When I started a couple years ago the product had massive technical issues. Those problems don’t seem to ever get resolved, or when they do they are replaced with new problems from rushed code and a poor QA process. No matter how many “bug blitzes” or “quality quarters” that the development team engages in the backlog of bugs doesn’t shrink, it grows. Most if not all development resources are dedicated to releasing new products before the old product is stabilized unless you have an enterprise logo like ADP, Groupon or Paychex. This leads to very very unhappy customers, who after getting no resources post on the SalesForce Appexchange. Here’s where it get’s really weird. Customers that say anything negative about InsideSales.com online are aggressively bribed with many free months or dialer minutes to take down their review, and promised that their issues will get fixed. Many of the issues never do get fixed. Certain customers leave their negative reviews up. When this happens then the customer service team is actually paid extra to try and find customers to put up positive reviews to effectively “bury” the negative reviews so they don’t show up on the top page of the appexchange. Click through a few pages on the appexchange, you’ll find the real reviews, which are 100% accurate as to the actual state of the product. Most of the positive reviews don’t have any real content. What’s weird is InsideSales.com’s glassdoor reviews seem to be scripted almost like the appexchange reviews on salesforce. When there are lots of negative reviews about ISDC you can bet that soon after there will be a few positive reviews without a lot of real content to bury the negative ones. Read some of the positive reviews… you’ll see that the trend is in the “cons” section is that “there are growing pains with being part of such an exciting rocket ship.” Same stuff. Most of the employees that have been here a long time are extremely cynical about the company and it’s future. The dream here seems to be to stick it out until we IPO and then leave as soon as possible. While investors seem to be in love with InsideSales.com because of the “neuralytics” dream, there are actually very very few companies even on that product, with even fewer seeing any value in it at all. Another poster on this forum mentioned the passive aggressive replies from HR regarding the company values and why people don’t fit into the culture. The reality is the culture is very toxic and most employees laugh at the company values behind leadership’s back. I hope things change, but even with new leadership in every department nothing seems to change. Companies like this are supposed to be agile and quick moving towards positive change but all policy here seems to get caught at a choke point which most people credit to the CEO being a micro manager. Instead of instilling positive change in the product and culture, the only focus seems to be on company valuation, sales goals, and keeping any negative press off of the internet. New leadership comes in with lofty goals, great ideas for change, and enthusiasm but quickly find out that they don’t have authority or resources to change anything at all.
While I’m unhappy here (clearly) I’m sticking it out until IPO like most everyone else. I hope we can get our ducks in a row because even that result seems to be less certain than in the past. Too many internal problems.
