Most customer conversations revolve around contract restructuring and uplift negotiations — actual new business takes a back seat. The "Salesforce Tax" has become something of an industry joke at this point.
Account team incentives are fundamentally misaligned. Expect to spend more energy navigating internal politics than actually closing deals.
Forget best-in-class tools. Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, Clay — none of it. You're locked into internal tooling regardless of what the market offers.
The bureaucracy is real and it is heavy.
Falling behind in the AI race, and it shows. Agentforce is mostly a talking point, relatively weak adoption in the market and not something people choose to use internally. There's a significant gap between what product marketing promises and what exists in reality.
The culture skews deeply political. Ask someone about "aspirational pipeline" when you get there — manufactured pipe numbers encouraged by leadership
Comp structure gets changed almost every year, and somehow the math never works in your favor. Salesforce always finds creative ways to reduce what you actually take home.
Top talent leaving every day to leading AI-native companies.
"Merit" increases lag the market considerably. New hires frequently come in earning more than tenured reps — and rather than fixing it, the implicit message is to leave and boomerang back for a reset + signing bonus.
