At Gartner your value as a human being is determined by your most recent sale. Training was a joke, a waste of 5 weeks, and literally had 0 correlation to what was being done on the sales floor. The training team even admitted this and the program was changed after my training class. That said, leadership refuses to coach when asked, but continues to demand results. I have had 3 managers in 3 years and not once have I ever been coached to my strengths or weaknesses. When asking for coaching my manager literally laughed and said "I never said I do that." Leadership does not know how to do the job. When asking for best practices you, as a rep, are sent on a wild goose chase to find the answer. My first manager didn't speak to me for my entire first week. When I asked about leads, I was given a blank excel sheet. I was learning about every call in the sales process right before the call was scheduled (remember no training). My current manager actually told me that they cannot help with email prospecting because “they don’t know how” really?... When a rep is struggling there is no coaching to understand and fix the problem, there is just the demand for results. On my most recent end of year review, when my second manager (remember 3 managers in under 3 years) was asked about my strengths and weakness he gave a canned answer. My issue was NOT the feedback. My issue was this was my first time hearing this…, if you were my manager with the goal of developing me into a successful sales rep, you’re sitting on my calls and interacting with me, why wouldn't we discuss any observed strengths or weakness after a call, in training, or at all throughout the entire year? My first and only time hearing feedback was at that meeting, in front of our VP, which ties right into the demonstrative behavior and politics that flow throughout the company. the only good thing about working remote is that I don’t have to hear the word “optics” anymore, which is all they would care about.
I came to Gartner to learn how to take sales to the next level. Not only did Gartner refuse to coach and educate me, my manager had the audacity to imply that I "may not be cut out for sales" after refusing to even try to help me. They would rather say that and destroy one's confidence in a chosen career, than to step up and offer support as a coach. On top of that, the hardest part of this job is dealing with all of the internal efficiencies of Gartner. The lack of CRM creates double and triple work for the reps and creates embarrassing interactions in front of clients. Most of Gartner's sales leadership are Gartner bred and have not sold at other companies (look it up on linkedin), more efficient organizations. They should take input from others. Every time reps share an innovative idea it was shut down so harshly that people actually stopped making suggestions. They ask for input as a formality to appear as if they care about feedback and then they will tell every single person why their idea is wrong. Or they will take the feed back from HR (start, stop, continue) and literally do nothing. These things listed are why everyone is leaving, and until these things are fixed people will keep leaving. A bonus that doesn't pay out until february to bribe people to stay, shows how out of touch management really is.
