Pros
Work life balance, flexible hours, benefits, autonomy, opportunities to work anywhere in the country/globe and to try on new hats. Good middle management that will go to bat for you. Growth in Asia. The software is very well respected.
Cons
-- Pay is not competitive. -- SAP CRM is a bear, and the data entry required for sales opportunities is a full time job in itself. -- Lack of consistency. Overhauls in sales approach and strategy are undertaken every few years, and if you're there long enough, you see that it's a cycle where approaches that failed 5 years ago are brought to the surface as a new and innovative way to increase revenues. Blind squirrel chasing a nut with no end in sight. -- incompetence of exec sales mgmt. Every sales rep there knows what I'm talking about. And I don't mind saying it because they aren't just managing their goals poorly, a few key execs are utterly unstable a-holes to boot. Many others come from project mgmt and have much less sales experience than is needed for a company with Bentley's lofty goals. There is zero marketing support, there are 50+ very complex products that we are asked to sell, and finding collaborative support is like playing darts blindfolded. -- good luck getting a project established to implement what you sold. Services won't budge on planning the project until there is a PO in place, which results in you telling your new client that the project might get started by April. Not a good way to kick off a business relationship. -- ProjectWise is a hell of a product but the implementation services team is being held together by dollar store duct tape. If a couple of excellent implementers leave the company, we are effed. -- the comp plan is a farce. Reading the fine print isn't enough, because there will be a piece of the plan that you don't know is there until you finish the year and find out why you made $30K less than you thought you would. You better keep your own spreadsheet of your sales because the internal systems will fail you every time, causing you to have to fight for your earnings at the end of the year (sometimes with the very top of the organization) , because invariably a few sales will be missing. There is ALWAYS a way to curb your commission at Bentley. BTW, sales directors, its against the law to tell your reps to not discuss your salary with other reps. I was asked to do this no less than five times. -- we are aggressively trying to go public or get bought, so the current goals are extremely aggressive and untenable. Bentley hasn't grown organically by 10% in 20+ years, yet those are the annual goals. Those goals aren't met, so they lay off good people, restructure (blindfolded), set higher goals, and fail to meet them again. -- many very solid employees of this private company have been there for 20+ years and have stock that will only be exercised when they sell or go public. Many of these employees would have left a long time ago without the golden handcuffs. They want their fat check, and that is understandable considering the sweat equity. But the morale of many of these workers is very low. They want to go, but they are stuck. And this reduces morale in all groups. -- licensing programs are overly convoluted. I wish we'd keep it simple with the move to the cloud, but Bentley seems to believe we can make a better wheel than all those tech companies that are way more successful than us.
