Client Success Manager / Account Manager
Pros
Lots of good people at the rep level. On site gym. Good benefits. Pays well for those without technical skills or a college degree.
Cons
It's a mass exodus. Most people in the department are looking for employment elsewhere, despite the good pay. You are treated with zero (maybe less than zero) respect by senior management and even your direct manager if you aren't lucky enough to get one of the 20% that are good managers. Most managers are just "Yes Men" who do what stupid idea upper management has instead of providing feedback or actual thoughtful insight. You have weekly "talk time" expectations. They aren't unreasonable, but no adjustments are made to the requirement should you have meetings, PTO less than 4 hours, time off the phone to complete required HR training, etc. If you don't meet your "talk time", you get written up for that week. 4 write ups and you're fired. To get out of the a single warning, you need 4 consecutive weeks of meeting the requirement. This is a requirement for everyone, regardless of if you have 300 accounts or 100 accounts. The "talk time" also factors into your "Scorecard" score which is a spreadsheet that tries to calculate how good you are at your job and ranks you against your peers. It is a document available to everyone in the department. If you produce better sales numbers than someone else but they were on the phone longer, they could be ranked ahead of you. The "Scorecard" was arbitrarily created without any correlation or relevance to actual sales performance. This "Scorecard" also determines if you are written up. Even the top rep in the department is stressed out because he/she has to meet "talk time" even if they've talked to every account within a month. You are required to clock in/out when you arrive, leave, and go to lunch even though this is a salaried position. There is literally zero ongoing skill and professional development. They laid off most of their training staff in November 2016, stopped using Lushin Sales Consulting for sales development in 2015, etc. They force you to use a Salesforce app called Gainsight that is supposed to be used as a "call to action" tool, but they've turned into another way to control your every move. You have hundreds of these "call to actions" for your month that make your job completely inefficient. If you're still following along, everything in this department is based on fear of losing your job, and they control every aspect of your day. Think about this - in May 2016 the department reorganized from Account Management to Client Success. They hired 24 senior-level client success managers to handle the best accounts. This was supposed to be a big promotion to retain top talent. In less than a year 19 Senior Client Success Managers are gone. That's turnover over 80% for their best reps! And NO ONE CARES. Not a single senior-level, director-level, or VP has been fired. Think you can do your job better with some actual individualism and skill? Sorry for you! This is all just the human part of your job. Now let's talk about the product. As other reviewers mention, the advertising doesn't work. the web site is a joke. Most clients you talked to are pissed off. Management tells you to tell the client that it's going to get better and sign up for some extra programs. Isn't it just insane that a client that could be spending $10,000 a year has to sign up for more programs to even have a glimpse of hope that their investment will work? You'll hear a lot about how many members Angie's List has now since it's free. But no ones makes mention of how the number of active users and searches continues to decline. They also deceive shareholders and business with how many "members" they actually have because they count two members for every person that signs up since there are typically two people per household. 5 million members? Actually it's 2.5 million users since why on Earth would a husband and wife both search for the same project. TL;DR The only way you should work here is if you are unemployed or have never made over $60,000 a year. Everyday you will ask yourself why you do this to yourself. There's been 3 lay offs within 6 months. There might not be an Angie's List by the end of summer.