Learned Lots, but Unappreciated
Pros
-As a fresh grad in my first sales job, I learned a ton about business and sales through working with the CEO and Inside Sales Director -Opportunity for fast growth and promotions -Fun working with other young people, good team dynamic (no thanks to upper management) -Fun contests with exciting prizes (could be hard to get them to follow through on giving you your prizes though)
Cons
-In general, not a healthy work environment. Huge, thankless expectations and pressure placed upon a lot of young people who are brand new to sales. -Quotas were very high and difficult to reach making it hard to earn much commission -Occasional training calls during the work day but most training was done through expecting us to listen to calls from other salespeople on our own time, outside of our 10-hour work days. -1:1 coaching from CEO was very intimidating. He would ask pointed questions, like “what should you have done here?” and when we said the right answer he would come back with responses like “so why are you not doing that?” He would check and critique our note taking and administrative work on screen-share in front of the whole team which was very nerve wracking. -CEO constantly late to team meetings and 1:1’s— says he will be one minute and makes you wait an hour, makes you feel like your time isn’t valued. -When you weren’t hitting the numbers they wanted they would micromanage you and force you to commit to attaining certain numbers in the future rather than really working with you and coaching you towards success -CEO and COO could tell people were not happy but instead of genuinely asking how they could improve, they would schedule individual calls to pressure everyone and tell them why they should be happy, until they said they were happy. Could not take any responsibility of their own. -No real HR— all handled by the COO, wife of the CEO, which made for bias during tough situations. -Constant employee turnover, hard to maintain confidence and success with everyone quitting around you all the time. -When people quit they would say “Anyone else who is unhappy can leave too” and offer to give us severances if we wanted to quit. Why encourage people to quit when you could simply ask your employees who haven’t quit yet what you can do better to make them want to stay??? -Quota was not adjusted in response to people quitting, putting more pressure on the remaining employees who stayed loyal. -Overall my time at the company was very stressful. I did learn a lot about sales but I also learned which red flags to avoid when seeking future employment.
