Yodle Employee Reviews about "high turnover"

Pros

Let me start off by saying there is a difference between 'Sales Representative' & 'Sales Development Representative': - If you're looking for a career in sales, this place will toughen you up - Co-workers are great & everyone is approachable(including the CEO) - Free lunch everyday - Everything is electronic & easy to use - Management is great and really want to help, so don't be afraid to ask them anything - If you succeed and enjoy being an SDR at Yodle, you should do well at any inside sales job - Happy hour every Friday

Cons

- As an SDR your sole duty is calling 90-100 small/medium sized businesses a day using a list given to you at the beginning of the day - Since so many SDR employees call 90-100, high-earning sectors become saturated and run out quicker than other sectors - You set appointments for the sales reps and never close the deal - Building a relationship with a customer is useless since you'll never talk to them again once the deal is completed - You're taught 70-80% of the product (that's for the sales reps to know) - Structured 15 minute breaks everyday the day - Not as stressful as being a sales rep (that's not top 25 in the company), but still very stressful - REALLY high turnover - Base pay is very low - In the end, your commission is based on the sales rep closing the deal

Pros

Opportunities for professional growth, collaborative environment, good onboarding programs for new hires

Cons

High turnover among sales staff

Pros

Good about giving recognition and finding way to keep sales employees focused on calling. Opportunity for good income in Max Division by selling to lawyers. They'll hype reading the script, but never complain when you're selling and representing the firm professionally.

Cons

Extremely high turnover due to stress of cold calling by telephone 100-200 dials per day. Within 6 mos., I was only one remaining from 30 person training class. Favoritism, and buddy system clearly in play. They claim as a motto "take problems to the next level", but don't make the mistake of believing your immediate manager won't takes issue with any comments or suggestions made to the man above, no matter how helpful or innocuous you think you're being. Very poor customer retention due to lack of product performance. Standard operating procedure for all customers: sell highest priced package possible, then attempt to retain customer at lower tier until they succeed with their attempts to cancel.

Pros

Learn a lot, great entry into sales. Fun atmosphere, great people. Typical cold-calling sales job, with your hip millennial-friendly perks like ping-pong and happy hour. You can make a lot of money if you work hard.

Cons

Little promotion from within. Everything is scripted so at a certain point the development stops. Very little opportunity for growth, as a salesperson, or moving in any other direction. No job security, low base-pay, high turnover.

Pros

-Peapod- comes once a week -The people- you start to form family-like friendships on your team -Commission structure. There is the potential to make a lot of money. The commission structure has recently changed for the better. -Fun environment

Cons

-MICROMANAGEMENT -Inconsistent standards- the company is constantly changing every day. One day you have to make 75 calls, the next day they require you to be on the phone for 3 hours. -Cold calls, cold calls, cold calls -EXTREMELY high turnover rate -The company doesn't care about their clients success- they only care about getting the credit card -They set unrealistic expectations for both their employees and their clients -The product hardly every works -Hardly any room for growth -You have to sell in the form of a robot- how they want you to sell from a script.

Pros

Well structured training and excellent trainers. Team environment makes it competitive and supportive at the same time. Thorough sales scripts and coaching on delivery. A pretty cool product. They are upfront about how challenging the job is.

Cons

The soul-sucking knowledge that you are doing one of the most hated jobs in America- do you like getting cold-calls? I didn't think so. The fact that you are starting every conversation trying to mislead someone. The incredibly high turnover and extremely low average income that is glossed over by the company.

Pros

Free Lunch. Some managers are top notch. Kind of have to get lucky in that regard. Good co workers as well. Average age was mid 20's.

Cons

High turnover rate. They will hire anyone and everyone. My training had over 70 people in it. Open After 2 months only 10 percent remained but they had another 70 in the next class revving to take their place. They keep changing the commission structure. EVERY single month I worked there, there was where changes that never benefited the employee. They make everything sound much bigger than it really is. Theoretically you can make $3000 in RV and not see a cent of that due to clawbacks from previous months.

Pros

The people you meet here will become your friends. Through training and the 9 months I worked there, I got to know many people very well and became very good friends with many of them. Happy hours on Friday, and plenty of (almost too many) contests going on every week to incentivize performance. I will say that my manager genuinely cared about seeing me succeed, however a lot of times his methods were not the best.

Cons

They will tell you during your interview that you can expect to make between $60-$80k. What I saw personally was that after 6 months of working there, I was tracking towards around $30k. Technically $60k was achievable, however that is not something that I witnessed on my team of 15 or so, even the ones who had been there over a year. It's simply a figure that is only achievable for 1% of people who go through this cold calling factory. Cold calling is BRUTAL. You will make between 80-120+ cold calls per day, and if you're on your game then you can set around 2 demos per day. By your third month in, you will hate it. By month 9, I was making more dials than ever before and yet was making less demo sets. It's all about the numbers here (according to management), and if you can't handle being micromanaged and having every tiny detail scrutinized, then this is not the place for you. The music, at least in my bay, was awful. Every single day was a mix of rap and house music, and I heard just about the same songs every day. It's usually very loud as well to get you "amped" up to make more dials. You will see an insanely high turnover rate. I had a training class of around 15, and by month 3 maybe 5 of us were still there. By the time I left at month 9, only 2 of us remained. It's that way and worse across the sales department, and that is no exaggeration. This isn't a sales job. You will learn sales techniques, but they generally only apply to phone sales. You will be reading from a script, and your entire cubicle will be covered in scripts, rebuttals and other various papers. You will get burned out, everybody feels it at some point. Finally, I got tired of hearing motivational speeches every day. There's only so many sports-themed videos I can watch about Michael Jordan not making his high school basketball team that I can handle.

