Great facilities and reputation. Terrible leadership and atmosphere - Finance Director Sage Employee Review

2.0
Sep 16, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Company has a great reputation, product and working facilities.

Cons

Disorganised sales strategy and business planning process. Amateur finance processes and systems (ironically). Overpromising to board and investors, resulting in underperformance despite positive growth against last year. Leadership does not care about staff - happy to sack people to achieve their bonus targets. Senior global sales leaders lead by shouting 'sell more' with no vision on how to do it. Confused, disorganised, overworked and staff under the constant fear or being performance managed out or made redundant by the thousands.

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Sage Response
8y
Firstly, thanks for taking the time to write your review. Your feedback matters and what you say concerns us. We have a Code of Conduct that provides a clear set of rules for colleagues and when they see something that goes against the Code they are encouraged to discuss with their manager, their People Business Partner or a SafeCall number, which is free and confidential. If you would like to discuss further please contact me lynne.ellis-parker@sage.com. Leading@Sage is the development program providing leaders with the tools and techniques to help their teams flourish in a high performance customer focused environment – and this includes coaching as a way to help colleagues reach their full potential here. Shouting at colleagues is not acceptable and not tolerated – it is the sort of behaviour that goes against our Code of Conduct. Our culture encourages ambition, simplification, and bias for action at pace and our finance team takes immense pride in putting our customers first and foremost. It is important of course that we continuously improve so we review, invest and develop our systems and internal processes all the time. It is disappointing that your experience has not matched expectations, but we appreciate your feedback and wish you well.

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5.0
Jun 5, 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

They will work with you and teach you everything you need to know and help you as long as you help yourself and meet kpi but they help you meet it

Cons

No cons to add at this time

2.0
Jun 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

was hired as remote and get to have that honored, but have been openly told no career progression because of remote status. decent pay

Cons

Leadership instability: Seven manager changes during my relatively short tenure. Unrealistic targets: A sales quota set at 1,100% growth (not a typo). Slow product development: Getting anything actioned on the product side takes far too long. Product management turnover: Three product manager changes, resulting in no meaningful deliverables in over three years. Misaligned hiring priorities: Greater emphasis on DEI optics than on hiring people positioned to drive growth. Internal vs. customer focus: More energy spent on internal events than on product enhancements. Lack of accountability (the biggest issue): No one takes ownership. Responsibility gets passed around constantly — for example, client cancellations going unprocessed because they impact someone's numbers. Managers have openly encouraged pushing the work onto someone else rather than handling it.

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Sage Response
16h
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback. We’re sorry to hear about the challenges you’ve described around leadership continuity, targets, growth, and ways of working. We recognise the impact that stability, clear accountability, and achievable goals can have on the day-to-day experience of our colleagues, particularly within sales and customer-facing roles. We shall share your feedback with leaders for their visibility as we continue to evolve how we support our teams to truly thrive at work. If you have any additional insights to share, please leave us more feedback via our internal Always Listening forum or through your manager. Thank you again for sharing your perspective.
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