Company: Microsoft
Date: 2015-07-07
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Microsoft sales role review.
Pros: Outstanding Cadillac benefit plans. Stock ownership for all employees from day one. Great earnings potential. Fantastic facilities with 5 star dining and free vending machines in break rooms. Very professional atmosphere with high quality coworkers.
Cons: Management style. Microsoft has a management style that I felt discouraged top performance. High priority is placed on sales forecasting to the point that I spent 65% of my time each week in forecast spread sheets and forecast reviews with management. The culture set by management is also a throw each other under the bus culture. Typically sales were performed by sales teams of various Product Specialist Technical Sales Experts and Account Managers. If a team lost a sale to a competitor, management would schedule a conference call with the team for a loss review. During the call the manager would often ask each member of the team who the weak link on the team is that caused the team to loose the opportunity. The legacy Microsoft employees would immediately begin throwing each other under the bus. Having come from an IBM culture where we truly worked as a team, watched each others back and typically had "air cover" followed up by coaching from our managers, I found the Microsoft throw each other under the bus mentality to be very detrimental to to building a good close cohesive sales team where the members were motivated to trust each other and work together in a positive way to be successful. It appeared that back stabbing was expected and eagerly applied by employees in an effort to safe themselves or try to get brownie points. I found it to be a very negative and demoralizing approach to team sales..