Talkdesk reviews

The company culture is extremely toxic and is only getting worse. I joined Talkdesk with high hopes. Shortly after joining I learned that the departments are very fragmented/siloed. The CEO, Tiago Paiva, micro-manages decisions throughout the company and will shoot things down for random reasons. Many managers are afraid to speak up to Tiago because he has a quick temper and flies off the handle any time he feels like his "authority" is challenged. As a result, there's a constant effort to manage him and his perception of what's happening, with predictable results. His attitude has probably contributed the most to the steady stream of executives and senior leaders who have left over the last year (several in the last couple of months). If you're in sales, the management is inconsistent. There are some great leaders still on the sales teams, but going to the deal desk for help with a tricky sale is a game of Russian roulette. Tiago rules the roost there too but you're just as likely to get shot down by some flunky in the finance department who doesn't have a clue how to actually close a sale. Benefits are on the low side of average, the company doesn't match 401k (somebody kept asking about it at every all-hands meeting a while ago, but that stopped all of a sudden), and the stock option offers are just stupid. But hey, you can bring your cute widdle puppy to work and all the recruiting team will oooh and aaah over it.

There are so many cons and here is my list: 1) Compensation - They pay the enterprise sales reps a low base salary compared to industry standards. The quota is $1.5 million. Last year, not a single rep hit this number. There were only 3 AE's that sold a little over a million dollars. These 3 AE's also had much larger territories in 2019. Bottom line is you cannot make money here. They also do not reimburse you for your cell phone. 2) Turnover - Most people at Talkdesk do not last a year. The average AE is fired in 6-8 months. There are currently 19 open enterprise AE positions on the Talkdesk web-site. Many of these jobs were reps that were fired in the last several months. Many of them are friends of mine and they are very talented. In addition to high sales turnover, many other talented people have left. There were two C-level executives that quit after only a few weeks on the job. Two of the best sales engineers left to go to a competitor. Many other talented people have left in the past few months. So you have to ask yourself, why are some of the best people leaving a company that is doing so well. 3) Toxic sales culture - Talkdesk is a depressing place to work. If you are in sales, you will not like the monthly sales call. The purpose of this call is for everyone to say what they will close for the month and the quarter. The person that runs this call likes to berate 1 AE for missing their number. Most AE's have such a weak pipeline that they make stuff up and hope that something will come in. We wonder why are numbers are off every month. 4) Weak Product - Talkdesk is one of four companies in the leader board for Garter's CCaaS. During the new hire training, we learned that our competitive advantage is the modern micro services architecture. This allows Talkdesk to say they have a 100% SLA. On one of our monthly sales calls, we had a guest speaker who is an expert in the call center space. He told everyone to stop saying that Talkdesk is the only company that has this, as the other competitors also have this feature. All of sales reps felt we were lied to in new hire training. Bottom line is Nice inContact, Genesys, and Five9 have a better product than Talkdesk. Also, most of the new logos are small commercial companies. Very few enterprise companies use Talkdesk. Plus our enterprise licenses are too expensive so most AE's sell a lower version that does not include the 100% SLA. I have a feeling that Talkdesk will not be in the Garter leader board next year. 5) KPI focus - The sales leaders are very focused on KPI's. We have KPI's for everything. You can see your colleagues number of calls made, emails sent, meetings completed and opportunities created. Guess what KPI is hidden from all the of sales reps? The percentage of quota and how much each AE has sold year to date. The reason for this is most reps sell very little and as I stated earlier, it is impossible to make quota. There are about 12 reps that have sold over $100K and not one person is even close to selling $1 million dollars. Most AE's have a weak pipeline for the remainder of 2020. Let me wrap up by saying I have never posted a review on Glassdoor. I always thought that this is what disgruntled employees do. If you are looking for a sales job here, please read all of the reviews about Talkdesk in the past few weeks. The theme is the same and the level of details that we are saying about what is wrong with Talkdesk is so accurate. I question if Talkdesk will make it. Remember, if you are interviewing for a sales role, the only question you need to ask is how many reps made their number. The answer is nobody. Please do not damage your career to take a job at Talkdesk as it is a terrible company.