Pros
Next to none but I guess you could consider our very recent Series C into a "pro". However, the company probably desperately needed cash because there are tons of Enterprise AE's sitting at less than 50K for the year with 1.5M quotas.
Cons
I don't even know where to begin...overall, this company is fundamentally flawed in all possible ways across all business units. Leadership is completely blind to how miserable 90% of their workers are (or simply does not care) and it is truly sad to see and discuss with your colleagues. Please save yourself and do not work here. I'll do my best to summarize the cons from my first conversation with Talkdesk onward. Recruiting process: Complete lies. Other than my salary and nominal equity shares, everything I was told was a lie. I don't blame this on the recruiters, I blame this on the sales leadership that is feeding them the bullet points to pitch to their candidates. It is borderline criminal to lie to people in this way considering you are playing with people's lives, careers, families, and finances. Onboarding/Training: If you can even call it that. The information you "learn" is not the information you need to do well at the job. What is the value of being trained by people who have never sold software of any kind at enterprise or even mid-market? Most are former SDR's so how can they possibly train reps with 5-20 years of SaaS experience? You will be set up to fail. Day to day: Any real Enterprise AE knows that personalization and targeted outreach is the right way to go. If for some reason you want to be stack ranked and crucified weekly about sending thousands of emails (yes, per week), making 100+ calls, and sourcing dozens of contacts, then this is the place for you. What makes things SO much worse is that they don't give you the tools you need to hit these metrics. As an AE (any segment) you won't have access to Linkedin Sales Navigator, DiscoverOrg, any sort of sales enablement tool (outreach/salesloft etc.), or any of the tools that Talkdesk sells to improve efficiency...it's beyond strange. Sales process: I've never experienced so much internal friction to get a deal done in my entire career. There is not a single part of working a deal here that is easy and you will have zero support from leadership, legal, operations, or the supposed "deal desk" which includes dozens of execs for simple discounts. You have to keep in mind that this company has almost zero enterprise logos yet they aren't willing to bend rules to win deals. SDR/Marketing/Channel/Reseller: With dozens of new reps with a 1.5M quotas at a company where only 5 reps in the world cleared 1M with territories 5x the size of the new reps, you'd think they would make massive investments in pipeline generation...nope. The SDR channel is useless and this isn't the SDR's fault necessarily because there is zero brand awareness, the marketing team has no idea what they are doing. The channel and reseller division produces next to no leads as well, and they are constantly firing or losing channel managers as a result. Leadership: They recently brought in a ton of important SAP/Salesforce executives to get things on track but after a couple of months there have been zero improvements and 10X more scrutiny and eyes on deals. Not support, just scrutiny...just to be clear. We are entering our 8th month of the FY year and only 10 people globally are over 300K on a 1.5M number. I'll be shocked if more than 1 person in the company hits their number this year worldwide. Overall, leadership is blind to how miserable the entire workforce is and instead of figuring out how to fix it, they apply more pressure. It's shocking to see and incredibly sad to watch your colleagues slowly lose sight of what they were told they could achieve by joining the company. Overall: I cannot stress this enough, unless you are completely desperate for a job due to COVID, do not consider joining this company as an AE. Especially as an Enterprise AE. I assure you that the positive reviews you see recently are fake. To tie this back to the subject of this review, do you remember the scene in Titanic when all the rich people are watching the less fortunate people jump off the ship from their lifeboat? Leadership is in lifeboat, except in this case they are preparing their slides to talk about how great they are at the next all hands meeting while every single salesperson fails/drowns.
