Pros
- Great product - Opportunity to make a ton of money if timing and territory aligns - Excellent resume builder - Great benefits like healthcare, pto, espp, etc... - Feeling like you are working at "the" company everyone wants to work at
Cons
- Unhealthy expectations and requirements from the sales team. You will be given goals that are ridiculous and barely any of your AE's will come close to hitting their number. If you have a team of 10, expected 1 or 2 to hit their quota. The rest will be starving. - Revolving door of sales reps. Even at the enterprise level, experienced AE's stay at this company for 1 maybe 2 years. There's a constant revolving door and it feels like groundhogs day for our customers. It's always a "first discovery" or "casual intro" and its hard to truly build something great to sell. Big deals happen when customers already know they want Salesforce and are working with an SI partner... so our SFDC AE gets lucky. The rest of the deals are typically run rate out of pure desperation with over aggressive sales tactics. Now, there are a handful of AE's that stay for the long run and build something great + transformation but it's rare. I would say 10% of AE's are genuinely successful and bring value to the company. - The lucky Salesforce AE mentioned above gets paraded around by upper leadership like god's gift to sales. Every department head begs to attach their useless "programs" to the lucky deal in the CRM to get a number next to their name on their own dashboard and to justify their role at the organization. It's crazy. You will have 10 different business units all claiming credit for a deal no one actually sold and if it gets approved they all get ridiculously large paychecks. I've never seen anything like it. From the AE's perspective, they and their manager will be harassed night and day until these "credits" are approved. You will be threatened, bullied and pressured by very high up people to approve their team's involvement. It's toxic and goes unchecked by Sr. leadership. - Additionally, if you are selling a certain product you will have parasite co-primes and ECS reviewing your quotes in Salesforce and ask you to switch to their products instead or put a deal on two order forms. Even if they have never met the customer. Even if they don't even know who the customer is. If you switch to their sku or move the deal into their band, they will get a big paycheck. This harassment is constant and they will call, email, slack, chatter and FIND YOU until you switch. Their manager will call you. Their manager's manager. Their manager's manager's manager. Everyone. It feels endless. There will be pressure and bullying. Most of the work you do at Salesforce is responding to internal teams trying to make money off of your work when they do nothing. - I can say a lot more but the internal battles between Core AE's and their insanely large account teams are what make Salesforce a truly unique place to work. This toxic work environment and endless pressure cooker sales environment is why I ultimately left. I admit it, I drank the koolaid and thought I would never work at a better, more innovative company... until I left and realized that there are organizations just as innovative (if not more) with out all of the internal drama. Also, I get paid more now, work fewer hours and I don't have to constantly apologize to customers for the harassment they receive from entry level cold callers or desperate ECS reps. Once you take off the rose colored lenses, you will see how that the most groundbreaking part of Salesforce is their ability to create the illusion of being the best company in the world.
