Vantaggi
Training: Gartner provides a sound ENTRY LEVEL sales training. Those lacking a Tech background or sales experience can get up to speed on major technologies and how they impact businesses. Gartner will also provide basic training on how to run a sale cycle. Culture: Lots of PTO and the upper management puts in a lot of effort to make what could be a mundane job fun. The culture is amazing - people are generally motivated and happy to come to work. Most people in the office are friends since 75% of us relocated from out of state. The little perks such an annual beach day, team outings/happy hours and beer in the office on Quarter closes are fun. Advancement: The reps who perform have a lot of different career paths to choose from. Going into Management or becoming a Field Rep tend to be the most common advancement paths. Gartner will provide a lot of support to performers who communicate they want to go into Management. IF you are closing deals, it is easy to advance. Random: Great foot in the door company to the technology industry. A lot of companies will head hunt Gartner Employees - especially the top performers, so this job can set you up for a great Career. You learn a lot about both sales and technology your first year and get first hand experience managing clients and selling business. If you achieve 130% of Quota, you win an all expense paid trip for 2 called Winners Circle. 2015 Winners Circle was to Hawaii, I sold enough to attend and the experience was amazing!
Svantaggi
Training: The Training (8 week process) is very entry level. This is not training for someone with Technology Sales Experience. If you are coming from another sales organization, the recruiters will oversell you on how effective the Gartner training is. That being said, the training is great for someone straight out of college but I would be cautious if you're coming in with prior Sales experience. Culture: Life at Gartner can become somewhat 'Culty'. Management will not tolerate anyone talking bad (or even venting) about their frustrations. Employees who do not 'drink the kool aid' will get phased out of the company. We're required to dress up for team theme weeks 4 times a year during each quarter close (the theme weeks can be fun at first but get tiring over time). There is an odd contradiction between professionalism and the Gartner Culture - We sell ourselves as Strategic Business partners to our clients, but the majority of Account Reps are 23 year old former fraternity brothers running around shooting nerf guns at each other. Advancement: Gartner SMB division requires you to move to Fort Myers, Florida. The recruiters tell you that you'll come down to Florida, put in your 2 years then get placed nation wide in one of the many Gartner offices. That advancement path is very possible, and many employees do get placed nationwide, but the SMB Management will fight to keep you in Florida (aka making money for their division). It is much easier to get promoted within the Florida office rather than get placed at another Gartner Office in a bigger city. In short; promotions are VERY achievable, but they will try and keep you in Florida as long as possible. Random: No sales-centric CRM . Reps are given an excel spreadsheet with about 200 company names. They have to Google to the companies to find the numbers and contacts themselves, which is very dull and time consuming. The spreadsheet gets shuffled at least once a year, so you have to re-research all new companies halfway through the year. Certain Managers are very process driven - almost robotic - and will require their team to hit very specific metrics (dials per day, meetings per week, ect). Gartner overall is great with PTO, but they get really weird about Reps taking time off for Christmas because it is so close to the end of Gartner's Fiscal year. Lastly, Gartner has hired a lot of Fraternity College Grads in the last 18 months and the environment is becoming very "bro".