Pros
- A wide variety of products & apps to learn. - You get an all-expense paid training trip to India. - Free lunches while we were in the office.
Cons
Zoho's Sales Team is basically a cult. If you can think for yourself, you won't be happy here for too long. Long story short: There is no actual training for managers and they underpay sales like crazy ($20/hour starting salary for an Account Executive position is a joke). As if that wasn’t enough, they’re the opposite of forward-thinking. For example, Zoho is a CRM software, yet sales leadership had us manually enter data & provide updates via a Zoho Sheet (Zoho's version of Excel), instead of using the actual technology that auto-generated reports for management. That was just one example of the lack of tech savviness within leadership—the list goes on. Scalability and agility were non-factors. Recommendations for efficient improvements to approaching daily tasks were shut down right off the bat--goes to show why employees don't even bother with bringing issues up with the sales leaders. Sales management regularly seemed overwhelmed with basic day to day tasks that resulted in extreme levels of stress which they never attempted to hide, but subsequently pushed onto their team. Mood fluctuations were a constant issue, leaving teams to guess what emotional turmoil their manager was experiencing day-to-day—ready to play a guessing game of how to approach your managers with a simple request? Let the games begin! As if that wasn’t enough, the sales culture was extremely toxic. Team members got reprimanded for sharing product related updates and were told not to post in collaborative team channels with useful info as it deterred teammates from making sales. Hmm how can you make sales if your product knowledge isn’t current? It’s one thing to be aggressive towards your goals, that’s common in sales, but management applied the same tactic in their 1 on 1 conversations with their employees. Micromanagement trickles from the top down. Advice to C-Level leadership: please spend less time going through individual reps' emails to tear them apart and spend more time mentoring/coaching your employees. A previous review mentions “low sales pressure tactics”, but I’m confused as to which team they might have been on, because I’m sure they weren’t on mine. Work-life balance is non-existent. You are constantly working, including on days off during which we were assigned leads that kept piling up (guess that's an expectation in sales?). DEI wasn’t even on the radar of the leadership team. Queer representation and rights weren’t on leadership’s agenda, disregarding any issues raised because those are matters Zoho's senior leadership doesn't care to be involved in. Unsurprisingly, there were no ERG communities or talk of progress. Zoho never even took a stance on/or showed support for the Asian or Black communities, given the events of 2020-2021. Politics in a professional setting? Yes, please. From my experience, it was a plus if you were a Trump supporter on the sales team, so if those are your political leanings, go ahead and join them because you’ll fit right in. Win-win! This concern was brought to the attention of the HR team and the Sales leadership, but again, nothing was done to address the issue. Additionally, we were frequently encouraged to post/re-post company updates on LinkedIn to portray the company in a positive light. Employee education and development were non-priorities. There weren’t any forms of reimbursement or support for individuals wanting to further their education. It was made pretty clear that further education wouldn’t be on leadership’s radar anytime soon, despite receiving hundreds of requests from employees on a global scale (makes sense why there are managers with no management training in place, right?). Keep in mind, Zoho customers are often as abusive as management. If you happen to be in a customer facing role, you are constantly harassed and discriminated against by customers because they don’t want to talk to someone in a “call center in India”—a constant misconception despite the fact we were a global company. I have personally witnessed extremely intelligent colleagues harassed because of their accents, yet this (like so many other issues) went unaddressed. Does it matter where your office is located or what your country of origin is? It shouldn’t, yet Zoho remained unbothered. All things considered, I suppose I should be grateful I was on the US side of the company because the Indian support team had to beg for one day off each week during internal meetings. Again, work-life-balance was great—clearly.
