Could not recommend the direct sales SMB AE job any less! The expectations placed on you are incredibly high, but the overall support to be successful is low. Seems to be a top down issue of poor management. There's clearly no concern for the culture being created for the SMB AE's by the sales leadership because it's terrible.
You're basically an on-call agent for inbound BDRs, so you must be glued to slack all day so you can get calls sent to you for opportunities to sell. You get little to nothing from the outbound BDRs. And even tho the time off policy is "unlimited", that won't be the case for this role.
The manager answered 95% of questions with a question. He was M.I.A. half of the time but then if things weren't going well, he would threaten to micromanage. And he consistently belittled team members' frustrations when they tried to address gaps in processes to get things done - which sucks because almost every process to get the job done is convoluted. He's very knowledgable about the company's product offering and tech stack, but would be far more of an asset in an individual contributor role.
There are clear gaps in the teams that support the sales function. Many of the BDRs that generate leads for smb AEs seem to be taught to be entitled and will pass you absolute garbage and then demand credit for it. They're not all bad tho. The SCs (solutions consultants) that demo the products seem to be spread thin, so you have to sort thru them to find people who can actually demo what you need and hope they have a time available. They also can't demo most of the integrations the company offers.
And you'll be lucky if you get to keep all of the commission you earn in a month. There are consistent "draw backs" in commission when someone wants to cancel because of things completely outside of your control. In the SMB role, you'll also get numerous deals sold that turn out to be credit card fraud, and those come out of your commission too. Plus, the company has lowered the base pay for this role over the past few years... this crap is NOT worth what you'll make.
