-Sales Operations in relation to comp/quota/books. We recently had some turnover in Sales Ops, and for the last 4-5 months the side of sales ops that deals with comp/quota/books has been pretty much a complete disaster area for the growth side of the business, if we're being brutally honest. Couldn't be any worse timing with the transition from FY17 to FY18 and new books/plans being created and rolled out. It's devastatingly demoralizing and unspeakably frustrating when the growth sales leadership team top to bottom either has no clue how sales ops is building books, quotas, and comp plans, or has no say in how they do it. How do you build a comp plan without knowing what quotas and books look like? You end up building a comp plan and sales flow that emphasizes retention, when the quotas actually require much more growth. What in the world is going on? When neither your manager, your director, or your SVP can't/won't give you a straight answer for months and months (the quarter was more than halfway over before we got our quota; we still to this day don't completely understand why we're getting paid out less on our deals than last year), its frankly unacceptable. When we ask about it, we get the response: don't worry it will all make sense eventually and in the meantime the bottom line is you have to sell more into your book than last year (even though there's a new sales motion and some people are struggling with basic living expenses while still hitting growth quotas). Accountability works both ways... If we couldn't give you a forecast for the quarter until more than halfway through, we wouldn't be employed here. If we couldn't explain why we didn't hit our target or why we lost a particular deal, we wouldn't be employed here. And yet we're supposed to be okay with a high degree of ambiguity "because we're an agile start up." That excuse for incompetence only goes so far before your top performers are inevitably interviewing elsewhere. I can tell you this - they don't want to. They want to believe in you, sales leaders. We're all looking to you to help us out of this mess, but you don't have much more time.
-Sales ops issues aside, overall compensation is a slight con. Lower base and OTE compared to similar companies and similar roles. But in reality, b/c of the strength of our brand, you're actually more likely to actually hit your OTE than most smaller companies. 6 months ago, I would have told you it's a lock that you'll make up the lower base in more commission/bonuses. But the changes to the comp plan have made me seriously skeptical of the risk. It also remains to be seen whether the equity plan for recent employees will make up the difference.
- SMB customer success. Cases take a full day to escalate from customer support to a customer enablement manager. Client emails us with urgent technical issue that requires resolution immediately, but the process takes 48 hours to resolve. AM's have very little visibility into who their assigned CEM is, what CEMs will or won't do, and who they should talk to when there's a problem with an account because CEMs + account assignments change on a quarterly basis it feels like. We get one presentation a year on this, but then in practice it all falls apart. I don't think the problem is the people, they're all great and strive to help to the best of their ability. It's the process and structure that truly boggles the mind.
-Product performance. Without getting too detailed, some aspects of our products underperform compared to the market and often we struggle to justify ROI with customers. Help us by building a stronger product and improving the type of data we have access to that builds a successful partnership business case.
