Pros
- The office environment was quite fun, especially in 2019. Everyone was very sociable, jokey and fun to hang around with. - The SAP name. This is what draws a lot of people to join Concur despite the slightly lower than average salaries. Having the SAP name on your CV is very valuable. - The SAP benefits. The share scheme in particular is great. You also have access to great internal resources such as training, career coaching.etc - There have been some really great characters throughout both the MDR and RSE team (and actually some of the RSD's too). I have made some friends for life here. - You are really forced to be innovative and hard-working if you want to see success here, so there is a lot of room for personal growth. The Concur product is considered a 'nice to have but not a priority' by most businesses, and currently sits in a mature market with new competitors popping up every week. Navigating these challenges is great for your skill growth, as this really represents being 'chucked in at the deep end'. If you can find success here, you can kill it at ANY other SaaS company. - Pre-2021, there was actually a decent vibe about Concur. We had nice company days out (watching the horse racing, a sports day, BBQs and a solid Christmas party) and the office was quite fun to be in. We'd regularly go for drinks in Maidenhead, and would quite often go out in Reading. Even when we were forced to work from home, we had plenty of virtual socials and other bits of fun.
Kontras
- As of January 2021, there were 15 active Outbound MDRs in Concur UK SMN (a few others were on long term sick leave). Leadership decided that they weren't happy with the MDR team's performance, and instructed the MDR managers to put 9 of us on 'performance improvement plans'. This was done very quickly without prior warning, and the plan targets were so high that they were basically unobtainable, essentially managing a bulk of the team out the door. All 9 of us have found new jobs and resigned in advance of being dismissed. A vast majority of those pushed out were only hired in March 2020, and so had only worked during the pandemic, yet everyone was made to feel like they were individually incompetent and lazy, rather than recognising the obvious challenges of selling Travel and Expense software in a pandemic when no one is travelling or expensing. - The Senior leadership team are (for the most part) young and inexperienced. Many have no experience/training from other SaaS or tech companies, and a few key figures joined Concur in its heyday between 2004-2013 when the business was drowning in inbound leads and tearing up a largely untapped market. The same leaders now have no idea how to navigate a mature market with new competitors popping up every day, let alone a pandemic where demand for our two biggest products (Travel and Expense) is almost none. - Managerial tasks such as Salesforce report building, managing inbound leads and helping new starters quite often get taken on by subordinates as certain managers are unwilling to do them, or learn how to do things they don't understand. They focus on busybody work like drafting long corporate internal emails/teams messages, gathering feedback for marketing or copious team meetings and 1 to 1's rather than effective deep work that would really help the team perform better against their quotas like identifying good accounts, building reports and helping out with some prospecting where appropriate. - Whilst not a widespread issue at Concur, I have seen bullying behaviour. We saw an individual MDR called out for missing a marketing lead (an easy to make mistake on our complex and messy Salesforce) on a Microsoft Teams call in front of the entire company (hundreds of people). Another MDR was also harshly interrogated during a standard territory mapping presentation - the MDR in question was struggling with a terminally ill father. Such behaviour seems to have been swept under the rug thus far. - In 3 years there have been 4 people promoted from MDR to RSE (roughly 1-2 per year). I would not join as an MDR if you have serious aspirations to be a software salesperson as you would be taking a massive gamble with the odds stacked against you. Even consistently good performance is no guarantee as I've seen brilliant candidates with very high quota attainment turned down. You'd do well to invest your time somewhere else where there is a more well-trodden path of promotion. - The Concur product is a bit old and tired, plus it is expensive and struggles to compete with the slicker competition in the SMB space (think of how the technology of Monzo compared to the older, traditional banks in the UK a few years ago). - For a SaaS company that sells a product that is supposed to remove manual data work, SAP Concur doesn't drink it's own medicine. They have only just implemented a basic version of RingDNA, and don't really have any other modern prospecting tools/software that are almost the industry standard in other SDR teams in other companies. They don't have Outreach, Gong, SalesLoft, Lusha, Hunter, Refract or any other modern prospecting tools, and instead manually dial numbers from a slow Salesforce CRM. When I joined we were still prospecting using desk phones! - There is quite a lot of snakey behaviour from a few particular RSEs. I had to consistently fight off said RSEs from poaching my opportunities, using the ever-changing rules of engagement and labyrinth-like CRM as a cloak over their actions. Favourite top-performers break rules all the time and don't get so much as a slap on the wrist.