I’d strongly recommend avoiding Account Executive roles at Extreme Networks. And yes, slightly disgruntled here, but truthful as well - and I'd want to know what I was getting into before joining a company. All companies have their issues, and Extreme is no exception.
The Account Executive role has been tough one for me and for others at Extreme. There are plenty of reasons why I would not recommend this role or the company.
This is a troubled company. Don’t take it from me, do some research. This is not a tech company getting ready to burst onto the scene. This is a 20+ year old company struggling to hang on, and is competing with HP, Mist and Cisco and two of the three are well established. Extreme does have cash on hand but has failed to make its financial commitments over the last year, and FQ4 ’20 isn’t looking good. The growth is through acquisition, but very little organic growth. The stock has been on a downward slope for months, and Extreme has missed several quarters in a row. One can blame some of this on Tariff wars and the pandemic, but these issues were present before the Pandemic.
I’ve also questioned the acquisitions over the years. I’m not sure of the total cost of the acquisitions, but it sure is higher than the value of Extreme Networks. Much higher. Not sure the there was a positive return on investment. Bad decisions? And don't take my word for it, just read up on if Extreme reviews from investment professionals. Is it a good long term investment. Most say, "No".
The company’s sole focus is cloud and wireless. If this works, then the company survives, if not, well, the end probably. There seems to be lack of focus on the “wired” business, which is baffling to most of the employees, since so many huge deals have come in over the years. Extreme says we are an end to end networking company, but there is no focus on half of one “end” The focus is now mostly with wireless and cloud management. management thinks wired sells itself. It doesn’t. Will Extreme abandon wired? A lot of support was abandoned on 4/15 with layoffs. Extreme will need to pull in some large new wirelesses customers to stay alive. I don’t see many Fortune 500 company investing in Extreme Networks. The stock hovers around $3. With large prospects, the lack of financial stability is a huge challenge to overcome for sales, regardless of what Extreme Executive shows up to pitch CloudIQ. Huge.
The company had the sales kick off virtually to save money. No big deal, but it’s a sure sign of the current financial challenges. Maybe this was to save money for the Aerohive acquisition or maybe it was because sales fell short of expectations. Probably a combination of both. Last year, there were layoffs to help pay for the Aerohive purchase. Recently, employee pay was docked a due to shrinking sales and the virus, 401K match was suspended. More layoffs occurred on April 15th 2020. Real classy move given the state of the world with the Covid crisis.
This is a serious consideration when taking a role here. Extreme constantly tries to find ways to avoid paying reps. I’d say less a fourth of reps make their number – this is a guess and the current trend, not fact. I don’t know what the industry standard is, but that seems low to me. The quotas were set well above possible achievement for most, last July. They didn’t encourage anyone, Extreme just saved some cash by not paying their Sales reps and others employees tied to the number - the Engineers and Inside sales reps. To make matters worse, compensation for maintenance renewals under and specified amount were taken away from reps, which meant it had to be made up with more product sales, so kind of a double hit for reps. Many of us received new or modified territories, which means new relationships need to be built and new opportunities needed to be uncovered, so making the number is proving even more difficult, and rumors of more changes in July. Quota’s are set by what the company needs financially, not by what is actually obtainable. You can’t just say – sell $6M this year. There has to be some rational behind it – a strategy, maybe some improvements in business development, improving the channel, advertising, and marketing behind the request.
The partner program is a disaster. I’m not saying the people are bad, it’s that there aren’t nearly enough of them to be effective – the model isn’t working and is short staffed. Some partner reps have hundreds of partners to manage. The end result is that the partners never hear from Extreme. If they aren’t hearing from Extreme, then they aren’t selling Extreme. Our partners likely hear from our competition several times a month. Guess what the partners are going to sell? Constant requests to fix or even improve just go ignored, in fact, they just laid off more channel reps. If you’re going to sell through the channel, you better focus on a having an effective program. As an Account Executive, you will be the channel rep most of the time and though this, should be part of your job, it’s going to take up a lot of your time.
In many areas, first and second level management turnover is high. It didn’t affect me much, but a sign of the drama and micromanagement higher up. Seems most new management is from Cisco and the new trend is that they are bringing all their friends with them. This is a horrible trend at many organizations, especially in sales departments. Bring in one executive, usually from the competition, then they weed out existing people and hire their friends. It happens everywhere, and it is definitely happening at Extreme.
Training is all online and ongoing. This is good or bad, depending on how you learn. There is no onsite training. If you don’t have a solid networking background, it will take some time to ramp up. Just something to keep in mind.
Resources are spread thin, from business development to sales engineers. Managers have 10+ reports. Everyone helps, but everyone is also overwhelmed. As a sales rep, you will often go to meetings on your own, which I think is odd, based on the technical discussions. Just when you think we can’t be any thinner, they let more people go. Do more, with less, for less, or else - this seems to be every companies’ motto these days, but it’s the daily life at Extreme Networks.
If you have no other option and decide to join Extreme in Sales, I would stay away from Enterprise and SLED Account Executive roles. Enterprise is struggling and SLED is very seasonal. There are some verticals such as hospitality, healthcare and retail that do much better than the generic SLED and Enterprise roles. They have many of the established accounts and seem to have free reign every July to take all the other accounts they want, and they do. There have been talks that this will be fixed, but it never happens.
If you do decide to join Extreme, don’t stop looking. The layoff threat is constant. The 2019 layoffs included new employee’s with the “last in first out” model in some cases. Extreme will likely miss FQ4, and if so, expect more RIF’s further out in 2020, and if another organization acquires Extreme Networks – well, you would eventually get laid off in that scenario as well.
