If you’re thinking about joining Smartsheet as an SDR in Boston, I’d highly recommend looking elsewhere. If you want to be a part of a forward-thinking SDR organization with a great culture that will value your ideas and give you a great chance at internal promotion to a closing role, this is not the place for you.
Smartsheet has a good product, and there are a lot of sales teams doing really well here, but the SDR organization is a disaster. The problems start with top SDR leadership and trickle down throughout the organization. SDR management runs the organization like a dictatorship, and despite running a process that is flawed in endless ways, any sort of feedback or suggestion of change is considered hostile and can result in retaliation.
The SDR org is split between Boston and the Bellevue, Washington headquarters. The rules around the SDR process are applied in a totally uneven and biased way between the two locations, with the Boston reps being treated as the black sheep of the organization. Any time any of these issues are raised, you will be considered a disturber of the peace and face consequences.
As far as the job progression goes; you will start off as a “Reactive” SDR, where you are responding to inbound calls, chats, and contact requests in order to find and create sales opportunities for closing reps. There are plenty of at-bats since the product is popular and growing, but since the support team at the company is very weak, a lot of this role consists of filtering through a sea of support/finance-related requests in order to find qualified sales opportunities. The role is highly competitive and you’re held to a quota of 95 opportunities per month. Unfortunately, leads are distributed from a lead queue on a first come first serve basis, so the top-performing reps are those who are quickest to the draw (You literally have seconds to pull leads as they come in since everyone is waiting on new leads like circling sharks). Since the quota is so high and the fight for high-quality leads is so competitive, you will be tied to your desk if you want to be successful. As the opportunities are generated by the Reactive team, they are distributed to available sales reps in a Round Robin. Since the closing sales reps are relying on these opportunities to hit their numbers, and since the number of opportunities being passed is increasingly scarce, there can be high levels of tension between closing reps and SDRs. Because of the time investment needed to reach the high opportunity goal, there is little time left for coaching, training, and career progression.
After 6 months in the Reactive role, you will be eligible for a mini-promotion to the “Proactive” role. Whether or not you are deemed worthy of moving onto this role is very subjective. If they don’t want you to move forward, they will find vague reasons like “not going above and beyond” and “not building your brand” to hold you back. Colleagues who have hit their number, consistently put in the work, and won awards/recognitions are told no for similar reasons.
In the Proactive role, you will be aligned with sales reps covering existing books of business, and you will be responsible for reaching out to current and potential customers to set up meetings/opportunities for the sales reps. To put it bluntly, this role is an absolute mess right now. The work itself is a convoluted mess, where SDRs are spending more time figuring out rules of engagement, dealing with tedious work, and having micro-managers breathe down their necks than actually having great sales conversations and serving our customers and sales org. The alignment between SDRs and sales reps is not productive, and while it seems like the org is bringing in money, upon closer look you’ll realize that the sales reps and SDRs are often overlapping in their work, and the money that SDRs are helping bring in are often the easy wins that the SDRs find ways to capitalize on before it gets to the sales rep. The new proactive management in Boston has the potential to be good, but they’re so hamstrung by top management that they have no voice and end up coming off as clueless, in over their head, and completely out of sync with the team. Sadly, they’ll be instrumental in determining whether you get promoted.
When it comes to moving into a closing role, those who are the best suited for sales success are not the ones who move forward. For the SDR leadership, it’s about who can check their subjective boxes as opposed to who will be most successful in the next role. In addition, most SDR leadership lacks real knowledge and experience in sales to make accurate determinations of who will succeed in the next role. As a result, the small percentage of SDRs who do get promoted are mostly average SDRs becoming below-average sales reps while top SDRs are being passed over, pushed out, or moving to other companies to progress in their careers.
