Now here's where it gets difficult. Up until 2019, NetBrain was somewhere I raved about working. There was a switch when the company started to hire more than they needed to. Since then, it became a downward spiral.
1. Sales overpromises what the product can do. They promise to deliver anything the prospect asks for, then once the deal is closed, they make it the customer success manager's problem to let the customer down. The CSMs get a bad reputation because they cannot deliver what the customer wants quickly, or at all. Sales turns it on the CSMs, but then they never learn to be careful what they promise in future deals. It's a lesson no one from upper management pushes because they're trying to hit unrealistic targets, resulting a ton of friction between your sales teams and customer success / services.
2. There's little to no collaboration among pre and post sales. Sure, they talk and join calls together (sometimes), but there are a handful of these employees who just show and talk to make themselves feel like the leader, and not in an attempt to work together to truly make the customer successful. It's one person talking over the others to validate they know best.
3. Product releases add features, but don't fix existing issues and bugs. If they were to send out a survey to all of the customers, they'd find a majority just want a release that fixes the excessive amount of bugs in the product. Make that the major releases, and minor releases can put in the few features that are a 'nice to have'. Our customers are exhausted with our product releases. Listen to them and simplify the tool! Stop spending all of the time adding new features until you get the existing tool to work.
4. Why is it still so hard to upgrade this tool? Every single new release comes out with no consideration on the path of upgrade. The fact that this tool still cannot hit a button to initiate the upgrade is beyond me. Services is always told to speed up the projects, but it's not their fault projects don't complete quickly, it's the tools! Stop blaming the people trying to help the customers and start looking at the backend issues.
5. Ditto above for installations. Stop blaming Services for installations taking over 12 months! This is a tool issue. Your Services team is made of the STRONGEST people. If they slack, it's because they're tired of pushing for development improvements just to be ignored and overlooked.
6. The communication between Level 1 and C-Level does not exist. No one knows what is going on at any time because things keep changing and not being relayed to the rest of the company. You need to explain your vision and reasoning to your company or else no one will see your ultimate goals and how to get there. All they see are 'here's another change' and it's exhausting to try to keep up.
7. The employee retention is embarrassing. It's about time the high level managers acknowledge there is an issue. There is an issue with how frequently our directors and C-levels come in and out that door. You need to welcome new ideas, you need to hear how other companies succeeded where you are struggling. Let change happen and trust that you hired people with better skillsets than you, so you can improve your company! There's also an issue with the individual contributors leaving so frequently. Almost an entire post-sales team left within a 4 month period. This is not a coincidence. This is lack of management ownership. They were unhappy. They voiced their unhappiness. Stop ignoring them or your top talent will continue to walk out that door.
8. Don't be tricked by the comp and bonus structure. Until the company's revenue goals are realistic, you will not make your full bonus.
