Pros
- Cool product - Quarterly get togethers
Cons
- Product may not be terribly behind competition, but the go to market motion is. Typically trying to flip clients who have years of experience with competition and are satisfied with the incumbent (rip and replace is very painful) - Not only is the leading competitor way ahead in market saturation, but similar offerings are included for free by companies like Google and Microsoft. Coda is a nice-to-have in a good economy. - Zero direction from sales leadership. A ton of outbound motions were implemented, then brand new personas were targeted - all of them failed terribly. We were finally told that inbound leads are the only successful deals that close. - Sales leaders who were hired had no idea how to use the product or the value it provided. Instead of being the ones to actually help sales reps get onboarded/close deals, they brought in folks from the recruiting team to train pitching. The logic was that recruiters needed to pitch candidates on the product, so they could easily teach how to pitch to prospects. - The amount of busy work arbitrarily assigned is astounding. We would often be given a project, then told to re-do the entire thing in a different format multiple times for no obvious reason. Additionally, we would have anywhere between 4-6 hours of internal meetings PER DAY which is untenable for somebody who is supposed to be customer facing. - You will be micromanaged more than anywhere you have ever experienced - For a company selling a tool that helps organize and clean up internal communications/process, the sprawl of information internally is practically impossible to follow. - The product is 100% optimized for what the product team thinks is valuable instead of what the actual customers want. There was an internal meeting sharing that product would focus on revenue generating projects - product followed this announcement with a template they worked on that inserted Owen Wilson saying “wow”. Quite the disconnect. - Pricing structure is touted as a revolutionary way to charge customers (charging based on editors and admins while viewers have free seats). Not only does this tend to overly confuse customers, but the more creative customers find ways to completely game the system. Don’t be surprised if you end up spending your time working a 3-figure deal (literally). - The team is so desperate to hire sales folks that there was a lot of deceit throughout the hiring process: - OTE range I was told was roughly 30%-50% higher than my actual offer (one of my colleagues was promised 100% higher OTE than actual offer) - Average deal size promised was about 20x higher than actual deals worked and closed - Was given figures around inbound lead flow. Turns out their definition of a “lead” is quite broad and not in line with typical SaaS
