There are so many things to say, but most of the other real reviews already say them.
Favoritism / discriminatory practices are commonplace. Some SDRs will be promoted to Account Executive immediately while others wait around for several months on end even if they've met all of the requirements to become an AE. I understand that budgeting may be a factor here, but stop promising your employees a promotion that you have no intention or capacity to grant. Certain representatives (especially women) would frequently be promised a promotion month after month if they hit certain numbers. They would succeed in hitting those numbers, and still no promotion.
Rules of engagement are very selectively applied depending on the representative or the region in question. During my time at BrightEdge, I literally saw representatives log new opportunities in Salesforce on calls where they only got a voicemail message, try to bribe prospects on the phone, and pretend that they had dialed the prospect manually in order to meet quota. This, of course, not only went unpunished, but was rewarded. Meanwhile, other representatives would log an opportunity with full discovery on the prospect and on the account and be cross-questioned every step of the way.
The list of prospects you will receive at BrightEdge is an absolute mess. Most of the prospects on your list are either a horrible industry fit for the platform, have already seen the demo multiple times, are actually duplicates of somebody else's account at BrightEdge, or otherwise cannot be prospected due to arbitrary rules about revenue or number of employees. Here's a crazy idea: maybe allow representatives to prospect accounts that are actually a good fit for your product. Why am I sending an opportunity with a $100 million construction company when there's a $20 million e-commerce company with a $100k marketing budget just sitting in my list because it only has 20 employees? If you're lucky, you'll end up with about 200-300 accounts that actually have any chance of purchasing the platform and that you can reach out to per ROE. If you're not adding 10 new contacts a night, you get called out for "not building out your lists enough," but most of the contacts worth adding to Salesforce are already in the platform. So, you either have to waste your time adding random titles to Salesforce, or you have to duplicate contacts already in Salesforce, which means that when you go to call the prospect, you may not be looking at the most recent activity history.
In addition to being unfairly applied, the rules of engagement that BrightEdge implements are very contrary to the end goal of closing new business. For example, higher level executives would frequently come onto Sales All Hands and brag about new deals that came through where the prospect only had 30 minutes on the first call or where the prospect was initially contacted in some creative way other than a cold call. The very next day, they would disqualify a representative for setting a 30-minute call (even if the AE had already approved it beforehand) or disqualify a representative for submitting a new opportunity over email.
Very unprofessional. Representatives are encouraged to harass and lie to prospects on a regular basis: calling prospects several times back to back, faking phone numbers, calling prospects who've explicitly asked not to be called again, calling prospects on their personal phones and then pretending not to know that it's the prospect's cell phone, etc. etc. Then, if the prospect is still willing to hear you out, you have to give this pitch about how we'll be giving them updated insights on their website when in reality, the first call is the same sample demo that the prospect has probably already seen five times before. Even if the quotas were halfway realistic, there's no sense of achievement in hitting quota because it comes at the expense of your integrity.
Quotas are outrageous. And I'm saying this as someone who has hit them. If the list of accounts offered at BrightEdge wasn't so useless for prospecting, maybe the quota could be justified. But as it stands, the only way to hit quota is by creating opportunities that are far from qualified and have no chance of showing up, which, again, is contrary to the idea of business development. This also creates unnecessary tension between the AEs / AE managers and the SDRs / SDR Managers.
