After a couple of years at InsightSquared (IS2), I decided to leave and it wasn't a hard choice....
Management:
- The CEO is terrible and needs to get kicked out. No one likes him, not even the management team, and he fosters a poor work environment.
- The management team as a whole makes very poor decisions or makes the right decisions 1-2 years after they should have been made. There are many examples of this.
- About 1.5 years ago, the entire executive team (except the CEO) left/got fired. Skip forward to today and now the next round of executives left/got fired as well.
Employees:
- 90% of the sales team quit or got fired in my 2.5+ years there.
- I heard they recently had a round of mass layoffs last week.
- Fratty culture
- For 3+ years, they've been trying to create a promotion path for SDRs to move into a closing role and they still do not have a good way to promote people internally. Do not expect to move into a closing role as an SDR. That's one of the many reasons why so many SDRs have quit.
- Favoritism... it's a thing.
- Very, very few people hit quota due to the reasons listed below.
Market:
-There's almost no market for this technology. They'll tell you they can sell into any company that uses Salesforce which is why the market is so large. It's a lie. They can only sell into companies that use Salesforce, that are B2B, that have an inside sales team, that use opportunity stages, and have over 50+ employees. With that said, the product is designed for the SMB space. InsightSquared already sold to all of the companies that they could sell to in that space. However, the customer churn rate is so high that the sales team is forced to sell into companies that churned/stopped using them. InsightSquared realized they needed to go up-market, but their competitors are in all of those ENT companies. Also, IS2's product is not designed to support companies in the ENT market. In short - There's no market for their products, so good luck being in sales there.
Product:
- They don't use their own product. The forecasting solution doesn't work. Also, out of the 200+ pre-build reports you can get, only 5-10 of them are actually used or useful.
Competition:
- Their competition is dominating the market.
- Domo had their IPO.
- Clari raised $60M recently.
- Salesforce only invested in InsightSquared's A round and decided not to continue investing in IS2's future funding rounds. Instead, Wave got acquired by Salesforce and re-branded to Einstein. Salesforce now encourages people to buy Einstein, not InsightSquared.
- Tableau is everywhere in the ENT market, so IS2 has no chance.
Other:
- The featured review on Glassdoor with the subject, "Great Place to Work" which has the first Pro as, "Access to C level" is a fake review. I believe they also edited the post since they originally posted it. It had mentioned how there was a gym in the building that everyone used but when that post came out, they were still building the gym/it wasn't open yet.
- The company is known to under pay. It's a well known fact.
- When it comes to work life balance, sales people would often come in on weekends to work and they'd come in at 7am on weekdays for the attempt to hit their number.
I chose to leave InsightSquared months ago and still can't stop thinking about how terrible the place is. You've been warned!
