Pros
Pay check and health insurance.
Cons
Where to begin... Tons of counterproductive inefficiencies within sales, especially in the SDR department. Managers creating work just for the sake of work, tons of meaningless rules and bloated procedures that only hinder reps and cause unneeded frustration. Other parts of sales have their own issues, but being an SDR at Smartsheet is really nothing but grunt work. Managers lie and manipulate constantly. The OTE that they dangle in front of you is unattainable for anyone who isn’t working 10+ hours per day, each and every day, yet they claim that work/life balance is great. Yeah right… Managers lack both management skills and sales skills. They’re also petty, engage in destructive office politics and they are purely self serving. They take credit for all the good and pass all the bad directly onto reps. Top down, heavy-handed management instead of being supportive, helpful and understanding. The quota is set unrealistically high and despite constant feedback and complaints, Management does absolutely nothing to address this. Instead, SDRs are blamed for having poor performance, even if they miss their number slightly and management uses this as leverage to hold back promotions, dock your pay and ultimately fire you. SDRs who are smart, helpful and good team members have been fired because of a this culture of unreasonable metrics. Extremely high quota means that some SDRs pass lots of low quality opportunities on to sales reps, which is double the amount of time and resources wasted by the company. The teams would benefit massively from a re-focus on generating quality business opportunities, instead of chasing unrealistic numbers for the sake of numbers. Typically the SDRs who win at this task are the same ones that become poor quality sales reps, once they are promoted for juking the stats and cooking the books. Ongoing training and career development are absolutely nonexistent. You are simply there to grind away all day long doing grunt work and are given no time or resources for improving knowledge of the product, improving sales skills or exploring other career development options. You are chained to your desk the entire workday, mindlessly clicking buttons and made to feel bad when you miss your number, even when it comes down entirely to luck. They promise the world in terms of promotions, but delay, defer and deny. A year down the road, when you’re still stuck in the same crap, suddenly the great company they promised during your interviews doesn’t look so great after all. Managers get to work from home all of the time but SDRs are not allowed to at all, even when your performing well. CEO Mark Mader seems to have his heart in the right place and is a good leader, but I think he’s lost sight of what’s happening lower down in the organization as the company has grown and middle management is not being held accountable to the “values” that the company claims to hold. Quality oversight is lost as the company scales and it’s becoming just another generic, out-of-touch software company. No 401K match
