The senior sales leadership that was hired just 9 months ago has already managed to turn a phenomenal sales culture into a total nightmare.
- CONSTANTLY OVER-HIRING: Everyone is starving for pipeline, but that doesn't stop management from hiring more AEs anyways. Seemingly zero thought is given to how to support those AEs; management just assumes more headcount = more productivity. Then, when those new hires inevitably do not perform, they are fired - sometimes even before their ramp is finished.
- UNFORGIVING PERFORMANCE KPIS: Top performers - both AEs and SDRs - are regularly put on PIPs and pre-PIPs for a single month of missing non-revenue KPIs (# of cold calls, # of outbound demos booked/held, etc.). Leadership was right to correct the team's lackadaisical approach to outbound prospecting, but firing quota-hitting reps simply because they didn't book enough meetings is total nonsense.
- PROBLEMATIC AND EVER-CHANGING COMP PLAN: Instead of being paid out on revenue, AE commission is paid out on your percentage of quota attainment. Effectively, this means that if your quota is higher than one of your peers, you will be paid less money for closing a deal of identical size. Management is also constantly making changes to the comp plan, and every single change seems to result in lower commission checks for everyone.
- LOTS OF CHANGE, ZERO CHANGE MANAGEMENT: Working at a startup means lots of change, and that’s okay. What’s not okay is making changes that are arbitrary, unnecessary, overly disruptive, and/or based on management’s golden gut instead of real-world data. It’s especially problematic when each and every one of these changes seemingly makes our jobs harder and our paychecks lower.
All of this is in addition to senior sales leadership’s narcissistic, demeaning, belittling, and downright abrasive personality.
Believe it or not, I could go on, but I’ll stop there.