Pros

In general, Yodle is a pretty good company to work for. Good health benefits with 80% of premiums paid by company (they even have pet insurance), free lunches, Friday happy hour beer and popcorn, billiards and ping pong tables, massages, etc. People are usually very friendly and approachable, and are willing to help one another. The annual performance review process is helpful and pretty well-organized. Nice custom-built open office floor plan creates a good work atmosphere. Good products and direction from executive team, and their decisions make business sense. Intelligent CEO is a good face for the company. "Unlimited" time-off for certain positions, earned flexible time-off for others. Dress is pretty casual (probably too casual in sales...I regularly saw people wearing pajamas or workout clothes). Work/life balance is fine - most people work 8-9 hour days, and the office is pretty empty by 6:30pm.

Cons

- No 401K match despite constant annual revenue and profit growth - Very stingy with raises within current role. Lack of financial incentives for non-sales positions. - Overpaid sales agents - everyone else is underpaid as a result - Management is making a lot of short-sighted decisions and cutting corners in efforts to go public - Poor interdepartmental communication/collaboration. Information is rarely shared, and when it is, people tread very carefully to not step on each others' toes - Confusing office hierarchy is constantly changing - Nobody cares about the next step in your career. Very poor growth opportunities. I know several people that left because of this very reason. - Office culture clashes between offices (NYC and Austin offices in particular) - Severe lack of sensible data storage and retrieval procedures makes finding data difficult - High turnover - No place for original, creative ideas/solutions. It's all about finding ways to save money. Decreasing focus on serving the customer's needs, replaced by an increasing focus on finding ways to prevent them from canceling - Unsustainable revenue model. The company is essentially just trying to keep new sales above cancellations, and when they can no longer do that, they will start losing money. Number of customers was relatively static in 2014, and they have no real solution for this problem.

Pros

In the beginning you feel like they are really investing in you. They training is a month long, and you learn all about the software system, competitors, and company sales script. I did learn a lot from my experience here, and despite all the negative things I have to say about my experience, it made me a stronger candidate for other jobs after I put in a couple months here. I didn't stay in sales when I left, but pretty much any field is impressed when they hear you can stand to call your required 90 prospects each day. Friday happy hour is nice, I made a couple lasting friendships, and if you are into having really loud music blaring constantly, that's fun too.They provide lunch, so that's helpful. This job built up my threshold for boredom and tolerance for focusing on repetitive tasks for long periods of time with no break. Having just graduated from college, it was quite an adjustment because in school, your day is broken up by your various classes and subject matters. So in that regard, this job prepared me for my "real adult job" that I took when I left Yodle.

Cons

Where to start... You are treated like a child and completely micromanaged. Managers will dial into your headset in the middle of a conversation with a prospect, and then will start "parroting" you- you have to repeat what they say into the phone. This is a problem when they actually haven't been listening from the beginning, and they make you say things you've already said. I saw some google or yelp reviews of prospects complaining about the parroting, and the Yodle rep responded and denied that being a company sales tactic- totally threw those employees under the bus. If I would try to ignore my manager when he did this (if what he was saying didn't make sense in the context of my conversation), he would whack my chair until I paid attention. I really did not appreciate that. 80% of the prospects are completely horrible to deal with because we've been cold calling them for years. (You have to get three "No's" before you are allowed to give up on a prospect). Training managers try to hype you up by saying there are people making 6 figures on the sales floor- I'm going to have to call B.S. on that. The recruiter that had interviewed me over the phone told me the average person makes 45-60K their first year, B.S. as well. I calculated that if you are consistently just meeting your quota for a year, (and most people are not consistently hitting the minimum) you make in the low 30's. But again, most people do not make minimum performance standard every month in their first year. The base pay averages to $9.62/hr., or 20k a year. When you really think about how much money the prospects you are selling bring in to the company during their lifetime (in dental), the commission structure is a joke as well. Butch in upper management said himself that they underpay dental. You are discouraged from using your PTO, and guilt-tripped when you do use it. I will say, Eric was really nice from what I could tell. All the training managers are nice. On my last day there, I was so fed up with the poor management and quality of life, I was strongly considering just up and quitting so I could devote more time to finding a better job. Then, my phone rang and it was someone I had interviewed with before even accepting the Yodle role, offering me a job because the position I was interested in had finally opened up. I accepted immediately. Yodle told me to just leave when I tried to put my two weeks notice in, everyone knows not to bother with that. They are dealing with a really high turnover rate right now.