I will try my best to put into words why this is an unpleasant company to work for. For context I was a top performer and consistently did well for 2.5 years at LoopNet in the costar group. You couldn’t pay me any money to go back there.
They gave us the worst commission plan I’ve ever seen in my sales career. It based on ‘net new’ which would make sense if you were selling a subscription product and not a product that was designed to cancel. If the advert worked or didn’t work, it was going to cancel. And the sales person was penalised for it. As a result, you would start the month on a minus, so you have to sell out of it. It was unmotivating and stressful. Sometimes you would sell just to get to zero and you’d earn no comms that month. It’s basically a ponzy scheme, but they’ll say you should be able to sell replacement ads. It’s not realistic to consistently do this, nor it is sustainable. And the more sell, the more cancels you get, so you have to sell even more!
It has a very American culture where you will be micro managed, metrics is king and churn is high. You get ahead if you can manage up, be ruthless and lack humanity. It lacks collaboration, positivity and any thought for wellness. It’s like they think sales people should be robots. It was a very unpleasant environment. Many individuals in the sales team are miserable and I was genuinely concerned for people’s mental health at times. I have seen people leave with no job lined up or taking lower paid roles just to get out.
Senior management are generally an uninspiring bunch. They don’t seem to be aware of how bad it is. Or they don’t care. Or they’re just trying to keep their jobs. Or mostly likely, it’s out of their control to make changes, because it all filters down from the US. Senior management also encourage pushy, unprofessional sales tactics rather than a consultative approach. They also change goal posts on promotions unfairly, and they’ve caused significant disparity across the sales team on job title / salary. They’re so desperate to get people to join, they offer new people more senior titles and higher basics.
Strategic decisions were made, sometimes partially executed and then regularly binned. It’s hard to keep up and it caused issues. The last minute changes were usually caused by the CEO having to be involved in every decision. (Google the CEO by the way, if you haven’t already.) It was difficult to get on board with strategies when it didn’t made business sense, particularly for the UK business/market. But again this was where blanket decisions across markets was the default, and the UK had to follow suit with the US.
The lack of customer focus was really hard when you genuinely want to help clients and be proud of the product/service you provided. Any customer feedback or recommended changes were usually ignored. Or were finally implemented 2 years later. Many customers are disgruntled by costar/loopnet and it’s well known in the industry that costar is generally disliked because of their lack of customer focus. The company would rather invest in tracking their sales people than their product. They were very quick to implement calling clients to check sales people attended a meeting with them.
The micro management is relentless and activity is constantly looked at. You will be badgered by your manager to hit the numbers all day, every day. The metrics cause bad behaviours. They want volume of meetings, which means you try to book anything. You end up wasting time on meetings with little or no revenue opportunity. They expect all meetings to be F2f, which is good but not always practical, they don’t care though if your client was in the other side of the country or works from home, they will cut your commission regardless if you don’t hit that the f2f metric. You’ll be travelling to a meeting whilst the thought of you not reaching the metrics looms over you because your phone is pinging with messages from your manager asking: ‘what are you going to do to hit these numbers this week?!’. The aggressive metrics mean the team burns through prospects, who have all been called over and over and over…
They do NPS surveys where they ask the client if they would recommend the product. Note how the question is about the product, but results directly impact the sales person and it goes against their name and cuts their commission if the score is low. As mentioned, they don’t collate the feedback to improve the product either. The feedback was often ‘sales person X was great but I wasn’t happy with the product so I would give it a 6’ so say goodbye to your comms for that month. A request to change the question was raised and ignored… classic Costar.
Other departments across the company were known as the sales police because it felt like they were working against sales and not with us. There is conflict of interests between teams because of the way in which systems were set up. Although Marketing wasn’t working against us, they just weren’t working… or at least it felt that way. I’ve never worked somewhere where the link between sales and marketing is so non existent.
No flexible working or hybrid working— just no chance of this happening.
This felt like a much needed therapy session for me and hopefully a good warning to anyone considering a job here. Don’t be fooled by their false promises. Don’t take the job.
Also if you are currently working there and happen to be reading this - The grass really is greener on the other side. So much greener.
