Hi –
Maybe you are a prospective talent looking at the opportunities we have to offer at SpotMe, or maybe you are one of our current team members going through Glassdoor. Either way, you are probably here because you are interested in SpotMe, who we are, and what we do. As you are reviewing our Glassdoor profile, you will come across some negative reviews, in particular from former members of our sales and professional services teams.
At the end of 2018, following 3 years of tremendous growth that saw the company triple in size, we have noticed that things started to break and wouldn’t be scalable anymore, as you cannot operate at 120 employees the same way you operate at 40. At the same time, our market segment has undergone brutal consolidation, with all our key competitors being acquired by the #1 player in the industry. At that time SpotMe’s leadership made a number of difficult decisions around roles, organizational structure, compensation, and product pricing. The rapid pace of changes, with some of them being overdue, had a profound impact on our team.
Our sales team has grown from each member being a jack of all trades, to having three specialized roles (SDRs, AEs, AMs) with quotas aligned to goals, clear territories to target, and an uncapped variable-based compensation with accelerators. Consistent with our enterprise focus and SaaS strategy, we also adopted a new pricing model. The earning potential is stronger than before for high performers, and the new roles/pricing combination is stepping stone for a SaaS sales professional.
Our professional services department had to adapt to a competitive and maturing industry segment, with an increasing number of projects, a fluctuating workload and pressure on margins, quality and accountability. On the flip side, everyone has worked hard to eliminate numerous unnecessary and error-prone tasks. Our teams still have the opportunity to work directly with global brands and C-level executives.
Finally, we have bolstered our leadership team having hired over the last 18 months a new VP Sales, VP Engineering, VP Customer Success, Head of Product Marketing, and a Director of People & Culture. Transformations in Engineering, Product and Customer Success brought instant wins and were welcomed by the team.
However, not everything was executed well. While implementing these changes, we have also reflected on our values – and “curious and always improving” is top on our list. We have realized, through the candid feedback we received on Glassdoor and in-person from current and former team members, that we got a number of things wrong. Thanks to these inputs, we have made a number of adjustments. First, we have built an HR team (we call it People & Culture, because this is what we believe in) and made sure that all regions are supported accordingly. We have added more flexibility to the sales team’s compensation and to our SaaS pricing. For our professional services team, we have implemented workload monitoring while reflecting on career paths and empowering our project managers. At a company level, we have also opted for radical transparency, with weekly progress reports sharing financials and KPIs, weekly all-hands meetings, and monthly Q&A sessions with leadership. These changes also come with increased accountability and more frequent and candid feedback from and to everyone – leadership and team members alike.
We remain committed to our people’s success, and we believe in rewarding the doers. Compensation and benefits will remain top of our industry because we are operating in a highly demanding and competitive space. We understand that change is hard, and we appreciate everyone who has stuck with SpotMe during the past 18 months.
Thank you for your time, and for stopping here to understand more about SpotMe. We believe we have an exciting opportunity ahead of us; if you are interested in joining, go ahead and connect with our People & Culture team.
Pierre Metrailler
CEO
March 2, 2020
