My experience was confusing at best.
Preface
- Growth Limited
- No CRM
- Green Management
- Green Product Delivery - AWS, Vendors other than Microsoft
After accepting the letter, my manager requested that I partake in their new hire training before my hire date so that I could jump into the role on day one; this was a hard task considering it was the end of Q4 and I was still employed by the previous employer I had made it to one of the session but the ask was pretty big considering I wasn't being compensated for my time and it made me uncomfortable because it took me away from my current responsibilities.
On day one, upon receiving my laptop, the device wasn't set up. Also, I learned that on my first day of work that, my manager was one week away from maternity leave and someone else would be my new point of contact. I felt a little swindled at this time.
Another issue that arose is that during my interview, i had extensively did research on their offering to see if it would aline with my career growth, they with this research it appears that they had an active SOC (cyber security) practice and I mentioned that this was the path i wanted to continue with. About a week after the manager left I had found out they had discovered their SOC practice in the USA, they still had a global practice but growth opportunities were limited.
At this point i felt that i had made the wrong decision I had left Softchoice I had just come off a fantastic year hitting 150% to plan an grown my business 68%. And now I am on a team with a green manager and limited growth opportunities in the field that I wanted to be.
As i told my colleagues and family, I thought i was upgrading from Softchoice to SoftwareONE, I thought there was growth and defined systems in place to help me be the best seller that I could. This conversation continued to fall apart as i was on the team longer. They DO NOT have a CRM they claim to be building on ( this claim has been discussed for over 7years). They DO NOT HAVE SALESFORCE. I told people that I thought I was leaving a minor league team and stepping into the Pros. This was far from the truth. Projects are managed on a wildly complicated pivot table that my new manager created. Kudos to her she created a "lite-CRM" tool with Excel. However, this tool was far from perfect and or helpful. Copies upon copies were created to ensure that the master documents were not affected. Working with a decentralized national team made work slow.
On top of all this, they have been solely focused on Microsoft business for the last 30 years, they sell 10K+ manufacturers or publishers; however, they are terrible at it, and there isn't a process in place to streamline. Build quotes effectively isnt a strong point, either. I think the average turnaround time for quotes was over 4-5x in comparison to; Softchoice, Insight, SHI, and Zones. I felt so ridiculously under supported in my role and it was challenging to support my customers.
I also didn't get my official quota and customer list until six weeks before the start of Q2.
Also, their AWS and AWS marketplace is loosely defined, with an extreme lack of focus on process details. As a result, a new point contradicts the previous week's objectives each week.
Then I was let go, the feedback i received was that i wasn't a good fit for the team. This feedback came out of nowhere. My previous 1:1 with my manager, she commented on how she was "excited that i was on the team, and enjoyed my process and saw good things to come". Also, i will note that both my manager and the VP were on the call and they both turned off their webcams while the HR team was talking. I found this to be extremely unprofessional, especially when i pressed for more information. I was never placed on a PIP, I was receptive to feedback, and most importantly, I was trying to help the organization improve its processes while selling into a competitive marketplace. ( that might of been my demise).
