Steer clear and avoid at all costs if you value a strong partnership, ownership and accountability
June 02, 2022

Steer clear and avoid at all costs if you value a strong partnership, ownership and accountability

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CIENCE

We are a small, but mighty team. We Needed Cience's help in the top-of-the-funnel lead generation/appointment setting with stakeholders who fit our target persona.
  • They set a few quality meetings for us
  • STEER CLEAR- their company and model are a mess. We had a kickoff call in February with our "team" and by mid-May, none of them were still with the organization. We were never looped in on this turnover and as a result, there was a total diffusion of responsibility. Beware of the "10-20 day onboarding period" ours was more than 30 despite the fact we proactively provided them with a 15+ page playbook detailing everything they needed: 1) Target personas 2) Objections and counters 3) Product info 4) Company history 5) Talk tracks 6) Etc. Every ball that was dropped was on their end and there was a complete lack of ownership and accountability from their leadership team. The only person who took ANY ownership was our CAM, who was let go as part of a massive company-wide layoff. Their whole organization is a mess.
  • We made numerous coaching asks of their team after hearing in the call recordings that the SDR was deviating from the script completely and had no idea what they were talking about. Their message was, "We help HR leaders retain talent so that they can promote their talent and not lose existing talent"--- the most generic of pitches and not at all related to what we do. They continuously referred to it as a "system" when we are a professional coaching organization. We coached continuously on every biweekly call and gave them suggestions, none of which seemed to get back to the SDR as they continued to repeat the same mistakes and even went far as pushing a prospect to take a meeting when she was in a rush because "I get incentivized from meetings booked over the phone."
  • Despite our continuous asks, there was no collaboration. Our landing page mockup featured companies that weren't even customers of ours and would've been catastrophic to our brand had it been released. We never saw a mockup of this until the last minute and ended up having to do the entire thing ourselves despite them selling us on the fact that it was something they could handle.
  • We got 5 meetings in 3 months
We evaluated a lot and went with Cience based on positive reviews. We are now so snakebit from a terrible experience with them that I am not sure we will go this route with any other partners again.

Do you think CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with CIENCE Sales Development (legacy)'s feature set?

No

Did CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) go as expected?

No

Would you buy CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) again?

No

If you are an organization that values collaboration, organization, attention to detail, coachability, and willingness to listen and take feedback, Cience is not the "partner" for you. You fork over your entire 3-month payment upfront with no guarantee of return. What ensues is them checking the boxes with no ownership and accountability along the way. Maybe if you're a drastically simple widget, Cience would work, but if you have a professional services product or something that clearly needs its value props well-articulated, steer clear. You will be burned and they will not work with you at all to take corrective measures, only kick the can further down the road without owning their mistakes.

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