Sliding Towards Mediocrity - Account Executive Expel Employee Review

Expel is a great case study of how the collapse of a strong culture can crush a business. All of their wounds are self inflicted. They went from an expensive CKO in Miami to layoffs so quickly you have to question what leadership is doing right now. The thing that originally made Expel’s culture special was how they did things their own way. There was a pride in not being like every other startup and security company. But then they hit that coveted “unicorn” status and it all fell apart. Expel became so obsessed with keeping up with their more established competitors that they completely lost their identity. Questions of “why are we doing things this way” were answered with “because that’s how other SaaS startups do it.” A new CRO came in, whose previous organization only had 1 competitor. In my opinion, not only is she incapable of uniting the efforts of Sales, Marketing and Customer Success but she has no idea how to compete in a space as crowded as MDR. She hired way too many AEs. Territories shrunk. Quotas became unrealistic. Marketing couldn’t create demand. Leads dried up. Sales did too. Desperation entered. So did a pushy sales motion hidden behind Force Management Sales Training. Under-qualified middle management exploded along with micromanagement and abundant Forecast calls. Internal NPS scores reflected a slide towards mediocrity that was so sudden, leadership had no idea how to address it. The culture didn’t scale. It disintegrated. Enter layoffs and and a new air of uncertainty around future employment any time the company misses the number. And almost nobody in Sales is hitting their number. It’s abysmal.