Only for the commercial, competitive, ambitious people.
Pros
I have worked at Meltwater for over 5 years and moved from Sales Consultant to Sales Manager in 9 months and to MD about 12 months later. How much you are going to like this company all depends on your MD. I have worked in offices where MD's were strong on team building, coaching and developing. But there are also MD's who are very inexperienced, only care about numbers and results and generally not likeable people. If you get the right MD (50% chance) you will love most of your job. The people are great and usually top of the class who are fun, smart and ambitious. The work is like any junior sales position, you have to build a pipeline of leads by cold-calling, demo'ing, meeting and closing customers. You get responsibility early on by being fully responsible your sales-pipe. Depending on management they will help you a lot in becoming a better sales-person month after month. After you've proven yourself, you will definitely move on to a Sales Management position which is 50% personal sales, 50% developing your team. Then if you prove you can develop people you will become an MD. in my time I've only seen 5 people out of 75 in total achieve this. But once you get there it's definitely worth it in terms of responsibility, things you learn and financial rewards.
Cons
Management can be quite bad and can change quite quickly. I've had a different manager to report to every year, some are great and very talented, some are very bad in terms of people management, giving feedback and offering help. If you don't pick up the sales skills quickly and have success, you will hate it. You will see other people around you be succesfull, be promoted, earn twice to three times as much as you. If you don't like targets, deadlines, dont bother either. Targets are set every month and will deliver you (big) stress every month. Some parts of the culture are quite American (high fiving, hugging, fake enthousiasm etc.) but in European offices not so present. Because the company grew so fast (from 10 to 1000 employees in 8 years), the management is not used to leading big organisations. They will try something new every quarter which will have significant impact on the way you can will work, if you can't stand change, this is not for you. Things that change per quarter are for instance products that you can or cannot sell, changes to your compensation, how to report, collaboration between sales and account management.
