Zillow Reviews

Pros

Stands by core values, opportunity for growth, focused attention on investing in and supporting employees, great culture, great benefits.

Cons

Do not have any at present.

Pros

I was an inside sales executive at Zillow and first and foremost - Zillow is a great place to learn sales. I came in new to the sales industry and Zillow really puts you in a sink-or-swim environment. This is what you're day will look like - Log into Salesforce - Use their dialing system - Call around 60-150 people a day and try to sell them lead generation What I liked was that management will listen to... calls and give you good feedback but they are pretty hands off. Most of the customers you'll be calling - have probably been called by Zillow an average of 20-50 times per year. It can suck but it forces you to be a good salesman. You'll learn how to overcome resistance, create time constraints, demo, build your own follow up processes. Zillow is so quota focused (you hit your quota or you get fired) and they are pretty attainable, so you can't just coast. If you work your butt off and you have sales ability you should be able to make six figures. A lot of the sales managers I had were really good people that would listen to you and want you to succeed. You can really leave your work at work. The second you clock out you aren't even allowed to send an email. Even though this review is mainly negative - I would still recommend Zillow if you are serious about sales and want to build good fundamentals.

Cons

I started in early 2018 and left in early 2019 and this company is going downhill fast. I don't even know where to start. If you are sales/support (read: Denver hires) they don't give a crap about you as a person. It's the only job I've had in my professional career where they treat you like a kid. You are paid hourly and have to clock-in and out. You have to be there at 7:30 every morning even if you are... calling a region that won't be up for another hour or two. Limited vacation and they are really weird about quota relief. They have a policy where if you miss quota a couple times in a six month period you will get put on a final notice and let go. You have to get approval on vacation in advance and submit quota relief but you'll be scared to do that because you might be struggling that month. Want to take a vacation the last week of a month when you're at quota so you won't have stress? Tough luck. One of their core messages is "Zillow is a team sport" and it's the exact opposite. You'll be part of a 20 person team that is all calling the same accounts over and over and over. The people who do the best either spam emails (and never get in trouble for it) or call accounts that slip out of other reps name. I never once felt like I was winning sales because of my ability - it felt like I either got good inbounds or the timing was right when I called someone that a different rep demo'd a couple months ago. They have done a terrible job at setting up salesforce and their auto dialing system is terrible. They will raise quota yearly without giving you a raise. They hire like 4-5 new reps every month to a team because they know people will get burned out. When they launched Zillow Offers they started removing MAJOR regions and making it so you couldn't sell their anymore. I had friends in the Southeast that said Atlanta was basically 30% of their closings and they removed the city over night. They kept quota the same and basically said start selling crappy zip codes that agents don't want. You'll go into a company sales meeting and they will waste your time saying stuff like "EVERYONE BE A LION. GO OUT AND HUNT" instead of talking about the things that matter to sales people like inbound lead flow or getting better data in the CRM (hmm maybe put a field for zip codes they've bought in the past...) . They don't really care about their customers. They know there are major zip codes that deliver crappy leads because they still put their contact form on underpriced/unsellable plots of lands and when the agents complain they tell them tough luck. Prices got so outrageous that I felt guilty going over ROI and showing they would be lucky to even get a 1.5x ROI in most regions. I checked back in and probably 30%+ of the best sales reps (many who had been there since Trulia) finally decided to leave. In the end it's all about the money. You can sell hot, treat customers like crap and email spam as long as you hit numbers.

Advice to Management

The way you have your sales org is problematic. There aren't enough inbounds to go around and you treat revenue growth as a problem you can throw sales reps at. You have veteran sales guys that can crush demos cold calling 150 people a day. You have amazing sales people at Zillow but don't utilize them correctly. It really feels like you could lay off half of the sales force - feed more inbounds to top... reps and automate check ins/hire a business development company to set appointments and you would save on labor and keep your top reps happier. Find a way to segment your market better so your customers don't get bombarded with 100 calls a year. Be more flexible with your employees. Make quota harder to hit but penalize employees financially instead of having them worry about losing their job.