Pros
-Interesting projects with international or innovation focus. -Most people are friendly and great to work with. -Amazing work/life balance, can almost always take a lunch, barely ever have to take work home and you can control work travel (for the most part). -Great location in Chicago -Starting to invest more in product and branching out to new BI tools.
Cons
-NOT the place to advance a sales career, rather a place to gain experience if you're just starting out and looking to build on experience. Sales positions are just as much about account management as they are new business. -Company and management has yet to recognize that strategic research is a niche market and not every business has a defined need or application for strategic market research. -Antiquated processes focused on old-school sales tactics. Very limited alignment between different departments. -Biggest obstacle to overcome is getting paid commissions! Something they smooth over in the interview process is that sales reps below 50% of quota YTD do not make commissions. Now, consider that less than 30% of sales reps hit their quota and a significant amount do no exceed the 50% mark. -Inorganic growth of business. The company is looking to double its sales force to show growth but their means of doing this is because of tons of new customers, it's because they're divvying up the territory into half or sometimes into thirds. -Limited to no insight into how company is performing as a whole as it's privately owned and very little information is shared. -Management has limited to no experience outside current company. Often feels like manager can get away with anything, including extremely unprofessional behavior that is never addressed and being unqualified where it feels like you're hearing lines from a "sales management for dummies" book spouted off. Management doesn't seem willing to address unmotivated culture within organization.