Feel like I was straight up lied to - Account Executive 42Floors Employee Review

1.0
May 23, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I was pumped when I joined up with 42Floors, in large part because of the glowing reviews here on Glassdoor. Unfortunately my experience was the exact opposite of what I expected. What I was told: you'll start as a Sales Delevopment Representative, where you'll spend at least a few weeks learning the product and getting your feet wet with phone calls. When you're ready, you'll transition into the Account Executive role (for which I had been hired). You'll get to set your own schedule, and you'll be able to earn commission from day one. What actually happened: I met with the trainer on my first day, and was told that I would actually not be doing any SDR work, and would start immediately as an Account Executive. Collectively we spent about 3-4 hours training, which mostly consisted of practicing giving product demos. I was given excellent feedback throughout the training process. By day three I "went live" and was ready to start giving product demos to prospective clients. Here's where it really started to go down hill. In order to "win" a demo, you must make yourself available during certain time slots on a spreadsheet. The best people get top priority, though, so if they also make themselves available, you'll lose the demo. This may happen one minute prior to a scheduled call. For two weeks I made myself available for literally 12 hours a day (so much for having a flexible schedule) only to get MAYBE one demo for the whole day. There were multiple days on which I sat glued to my computer for the entire day, only to get zero phone calls. When I did get them, they were extremely last minute, or even got thrown to me after the call was already supposed to have started --no time to look up the client's information beforehand, and not the best first impression from the client's viewpoint. It was exhausting, time-consuming, and demoralizing. THEN I was told that everyone in this role would now be required to "grade" each other's calls, and that the amount you graded would directly impact your chances of getting new demos. It didn't seem to have any impact, and felt more like a way to keep those of us sitting around all day with no calls something to do. Then the trainer, who previously had been kind and responsive, suddenly began to ignore me, so I knew something was up. The CEO asked me to have a video call with him, during which he let me know that I "unfortunately didn't make it through the process, but we wish you the best." He hung up, and I was instantly locked out of everything, and that was that. Let me be clear: I understand that sales is kill or be killed, and if my skills truly weren't up to par with everyone else's, fine, I'll accept that and move on. My problem is with the sheer dishonesty from the company about what I would be doing, and how much opportunity (basically none) I would have to actually talk to clients and improve. So let's see...Pros...working from home is nice. I can also see how the few people at the top are happy -- they get all the calls and decide when they want to work, but that means everyone else must wait around all day and hope for some table scraps.

Cons

-dishonest leadership -extremely low opportunity for calls/sales -expect to work very long hours in order to mayyybe get one phone call -Your job might be what's sold to you in the interview process, but it also might be completely different, so it's a gamble for sure

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42Floors Response
9y
I'm so sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. Reading your description of it, I would agree this wasn't great on several levels. Your basic, and frankly reasonable request, is that one should at least be able to prove themselves. And you felt like that opportunity was cut short prematurely. And you're right. Having now significantly increased the sales team, we no longer have the ability to walk through each step as well as we used to. Now a job here does require a fair amount of self-initiative to get off to a quick start. I tell everyone that starts that this can be a great place to work. A place where your time will be valued. Your voice will be valued. Your skills will be valued. And you'll make a great income. But you have to hit the ground running. We'll give you a few hours of training and then a huge number of example calls for self-study. And then it's up to you effectively sell. You don't have to be our top salesperson on Day 1-5. But you need to match the sales output that our top 50% salespeople had on their Day 1-5. And because this is initially a contractor position, if you are substantially lower than your peer group during the first week, we just have to part ways early. Those first 5 days are truly an audition and not everyone makes it. That's written explicitly into the offer letter and we emphasize it several times during on-boarding. I started this by saying your requests were reasonable: that you should be able to prove yourself. I'm truly sorry that our audition phase is as short as it is. We've hired several dozen people over the last few months and the one common denominator is that people who start off fast using stay that way. The opposite isn't always true. Just because you started off slow does NOT mean that you wouldn't have eventually become our top salesperson. There's no way I can tell if you would have made it with little more time. But we can't run a company that way. And for that I'm sorry. Overall, we have to stick with the system that works. But I'm sorry on a personal level that we can't be more patient for each person. Wishing you the absolute best, Jason

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May 4, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Leaders who interact with and involve the team and act quickly to implement ideas.

Cons

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5.0
Jan 3, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They want to take care of every employee, but it seems like they love the sales people. Jason, the CEO, hops on weekly meetings to make sure everything is easy, fun, and keeping us happy. When an idea comes up, it's bounced around to be made better and then actually implemented quickly to keep the sales pipeline moving for their team members. There is an excellent team of people here to make life so easy. They give you lists of leads to call, they find correct contact information when it's currently marked wrong, and take care of the whole on-boarding process for you. You just worry about closing deals. They are always working on new sales copy and processes to make things as easy and streamlines as possible.

Cons

Most of the time, working from home is great. Sometimes it can get a little lonely. Everyone is just a hipchat away though - and more than willing to help in any way they can.

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