Business is business is business. A business has to find ways to make and keep a steady revenue stream to stay afloat, and employees are there to make a living. This is the typical equation in pretty much any industry or job.
Yet, sometimes we are privileged enough to land at organizations where while doing these things, the societal and economic impact driven by the business is inspiring, proven and celebrated every day. Where the employees are developed, supported and uplifted every day. This is what keeps employees engaged and doing everything they can to keep making money for the business, while seeing the wonderful results their efforts are having on their clients.
One might think that an organization like PowerToFly, with a stated mission to ‘uplift underrepresented talent’ and ‘support other organizations in curating and maintaining legitimate environments that weave in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging into their standard operational + business practices’. Well, one might reasonably think that PowerToFly drives these very efforts internally for their own talent.
I was shocked and appalled to quite quickly (within about 2 weeks of being recruited and joining the team) find out that this is really not the case. Being with the org for 11 months and on many occasions voicing my perceptions and concerns with both of the co founders, the head of sales at the time, the head of hr, the cro and my own sales managers— there were little to no efforts to address these concerns, or present even the most minimal of plans to put any of these efforts into action in the future. I have my own receipts of on many occasions presenting thoughtful suggestions or ideas to begin at the most minimal, bridging some gaps- they were met with silence.
Being that this is a Sales Driven organization, relying only on their Business Development Reps and Account Executives and adjacents to go out and grow + maintain revenue streams selling their products and services, one would hope for strong Sales / Marketing Leadership and rolls outs but this is not the case.
Having joined the AE team with a lengthy background and understanding of how a contemporary go-to-market team thrives, it was disheartening to not only be thrust into an environment where leaders did not properly use or even themselves really understand how to effectively use tools like Salesforce, Outreach, Gong, Zoominfo, Hubspot to drive efficient efforts with real time data, it was the lack of being open to new streamlining ideas that became very difficult to deal with.
The defiant silos between Sales, Customer Success and B2B marketing is one of the biggest concerns- but when launching a new product line and defining themselves as a now “SaaS / Tech” business without the appropriate coordinations between the Product and Sales team leading up to and following the launch — this is when I really knew the org was headed in a questionable direction.
Notably, the CRO did not believe the sales team should be trained in depth to know the ins and outs, feature sets, full UX and data gathering/legal/security implications of their new business intelligence tool before going out and trying to get clients to invest in it.
Unfortunately, and again this is my personal perception, the way that the company wide and especially the sales team were spoken at by the CRO and remaining Co Founder on many occasions — it’s like they didn’t believe that folks were in their roles for their knowledge and experience. It’s like they didn’t believe they actually knew how to be successful— that is very demoralizing over time. In fact, if you are a non native english speaker on the sales team be prepared for micro aggressions in the way you are approached about hitting your metrics.
There was no consistent support or development, no discussions on industry insights, no coming together on competitive analysis or call coaching— only meetings where we were told what our revenue and activity goals were and how close or far we were from reaching them. And for about 8/11 of my months on the team, these numbers were presented to us on a Microsoft Document being asked to be manually updated by each member of the sales team. If you know you know.
