Does anyone have information on working at Meltwater News? What is good bad? Cont. from old question.?

Question

Does anyone have information on working at Meltwater News? What is good bad? Cont. from old question.?

Answer 1

I've been working for them and I was quite successful but didn't like the job.

The good: They have a very exciting online media monitoring tool - probably the best tool in the rapidly growing market of online media monitoring. Given the quality of the tool, it's rather easy to sell. Thanks to it and the company's aggressive sales strategy, they are growing extremely rapidly, setting up new offices all over the world all the time. Most of the employees are young (mean age about 27) an very talkative and friendly. If you are smart, energetic and enjoy phone sales, you can earn quite OK money and have a fast career development. It's actually quite realistic, given the company's growth, that you can become CEO of a new small office, if you have been successful within the company for about 1,5-2 years, even if you are only, say 25 years old. (However, read below, before signing for them...)

The bad: The rigorous hiring process was in my view very misleading. The job itself sounds a lot better than it is. Even if you start as "International Management Trainee", which 90% of the employees do, there is no "trainee program" whatsoever, and you are expected to work intensively with cold calling 80-90% of your time during the first year or so and find all sales leads yourself. Your pay depends almost entirely on your sales results and will turn out acceptable only if you meet pretty high sales targets each month. If you are successful (most new "trainees" are not), i.e. bring in a lot of new contracts to the company, you will most likely advance to a Sales Manager position within a year. However, as sales manager, you do almost as much cold calling as before, with the only difference that you will now also be responsible for motivating 2-3 new recruits to do the same hard work. There are few positions in this company where you will not do cold calling (I imagine the client relations positions being slightly better in this sense, but there are few of them). Even the office CEOs spend a large part of their time on phone sales. The employee turnover is very high, because of what you have just read. I would guess that most (60-80%) of the new recruits quit or get kicked out within 4-5 months and only perhaps 5% continue on to become sales managers and beyond. One of my former colleagues who also left the company actually called it a sect, but that was a clear exaggeration in my view. Some people are clearly both successful and enjoy the job.