Pluspunten
The best reason to take a role at Salesforce was to enhance my professional experience and refine my sales processes. The culture provides lots of support for deal workshops, war rooms, and the leadership team will poke holes in your deals to identify any areas you need to work on to get things accross the line. You will learn a ton about operations, and as a result, your efficiency and output will skyrocket. Having Install accounts is a great way to learn about the ecosystem, and work complex large deals, even in the GRB business segment. Easy access to leadership across the company. The vast majority of the time, if you reach out, they will take a networking call with you. Most of the people at the company really want to make an impact, and came on board with intent to do so. Some really have made a great impact on their community and teams. I felt I had the ability to help my coworkers as a peer mentor. Test out and refine my skills in coordinating events, and have a say in which direction I think the business should take, even though it was rarely put in effect. This is a good company to find a mentor, build a professional network, and give back to your local community. Team Quarterly Business Reviews provide front line sales reps with great feedback, and direction from management, and peers.
Minpunten
There are many cons, sadly. I truly wanted Salesforce to be my last company- to stay for 10+ years as many leaders there have done. Here's why my tenure lasted 1.5 years. When I took the position in December of 2021, the messaging I got was that this was a fully remote position with no plan to come back on-site. The messaging I got when I resigned May of 2023 was that this was a primarily on-site position. So much changed over the course of my employment there, that it was like two completely different jobs. I would consistently arrive to the office twice a week, and catch heat if I left an hour or two early even though half of my team was not in. Productivity and High Performace culture leads to burnout. As mentioned in my pro’s, productivity increases vastly, but at the cost of stress and peace of mind. You will constantly feel like you’re not doing enough and need to make more outbound calls, while simultaneously being in internal meetings for two hours or more a day. Enablements on enablements. The level of internal meetings is heinous. There is a monthly all-hands for 4-5 different teams you will be a part of. There are anywhere from 4-5 enablements a week, lasting from 30-60 minutes each. Every quarter there are 1-3 full day training sessions. Then they do three self-paced mandatory on separate products through a web portal every quarter. It got to the point where time called to cruise past some of the more important enablements so I could focus on other areas of my business. Then there's a call blitz set up twice a week to action for certain enablements. This needs to be refined, and there should be a time cap for what is considered "mandatory". The impact, from a business perspective, creates unfocused reps. If you're getting enabled on 10 different products a month, how is a sales rep going to have focused, and refined messaging? If they have 150 accounts, how will they have time to reach out to all of them with the time demand for enablements? As a result, this makes the outbound call metrics almost impossible to hit without padding numbers. I'm positive that those hitting connect metrics are logging emails, texts, and internal meetings as "connects” to hit the quota. Which I refused to do on account of effectiveness and maximizing my time. In addition, those connects were scrutinized if you were below the expectation. New logo process is weak as of mid 2023. They rolled out the use of their internal tool (sales engagement) without metrics on effectiveness. A good sales organization should be able to test their own metrics. There is no “best practice” outbound strategy that has been decided upon from a leadership perspective either. But it was better than having nothing, as it was in 2022. I ended up taking it upon myself to train my immediate team on the tool, even going as far as learning to build nice email templates by combing through marketing materials. Ultimately, I did not have the time to do this, despite my best efforts. Territory Carves- First, the data in the org is not clean. Of 150 accounts, maybe 100 of them could be sold into, and there is nothing you can do about it. You will find subsidiaries of your own accounts, duplicates of other peoples accounts, fake accounts, Out of Business accounts. And it's part of their process every carve to go in and "Tier 4" any accounts that are not legitimate. There's no way for a rep to report an account is not valid, and you're told to deal with it, and ignore the bad accounts. Some of the territories are worse than others, and it somewhat comes down to luck of the draw. They are not aligned for customer success. Until recently, accounts were moved to a different AE every year, providing a disjointed customer experience. There were some exceptions for large customers, however when they re-carve territories, it’s done at a level three or four above your direct manager. They allow you to contest and plead a case, but mine was not granted. I was given, instead, an account that was almost six figures in past-due invoices. They told me said account was supposed to make up for it. That account ended up attritting despite my best efforts to fix their dissatisfaction. To bring it full circle here, they were also dissatisfied with how many AE changes they had… there was not consistent leadership over the account to save what could have been an amazing and lucrative relationship.
