Avoid at all costs - SMB Account Executive Zendesk Employee Review

I highly recommend everyone steer clear of working at Zendesk, unless you are absolutely desperate. If you're absolutely desperate, take the job and keep looking elsewhere. Here's a summary of my short time at Zendesk: From day 1, Zendesk very disorganized. In previous roles, I had a clear list of things to accomplish in my first weeks at the company and I had daily check ins with my manager to make sure I was able to accomplish them and get support if I couldn't. At Zendesk, I didn't even have an actual manager for my first month at the company. I was aligned to someone's team, but I started on December 16, when everyone was trying to close business at the end of the year. I was in the Austin office where there was no managerial support. Because I've previously worked for smaller companies, I guess I assumed I interviewed with the person who would be my manager, Word of advice, always ask this when you interview. Between December 16 and December 31, I spoke with my manager a grand total of two times. I was then assigned to a manager who was on parental leave until the end of January (not her fault, but at the same time, I wasn't given a manager I could go to for support). Solid managerial support early in an employee's tenure is crucial to employee experience, and I believe Zendesk very much fell short here. The "training" was a complete joke. Bootcamp involved listening to someone talk for about an hour a day and then going and watching videos and reading articles on our own. We were then expected to be completely proficient at everything the training covered. There were several times when I asked a manager or director a question about something and was told "refer to the training". I've been very successful in sales previously. But when you're hiring people to sell a completely new product, sometimes in a completely new industry? Come on. Be better. Furthermore, Zendesk chose to split SMB into expansion and new business when, as admitted by managers and directors, new business had not been actively prospected into in quite some time. This would have been fine if Zendesk had an actual plan of action behind having a large portion of their AEs focus on new business only, but it was very evident that they didn't, nor did they have any data to back up the quotas we were assigned. There were no resources for prospecting, no plan beyond "make 125 calls a week and hope you get lucky with inbound leads". To add to this, territories were made based on data that had not been updated, in some cases, in almost two decades. I was already given a territory that was about 1/4 the size of territories my teammates had due to it being "prime territory", but when going through just my tier 1 accounts, around 1/3 of them were not legitimate accounts I could reach out to due to the companies being acquired by larger companies or going out of business since the data was last updated. I regularly found accounts that were acquired in the 2015-2019 time frame, and I even found one that was acquired in 2006. That's almost twenty years ago! I brought this to several people's attention, and I was told to update the data myself and use Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo to find more accounts. If you're going to expect people to prospect into companies that are not current Zendesk customers, update your data. It really isn't that hard. Don't give your reps a territory that is 1/3 not legitimate accounts, and the legitimate accounts have severely outdated contact data, expect your reps to hit a quota that's over a half a million dollars, and spend significant time updating the data. Beyond the accounts that weren't legitimate, I also had around 100 accounts that were not in my name and should have been, based on outdated employee counts, and had to log account disputes, one by one, for each account. You have a sales ops team. What exactly is their job? Finally, you should know that leadership absolutely sucks. One of our two directors in SMB, when I had been at the company for just over a month and I had just had an opportunity (that I wound up closing) transferred into my name, messaged me on slack WHILE I WAS AT MY COUSIN'S FUNERAL and she knew I was, to point out all of the wrong ways I had taken notes within this opportunity. I had just inherited the opportunity, had my first scheduled call with the prospect the following week, and all of the notes were taken by the previous owner of the opportunity. It would have taken 5 minutes of looking at the opportunity history to see this, but instead she messaged me on slack and CCed my manager while at my cousin's funeral. Great company culture. Our other director also routinely threw around terms like "always on" and "24/7" to describe how his sales team should be working. He went on sabbatical for a month and spoke at a conference. His topic? Firing "underperformers" quickly. With the cards I was dealt, being in this job was negatively affecting my mental health on a daily basis and was starting to affect my physical health as well. As a result of this, I made the decision that I would rather have no job than this job. I sincerely hope Zendesk takes this feedback into consideration, but I have my doubts on that.