Where to start? Working in sales at Semrush has led me to burnout. Targets depend entirely on your book of business; some people get lucky with books of business where clients buy on their own accord, others don’t. If you fall within the second category, you are doomed. Clients rarely reply to outreach (they don’t see the value of having an account executive), they ask you to make calls and then don’t give you numbers to call (apart from customer service numbers, or numbers of people who have already left the company) If you manage to get a client on a zoom call, you will have to be really aggressive to sell because clients usually buy at their own time. If you don’t have clients buying on their own, and people don’t reply to your outreach, you won’t hit target and will be put on PIP and fired. In the meantime, you see the top performed being praised when all they close is inbound or even self serve deals. Managers are usually useless, only give you tips about negotiation but their product and industry knowledge is limited. You get paid peanuts on new business and it’s not even part of the target, which encourages you to neglect those clients and creates a bad buying experience. Yet, the VPs and the managers think it’s actually down to how much input metrics and sales best practices you have, if you reach/don’t reach target. It’s a poisonous environment where most people are exhausted/burnt out but are afraid to say it out loud. The company’s not performing so well either so don’t join, do yourself a favour - you’ll thank me.
