The Advisory Board Company

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I started at The Advisory Board as my first job out of college in DC. It was totally not worth it. Make some friends during orientation and one by one they will be fired or quit within 6 months. Ironic that a company that promotes best practices in leadership cannot produce competent management.

 

The Advisory Board Sucks

Plain and simple The Advisory Board Sucks. It was started out of someone's closet in the 90's. The majority of middle management and upper management have never worked anywhere else. It is a Stepford Wives culture. If you aren't pretentious you are not going to fit in. To fuel their growth they hire and pay kids right out of college from Ivy League schools 30k a year to live in DC. It is hard to say what the turnover rate is...probably as high as 50 or 60 percent per year. The one good thing they have going for them is that they are acquiring good technology companies. If you want to work for a healthcare consulting firm work for Deloitte. Be warned. The Advisory Board Sucks.

 

Unfortunately, I had a pretty similar experience. I thought I was accepting a "marketing" job, but that isn't at all what it was. I was basically a telemarketer. In the MA job all you do is cold call hospitals to schedule sales meetings for your "marketer" (salesman). Pray that you get a good salesperson. Your sales person will make or break you. You have a quota of meetings that you must schedule per month; this is the only factor that matters to management in terms of job performance. If you hit your meeting number each month you'll be on the track for promotion; if you don't, you'll be fast tracked for firing or being forced out of the company. That might sound like a normal sales job, but this is an extremely cut throat environment.

The pay was awful and the hours were long. Management will schedule mandatory "early start" days where you have to come in before 8:30am, and you work until after 5:30pm to keep up. For 35k a year it just wasn't worth it.

Your success completely depends on your outside sales person. Oh, and on the gatekeepers. And on how many other ABC products a hospital has. And on 100 other factors. ABC has been using the same business development strategy for years. Hospitals get upset because ABC telemarketers are bombarding them with calls every day.

In addition to meeting your monthly meeting quota, you're supposed to do the follow up for meetings that your marketer already had. You make $0 on these follow up calls. But don't worry, your marketer will get a nice bonus.

Management is inept. They do little more than harass you on why you aren't reaching your meeting numbers. Advisory Board is notorious in DC for its absurdly high turn over. From the group who started the same time I did, more than half quit before 6months and the rest quit shortly thereafter. The embarrassingly low employee retention rate seemed to not even be on managers' radar since the company has its pick of recent college grads desperate for work. Also, instead of actually being paid for your work you'll compete for incentives like happy hour with your team. This is supposed to somehow motivate you to work harder, while treating you like you're 5yrs old.

Don't get me started on the "scripting" either. What a joke.

The marketing associate role is a high-stress, un-stimulating position, and you'll be working your ass off for pennies. Management only cares about whether you hit your number, not about updating their business development model or actually managing people and investing in their human capital.

Working at The Advisory Board is awful.

 

Make sure you ask about ABCs training. They control what you say through scripting.