Employer of Last Resort - Territory Sales Representative (Account Executive) Softchoice Employee Review

Low Pay - Starting salary is 40K for salespeople in the Seattle office. Seattle average for identical positions is 50K Terrible Commission Structure - This is a big one. Recruiting will not tell you the truth about how commissions are determined until you are through training. They will hide behind the excuse that "we cannot determine this until you have a quota" Don't fall for this. Basically, it stacks every year and punishes you for achievement. The problem is that it is based on nothing but prior year performance, and you cannot make any real money outside of accelerators which kick in at >100% to quota. The nature of Softchoice's core competency means that you will make most of your money on large Microsoft agreements. These renew once every three years. This means that if you closed 150% of your plan in year one, you would start out year 2 at 150% of your previous plus a growth rate of 10-30%. Although this seems to make sense, those agreements you got 10% on last year will only provide 1% this year. Therefore you have to go find the same number of dollars again just to get back to even. If you bring in three EAs year one and then 4 EAs in year two you probably made about 10-15K less in year two as you didnt hit your accelerators until you booked 3 EAs. This means that your OTE is very likely to drop in year-two from year-one if you get anywhere near exceeding your year-one goal. The comp begins to feel deeply unfair when you realize that people billing less than half of your margin are actually taking home more commission than you are because they are taking home 19% of their billings and you are sitting at 4% even though you are the senior rep who has "earned greater responsibility". It is not a scalable model as it asks you to bring in ever growing numbers while still holding on to your existing customers. If you intend to stay with Softchoice for more than a year then be careful not to exceed plan or you will quickly find yourself forced out of the company by economic reality. OTE should go up or at least remain stable over time, but at Softchoice it falls over time. Promotions actually cost you money as they allow Softchoice to allocate about 100K more in quota per level while only paying you out about 3K more in base pay. So now you get paid fewer commissions on billing $150K this year than you did on billing $100K last year, but Softchoice is only throwing in about 3K more on your check. Getting promoted raised your quota. Getting promoted costs you money Blatant favoritism in the Seattle office - It is very apparent upon joining Softchoice that those who make transitions onto management tracks are selected due to their willingness to suck up to directors. I have personally seen people who were in favor with the TSDM get away with everything from something as minor as leaving the office early to drink, all the way to something as major as bringing a real, 3' sword into the office. Zero repercussions in either case and the TSDM actually helped cover for the employee when the sword was reported to HR. (he told everyone in the office that it was plastic, but didn't say the same to HR. Strange that he would leave that detail out unless he was afraid to lie to HR on the record but willing to lie to the rest of the office) -Indifferent and incompetent Sr. Management - My VP insisted that I bring in resources from our Microsoft Services Team to assist me with a services deal that was based around AV and installing projection screens. These are two departments that have exactly NOTHING to do with one another. I truly believe he did not realize that we had entirely separate departments for different types of services. This fits the MO of general management-by-spreadsheet and incompetence that seemed so prevalent from the Director level up. Either they have no idea what is going on, or they simply don't care. -Terrible KPIs that make no sense and have no correlation with performance - you will be asked to hit "orange hustle" no matter how well you are selling. You could be at 200% to your quota and still at risk of being placed on a "Performance Improvement Plan" because you didn't generate enough activity points. More management by spreadsheet. -Apathy from Vendor Partners - if you can get vendors to be honest with you they will often tell you that Softchoice is not seen as a worthy investment from their side. This means you will have fewer deals directed your way from partners, fewer opportunities to earn bonuses from partners, and generally fewer resources at your disposal. Softchoice is, rightfully, seen as a customer service type vendor which does not have the people or resources to truly drive a technical deal outside of the strong Microsoft practice. Softchoice has earned this reputation through passively depending on renewals and failing to incentivize reps to truly drive major deals. Why would anyone push for difficult deals when getting promoted means less money and a higher quota means lower pay? -Insufficient technical and support resources - Softchoice simply doesn't have many resources in places you would expect them to. C-level management bragged during 2018 reviews about meeting profitability targets by being 10% understaffed, and I think that encapsulates the problem pretty well. (they then congratulated themselves on their upcoming round of bonuses due to this "profitability") -Terrible delivery from the resources that are in place as they are either severely overworked or just disengaged. Some are simply bogged down in hundreds of cases while others who know their job is safe will simply ignore you and close your case if they feel they do not want to work on it. (4 weeks to action a case marked customer urgent with a 4hr SLA, refusal to take responsibility for cases, customer satisfaction, SLA expectations. Flat out ignoring emails if the sender is not senior enough or a manager is not cc'd, etc... ) -Awful marketing - leads that are force-fed to sales are about 95% bad. I personally had one insisting that I call the decision maker named "accounts payable" in order to discuss moving a major Microsoft licensing agreement. This is a particularly egregious example, but most of them are off base or do not include contact information of any sort. They waste more time than they are worth. You will also have no brand awareness on your side outside of Canada. -"Inside Sales" are treated and managed more like a customer service team than an actual sales force -HR is considered a joke and people don't even bother reporting any violations because they fear retaliation and know nothing will happen unless they are complaining about someone who hasn't been at Softchoice for long Office politics are a MAJOR issue in Seattle. Be careful who you trust, as there are some real snakes in positions of authority. If you are female, I recommend that you ask for help from your female colleagues in identifying the predators in the office. The majority of them can quickly tell you which men you shouldn't let anywhere near your drink. They'll all point you to the same few suspects.