about how exactly the AI works and how much of the language is computer generated vs human generated. - Unrealistic expectations for how much one person can do, especially after layoffs. - 2 rounds of layoffs. Latest round 25% of the company was let go. The CEO wasn't even on the call to take responsibility for what happened. Instead it was HR, who was crying during the call. - Leadership honestly made me not want to work for the company any more. They were extremely toxic, gaslight employees many times, and said many problematic things during my time at Persado. - The company recently went into a pay freeze during the review/promotion period for employees. HR made it clear that you could still get promoted, but you would not be given a raise. When employees brought up on an all company meeting how they should not have people doing more work for unfair pay, the CEO said "this is not the time to have this sort of attitude." HR got very defensive and said that "it's not all about the money" and "you should want to get a promotion for the experience."

The C-suite does not know how to scale the company. The founders have done a great job of creating value but are not the right people to scale the company. - Terrible talent acquisition for leaders. There are almost no good leaders at Persado and they hire the same. Managers aren't taught how to inspire and lead - No strategic direction or experience in the c-suite - No product development capability (engineers but no real customer feedback loops and product development) - Major focus on aggressive selling but no attention to fixing the product leading to catastrophic churn - Performance management is very poor. Most managers don't have any idea how to coach and develop talent and there is very little direction and valuable guidance and they keep hiring more of the same type In past 3 years - 3 CROs, 3 Heads of Marketing, 3 heads of customer success. CEO has no strategy and any leader that comes in with one eventually butts heads.

the CEO has no strategy and will openly admit that. The CFO has a superiority complex and thinks he is managing a utility company, not a high growth startup. The COO is the worst of the bunch. He is charming on the surface, but incapable as a professional. He doesn’t know how to run a product team and he hasn’t released a new product feature in years. The market has moved past Persado. The real AI innovators have arrived and are well funded. All of the A talent has either left or is looking to leave. What will remain is either B players or A players looking for a lifestyle job until the company folds or is acquired by a strategic who doesn’t understand the product’s limitations. As other posters have said, there have been large layoffs and more will come. Major customers are leaving and new customers are choosing other solutions.

You are not set up for success in any way. In fact, there seem to be efforts to make sure day-to-day is as difficult as possible and that employees remain unhappy. Some examples: -Customer Success team has a lot of great, smart people on it, but their skills were hobbled by an effort to combine project management and CS into one organization. The result: projects are poorly managed and customers are generally less happy than they were prior to switch. And a lot of top-level talent exited due to the change. -Brand Content Strategy team are the data-oriented copywriters that produce the content that delivers results to clients. However, they seem beyond overworked, treated like a thorn in the company’s side, and undervalued (and likely underpaid as well). -Persado had its best year ever last year, which of course led to the CCO “leaving the company.” This has left teams like sales and product marketing flailing in the wind trying to reorient to totally new sales and marketing strategies. No opportunity for growth as a standard employee. Promotions handed out like favors to some while others get arbitrary excuses each review cycle. Major system of favoritism, even when the favorites are clearly incapable. Management would be a joke if it weren’t so unfunny how much they’ve failed their teams. Poor management stems from the top. One C-level exec joked about how he knew a lot about killing from his time in the army during a company-wide meeting as a way to end a tough conversation with a frustrated employee. CEO seems to have fully lost control. Meanwhile, after 40+ people were laid off, coworkers were falling over themselves to defend and even THANK execs for layoffs. Reprehensible behavior all around. No complaint or question is seen as valid. You will receive a defensive response or get radio silence (which is actually preferred because the responses are generally designed to gaslight or frustrate). Top talent has either found new jobs, been let go, or is actively interviewing. New product offerings seem somewhere between a solution looking for a problem and a desperate attempt to lure in new customers while alienating older ones.

persado gratuitously hands out promotions/raises to management pet favorites – usually lifers that have been with the company 5+ years who have been with the company long enough to gladly take orders from leadership and have no viable prospects of working anywhere else). these employees will get 2-3 promotions per year while everyone else gets excuses. agree with previous reviewers – talented employees are fleeing this sinking ship quickly and those who haven’t fled should absolutely be looking with this company’s dismal financial outlook - clients continue to cut back their investment with persado. competition is becoming increasingly fierce and persado's product has not evolved to keep up due to mismanagement and egotistical leadership - see OpenAI. Company differentiator is years of established testing which will be absolutely neutered when Microsoft productizes OpenAi tech. the product is way too much work for end users and has no real stickiness and limited value. persado has an extremely bloated middle management layer full of do-nothing yes-men who bark at employees and offer the business no real value. perasdo over-hired across departments in 2021 only to lay people off months later but PLENTY of fat to chew odd remains. incredibly bloated customer service team – 15+ overpaid and VERY junior “directors” of customer success who would never be hired as ICs at a real SaaS company. couple this with an even more junior 'delivery' team who does the job CS should be doing. budget wasted into ‘onboarding’ customers into a platform that none of persasdo’s clients actually even use. Overstaffed customer success teams with conflicting responsibilities confuse clients. frequent re-orgs and constant changes of leadership and direction add fuel to the fire. as others mentioned, ceo and co-founder are abrasive, shady, arrogant and frequently belittle employees – frequent inappropriate comments and behavior in public forums and meetings. leadership has no real vision and constantly changes strategy and direction over and over again. persado hires the wrong people and fires them only to do it all over again. mid-level managers are inexperienced and have little to no training and are promoted into roles just because they've been with the company long enough and tow the company line. HR constantly gaslights employees. the company regurgitates their mission vision and values at every all hands but can't live up to any of them. Company wastes money on consultants for useless trainings or strategic direction because leadership has no vision.

1) We were promised a fully remote culture, and then the new CEO did a mandatory RTO for those living in cities where there are offices. 2) Layoffs every year. No job security. 3) Some managers micromanage a lot. 4) Raises are promised, but I haven't seen any raises to match inflation. You have to wait years to get a raise potentially

C-level smug and disrespectful attitude trickles down through the ranks to make the day-to-day truly bombastic for the sales team and outcomes with current clients and prospects. The environment is always in total flux with fire drill directives that switch on a daily bases. All customer facing employees are continually running scared that the CEO will have a bad day and fire them without cause, which creates a CYA attitude and a throw-under-the-bus mentality through out the teams. CEO is a bully and doesn't listen to others, seems he only wants to hear his own voice drone on. In a monthly all hands meeting he called employees who are dissatisfied with getting a promotion, WITHOUT a raise, as "coin-operated" and should not be working for Persado. The head of HR then backs him up by saying "promotions are great way to gain exposure and learn" but I never saw any executive take a cut in their pay to "help the company in these difficult times." As well, they short salespeople on expansion deals by listing them as "renewals" and/or changing comp plan AFTER the deal closes so they don't have to pay commission. The also don't want to pay a salesperson on short-term paid trials, even if the sale is over $100k. They really don't mind having you do all the work, and then push a RIF to be able to play the odds of not paying commissions to sales people and sales leadership. It is really sad.