Company: IBM
Date: 2017-04-26
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

IBM is a tough place to succeed as a growth seller serving mid-market and enterprise clients
Pros: There is great technology innovation at IBM, in line with the strategy of becomming more product-driven and less relationship driven. If you want to invest in your knowledge and skills, IBM will help you do that, and does provide great and continuous enablement. Sales people have a lot of autonomy to meet their numbers, which means you'll run your own deals, and also boils down to competing for ever-scarcer resources at a time when revenue continues shrinking.
Cons: In six years I have had have five roles. I joined for one role, and found another when the first role was clearly going away. After that, I wasn't asked or consulted about the other moves...just woke up with a new job each time and found out afterward. While each one has been a deep learning experience, no one seemed to care if I would be good at it or even survive. And it seems that about 80% of colleagues in that position were gone after two years. So IBM = I've been moved. Work fast if you want to build a relationship with your manager. I was assigned to seven in six years. All this can be very alienating. Worse than the change of jobs is the change of clients.  If you value building lasting relationships with clients, forget about doing it at IBM, certainly in all but the very largest revenue-generating accounts that have dedicated teams. In many cases it took at least six months to a year to gain sufficient trust to have honest conversations with clients (which is where real sales forecasts come from by the way). And by then, I was reassigned, the the client's sense of not being important to IBM was only reinforced.  But IBM managers know this. We talk about it all the time.