Amazing opportunity, incredible people, some serious setbacks recently
Pros
Overall, Glassdoor is a phenomenal place to work and would be high up on the Best Places to Work list if they weren't the ones curating the list. I would highly recommend it to anyone considering joining. I would love to see some serious improvement on some tough issues, but what company is perfect? All things considered this place can be a great career accelerator. Come help us get to the next level! Pros: - The people. 93% of the people you'll meet here are genuine, down to earth, kind, good natured, selfless, intelligent, and always willing to help. I've made some friends for life here. -Team culture. Largely a function of the wonderful people you'll work with, this is different than overall company culture, this is more about the culture that develops between the individuals you grind with, battling side by side with you day in and day out to get to your numbers. I know this is not applicable to every single team across the company, but all the front line managers that I know here in Chicago aim to develop a fun, winning, close knit team. We truly enjoy each others company, on and off the sales floor. - The mission. We're a late stage start up with significant funding from top tier investors that know what they're doing, a recognizable brand name in a large profitable market, and a unique product vision that I can sell knowing wholeheartedly it's in the best interest of my client to invest in us. Transparency, employee engagement, employer branding, diversity/inclusion - this is the next frontier for companies that value healthy corporate cultures (and they should, based on research connecting employee satisfaction to productivity and bottom line revenue), whether employers like it or not. First it was free snacks, standing desks, and gym memberships - now it's listening to your employees and (at least creating the appearance of) genuinely caring what they have to say. - The opportunity. We are a high growth company and if you work hard, succeed in you role, and build authentic relationships with people - there will be opportunity for advancement. That doesn't mean it isn't difficult, you just have to be smart and intentional about how you craft your personal brand and position yourself when the time comes. I will say, the advancement process could use a healthy dose of transparency and over-communication. - Work life balance. This actually exists here. Need to duck out early at 2 one day? No problem. Want to take a week off for vacation (with proper notice)? Actually encouraged. Need to leave work every day at lunch to walk your dog for an hour? Cool. As long as you are communicating your needs in advance and it's not impacting your results, you will have a flexible, understanding manager. - Senior sales leadership team. The senior sales leaders at Glassdoor are experienced, communicative, empathetic, and incredibly smart. I believe they have the genuine best interests of the sales team at heart, and I do believe in their vision. -Company values. This is subjective, but I'm proud to be part of an organization that strives to make a positive impact in the world. Filing an amicus brief against the refugee ban. All the research & work we do around the gender pay gap. Making real strides for pay transparency helping working folks negotiate for higher pay. This stuff matters.
Cons
-Sales Operations in relation to comp/quota/books. We recently had some turnover in Sales Ops, and for the last 4-5 months the side of sales ops that deals with comp/quota/books has been pretty much a complete disaster area for the growth side of the business, if we're being brutally honest. Couldn't be any worse timing with the transition from FY17 to FY18 and new books/plans being created and rolled out. It's devastatingly demoralizing and unspeakably frustrating when the growth sales leadership team top to bottom either has no clue how sales ops is building books, quotas, and comp plans, or has no say in how they do it. How do you build a comp plan without knowing what quotas and books look like? You end up building a comp plan and sales flow that emphasizes retention, when the quotas actually require much more growth. What in the world is going on? When neither your manager, your director, or your SVP can't/won't give you a straight answer for months and months (the quarter was more than halfway over before we got our quota; we still to this day don't completely understand why we're getting paid out less on our deals than last year), its frankly unacceptable. When we ask about it, we get the response: don't worry it will all make sense eventually and in the meantime the bottom line is you have to sell more into your book than last year (even though there's a new sales motion and some people are struggling with basic living expenses while still hitting growth quotas). Accountability works both ways... If we couldn't give you a forecast for the quarter until more than halfway through, we wouldn't be employed here. If we couldn't explain why we didn't hit our target or why we lost a particular deal, we wouldn't be employed here. And yet we're supposed to be okay with a high degree of ambiguity "because we're an agile start up." That excuse for incompetence only goes so far before your top performers are inevitably interviewing elsewhere. I can tell you this - they don't want to. They want to believe in you, sales leaders. We're all looking to you to help us out of this mess, but you don't have much more time. -Sales ops issues aside, overall compensation is a slight con. Lower base and OTE compared to similar companies and similar roles. But in reality, b/c of the strength of our brand, you're actually more likely to actually hit your OTE than most smaller companies. 6 months ago, I would have told you it's a lock that you'll make up the lower base in more commission/bonuses. But the changes to the comp plan have made me seriously skeptical of the risk. It also remains to be seen whether the equity plan for recent employees will make up the difference. - SMB customer success. Cases take a full day to escalate from customer support to a customer enablement manager. Client emails us with urgent technical issue that requires resolution immediately, but the process takes 48 hours to resolve. AM's have very little visibility into who their assigned CEM is, what CEMs will or won't do, and who they should talk to when there's a problem with an account because CEMs + account assignments change on a quarterly basis it feels like. We get one presentation a year on this, but then in practice it all falls apart. I don't think the problem is the people, they're all great and strive to help to the best of their ability. It's the process and structure that truly boggles the mind. -Product performance. Without getting too detailed, some aspects of our products underperform compared to the market and often we struggle to justify ROI with customers. Help us by building a stronger product and improving the type of data we have access to that builds a successful partnership business case.
