Gartner EITL: Broken Metrics Lead to uninspired client delivery and soul-sucking employee morale
Pros
Are you a senior IT executive or deeply experienced IT consultant with broad IT management experience working 15-20+ years for significant organizations? If you tire of managing a large organization, wrestling with complicated general management challenges, using your intellect to build and run world class IT services, using your creative thinking to take your organization to the next level and leading and motivating staff consider being a Leadership Partner in one of Gartner’s call center groups called Enterprise It Leaders. By joining Gartner’s EITL team you will move to a simpler, but busier life, where you no longer have to think about complicated IT challenges and processes, but be coached by 3 layers of EITL management and numerous “support staff” to follow a rigid, prescribed, transactional process where you will interact with 25 to 35 clients, provide sales support to Gartner account executives on sales calls, support sales staff as they meet with prospects 12+ hours a day for a week at the Gartner Symposium, and support sales at the Gartner Summits. As a sales driven, growth company you will become intimately familiar with a modified version of Oracle’s “Seybold” call center software that is used in lieu of time cards. Your entries in the call center software are tallied and shared with your peers showing whether or not you generated “engagement plans” for your clients telling them about the monthly calls they will receive, the 2 peer forum meetings and the Gartner Summit they will attend each year, a half day on-site workshop and monthly or more frequent links to Gartner research they will be sent along with invitations for followup discussions with Gartner analysts. Your clients do not get to decide whether or not they want ALL of these services. Instead, you will be measured on the MONTHLY volume of transactions you are able to achieve with your clients and ultimately whether or not the client renews Gartner EITL services. Each fall you will enjoy spending a week at Disney World catching an early morning bus from a remote hotel so you can be an usher in the Gartner Symposium EITL lounge in between supporting account execs with sales efforts. Of course you still have to find a quiet spot at times during the week for client calls to meet your metrics. The area just past the fancy port-a-johns by the canal works well for getting away from the EITL Lounge noise so you can hear and interact with your clients. Another big plus in working at Gartner is the generous 5 weeks vacation. But be prepared to work during your vacation because there is no relief from meeting the metrics while you are on vacation. The metrics don’t change regardless of your life events or assignments to support sales efforts at Gartner events. If this type of work appeals to you, then by all means, seek out a Gartner employee to refer you as a candidate for a Gartner EITL Leadership Partner position. There are most always openings!
Cons
If you thrive on being micromanaged by 3 layers of management on how to interact with clients, how to push calls, when to send emails, suggest research, and other Gartner interactions based on management’s metric derived tasks rather than client’s individual organizational needs, this is the perfect job for you. Just forget the client centric, individualized approaches that brought you success with the clients you had over the past 15 to 10+ years. Leave your creative and analytical skills behind and just do what you are told to do each month by Gartner management. If you are lucky enough to have more than 80% of your clients renew each year you will be considered “golden” at Gartner and get to enjoy verbal recognition and maybe even get a trophy presented at a bowling alley. If too many of your clients have real world situations such as mergers, promotions, budget constraints, internal politics, heart attacks, etc. and cannot renew the services you will be held responsible for the non-renewal and placed on a performance plan.
