Looking for stability ? Look elsewhere - Sinking ship - Sales Omnipresent Employee Review

1. Overselling the role and Overpromising Omnipresent oversells their roles and the status of their company. To be blunt, before I joined I was told a fairytale and when I arrived it was nothing like it. I was interviewed by the sales leaders and all of them lied during the interview process and were not honest. They made it look waaaaaay better than reality. Here are some examples of the above: --> I was told the company's top generating countries where x,y,x only to find out they only had a handful of customers in those markets (insignificant numbers). --> They made it sound like they had a good footprint in a specific market only to find out we barely had any customers there. --> They made it sound like they were growing extremely fast only to find out that most of the customers were churning. --> They made it sound like the company had a focus on a specific region and they were going to invest in it, only to come to the realisation that 6 months after nothing was done and everything was neglected --> They made it sound like they had a great lead inbound system, only to find out the complete opposite and everyone was struggling. --> They made it sound like everyone in sales was selling and making good commission only to find out that barely anyone was hitting targets regularly. --> I could go on, however it is important I move on to other topics. 2. Overwork Most of the people in this company would tell you they feel overworked, tired and exhausted. This also showed in the past 2 company wide surveys where the majority of the employees in the company felt overwhelmed with the workload. The expectations of what is required of you and what you can actually do in a 8 hr shift simply do not align. In many occasions I experienced passive aggressiveness from my direct manager and pretty much felt forced to attend calls scheduled past my official working hrs. 3. Lack of communication The communication and transparency from management, is a joke. You will find yourself being pulled into late night calls to be told of something that will be effective the next morning, without any sort of hints, preparation or time to think about it. Just dumped on your lap and leaving you to deal with it. They would make decisions about you with other people and not even tell you until you asked about it. No asking before on "what do you think", "are you up for it", "are you ok with it"...nothing. Just do it. In addition to that, the communication across departments is not great. It was sad to see a bunch of talented people , who on their own were great, to come together and not be able to work efficiently across departments all because management did not have their stuff together. I can say that despite the efforts, the departments are working individually in their own agendas and bottom line there is no sense of togetherness when it comes to that. Everyone is doing their own thing, doing their own projects and no one knows about the changes until it is too late. 4.Change is good, but too much too fast is a red flag Working in a startup/scaleup is expected to have continuous shifts and changes and that is ok because it means the company is evolving and adapting to the markets and customer needs. That said, add too much of it too fast and you will see your company in shambles, and that is what the company status is at this point in time. In just 6 months the company has changed commission structures twice, they have changed sales presentations twice and team structures 3 times. If this is not a giant, fat, juicy red flag I do not know what is. Complete disorder and a feeling of confusion across the sales organisation. You can ask sales rep, from a junior to a senior and everyone will tell you the same thing. 5. Unnecessary pressure and blaming of sales reps Something that was really hard to see and experience while working at Omnipresent was the fact that no matter the problem, somehow it was always the fault of the sales reps. For some reason it always came back to the sales reps. The pipeline is empty, it is your fault, the leads are not converting it is your fault, the conversion is low it is your fault, we lost to competitors it is your fault. The sales reps were trying hard , as hard as they could with what they had and they were still blamed and micromanaged. "You did not manage to differentiate us from the competitor, that is why we lost the deal" is something you would hear a lot and something that would be put on the sales rep all the time. In reality, there was not much to differentiate us from the competitors. We were providing the exact same service, product and pitching to customers the same value proposition because bottom line that is what it was. And if someone says otherwise , you are kidding yourself. Just like our competitors, we had many issues and promising services that many times were not delivered. Same cloth, same cut and that is the reality of things. The sooner they accept it the better it will be. Still to this day it is baffling to me how blind they (Heads and VPs of sales) were to the fact they were hiding from the truth and not accepting it for what it was. Either they were truly blind and did not see the problem, which in that case they should have not been hired in the first place, or they were lying to themselves in thinking it was not their issue. There was a serious underperformance issue which derived from the fact that the targets were not realistic, the marketing was not efficient to deliver enough inbound pipeline for sales reps to hit their targets (data to prove this), the outbound expectations were unrealistic combined with many other issues and these people had the audacity to blame sales reps, to tell them they were doing a bad job, to micromanage they work and put psychological pressure on them, as if they did not have enough already. And to put the cherry on top, they would threaten and even put people on PIPs. The main reason why people are on PIPs is because of the business's inability to address the bigger problems. One would say, 21st century psychological abuse at it's finest. 6. Double standards, favouritism and personal agendas The upper sales management had implemented many changes in a very short period of time, some of them good and some did not even make sense especially if you are supposedly trying to expand to new markets and establish your footprint there (example they hired some of us as local language speakers however we were not allowed to work leads coming from those countries they hired us to work on in the first place...make it make sense). Rules of engagement were introduced for sales work across countries and I experienced many cases were people would turn a blind eye and let it slide while publicly "preaching" about the importance of sticking to the rules. They would let it slide if someone they liked was involved and when asked to address it they would not. Another example of this is when promoting sales reps who had not a good performance and taking this opportunity away from someone else who was more deserving of it. Complete disrespect and unfair to many of us. It really made my blood boil to witness this injustice. Sales Managers had their personal interests, agendas and the advancement in the careers in mind above all. Think about it, members of the top sales management were promoted 2-3 times/each in a period of 6 months while most of us in the sales team were seriously underperforming and having to deal with the consequences of their bad decisions and poor judgement. Looking from the outside in, even sales managers between each other didn't seam to like one another and were almost competing for that top spot and not in a positive way. Healthy competition is good, competition driven by resentment is toxic. 7.Micromanagement In the many years of experience in sales, I have not seen this type of micromanagement. Eyeopening to say the least. KPIs are a great tool to provide guidance, support and empowerment towards achieving of goals and not to be used as a rope tied around the AEs' necks. And that is what some of the sales managers failed to understand in many occasions. I understand that pressure goes both ways, meaning they had pressure on their shoulders to deliver results just like we however, learning how to positively redirect that tension would have been more helpful than hanging it over AE's heads. Those KPI's were also set on some unrealistic data and expectations which made them not just hard to achieve but also hard to believe in. Setting achievable goals and KPI's is more important than patronising people. after failing to address the bigger problem in sales, sales managers started to count how many emails we were sending, answering , how many calls we were making, how many questions we were sending... Don't be surprised if you get random slack messages at 10Pm at night asking you "what did you do with this deal", "did you do that", "why is this task still open" etc. I'm ashamed to say I have worked for a company that has scooped to this level. Embarrassing. I can go on and talk about the lack of stability, lack of structure, lack of vision and poor leadership however I will leave it that before this becomes a book. I joined this company with the hopes of a better future and career progression and 2 weeks into the role I knew I was better off with my previous employer. I saw the lies, the promises that would never become reality and the behind the scenes.I had taken a risk and unfortunately it had not paid off. Thank you Omnipresent for the lies, empty promises and for teaching me what not to do. For anyone considering this company for your next move, please LOOK ELSEWHERE. I know the package is tempting, but do not do it, no money can buy you happiness, peace of mind or respect in this company. It is not worth it. You can do better.