What can you tell me about the sales culture at Chownow?

Question

Accepted Answer

It's probably a 6.5/10, I'd say the RepVue score is accurate but may even be a bit high due to low sample size. Unless you have no other choice in places to sell, avoid chownow. They have not had a solid senior sales leader in 5+ years. They keep turning over  VP's and refuse to hire from within (due to a belief that sales is the problem, not the fact the product has fallen behind nearly every competitor and the value proposition just isn't compelling compared with toast and others - the ICP they want you selling to is not interested in buying this solution when they can just spend more to get the best in class), leading to long lapses in leadership where one of the co-founders takes over sales and rips up the comp plans, territories, structure, etc every 6 months. There's no consistency and you can't be a professional salesperson in this company. The only people who are actually hitting goals here are those who have been established with the company for years and have hundreds of existing accounts that add new locations helping them get to their goal. Otherwise, you'll be working 60-80 hours a week to barely hit your ramp and quota. Then, without warning, they'll magically find some new data that didn't exist when they hired you and take away 90% of your old territory forcing you to start rebuilding your pipeline from the ground up. They have really bad data they use to make decisions - like looking at the average sales cycle length - because most of the senior salespeople are doing one-call-closes or not entering things in salesforce, they often show as closing a sale the same day the opportunity was created so their sales cycles are shorter and closing ratios are higher on paper. This leads them to make shitty decisions with territory changes - like "we're changing the territories in 2 weeks, and you'll have 30 days to close out anything in your pipeline before we transfer it to the new territory". I've had dozens of opportunities that have been developed from cold calls and my own prospecting that were in progress moved from my pipeline to others who eventually sold them a month or two later. I have been looking for a new role for a while now, but a challenge with having a relatively unknown company like ChowNow on your work history is that employers who are better known and/or better compensated will make huge assumptions about the company and assume it's not a SaaS platform, they think it's not a complex sale, and they brush you off for candidates that come out of orgs using MEDD(P)IC sales processes instead. ChowNow has so much potential but they absolutely have their priorities wrong. They spend an obscene amount of money on website redesign and rebranding nearly every year as though that's going to fix the product that is way behind competitors. Up until 2020, the product was "good enough" to take one of the top spots in branded online ordering platforms. Since then. many competitors have come out of the woodwork including all POS companies, and a bunch of new companies selling almost the same product as ChowNow. Customer attrition has been higher than new sales volume for a while now. I'd say less than 40% of the sales org hits quota, and the ones that do often rotate between hitting the number and missing it each month. The people who were always at the top of the sales leaderboard are still there, but the volume they're selling is about 1/2 to 1/3 what it was 4+ years ago (before covid). This is a dying company with no clear path forward. They missed their chance to sell in 2020/21 and are just floating along. There are likely to be more layoffs (there have already been 4-5 rounds of layoffs since the fall of 2021 depending on what you consider a layoff round). They moved many jobs offshore years later than they should have, including most all of the customer support team, menu data entry teams, and even parts of the product teams. Tj

Answer

There is no sales culture. Hard to have a true sales culture with a stagnant product in an extremely crowded space. This is not a sales organization.

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Chownow

RepVue Score

0

Chownow

71.57

Anonymous Q&A

What can you tell me about the sales culture at Chownow?