Selling an enterprise product to small businesses
Pros
-Opportunity to become an AE within 1 year of graduating college -Made a ton of friends -GREAT managers/directors in the West -Every rep that moves on from BrightEdge goes on to be the best at their next company(if you can manage to hang on long enough to gain the experience)
Cons
Once you get your promotion from SDR to AE there really isn’t any upward trajectory. A lot of false promises get made in terms of how much the company plans to grow y/y. There are some outrageous growth goals in place and when questions get asked regarding the plan to make it happen there isn’t a response with any meat behind it. You will get lied to about how AE’s at BrightEdge make more than anybody else in the market. (**Please look up BrightEdge on reddit and see what people in the industry have to say) The CEO refuses to accept that the Product isn’t that great anymore and that there are tools who do more than BrightEdge for 100’s of dollars per month. Good luck with your deal when the prospect actually knows what they are doing with SEO and can see right through the pitch. The product is branded as an Enterprise product, but 90% of your pipeline will consist of SMB orgs who laugh when hearing price. Billion dollar companies pay the same as someone with <25 mil. SDR’s can send anything to the AE’s and there are no excuses for not taking a full swing at EVERYTHING. Expect a lot of time to be wasted on deals that will never close. There have been several reports in the past years that have said BrightEdge is not the best SEO tool on the market, so this year the company decided not to participate. Rather than do something to make the product better and align more to the actual market, there was just the excuse that BrightEdge did not agree with the evaluation criteria and chose to sit out. Diversity is nowhere to be found. The company only chose to react on the issue after having a blunder on social media and being called out by several people. Since the initial reaction, employees haven’t seen/heard of any additional things being done. Most of hiring gets done in Cleveland and the people in that office are scared into thinking without BrightEdge there are no additional opportunities for them in a city like Cleveland. The HQ office is a ghost town (even before COVID). Most SDR’s leave before AE promotion as soon as they learn about the 100’s of companies in silicon valley with better benefits and employees that love their jobs. I kid you not that every one of my peers had negative things to say about the role. When meet ups do happen outside of work expect the topic of conversation to be negative things regarding BrightEdge. In the past two years less than 1/3 of the team has hit their annual quota. Nobody wants to talk to BrightEdge. If you haven’t looked at reddit yet, please do so now. 9/10 sales people at BrightEdge are good sales people and 1/10 actually do well. If luck is on your side, then give this opportunity a shot and you’ll prob make some cash along the way. When the luck runs out be prepared to jump ship ASAP.
