Get 18-24 months experience then get out.
Pros
I worked with about 3,000 22-28 year olds in downtown Chicago with an endless supply of vendors to take you to happy hour. It’s basically an extension of college. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was fun. Unfortunately, that is really where the benefits end. The sales training was mediocre, but the technology training was very well done. Get 18-24 months experience then get out.
Cons
The two biggest issues here are compensation and poor middle management. For HiEd, K-12, Healthcare, S+L, and MedLar you are based at $25,000k. This doesn’t change depending on seniority or performance. Commission is 10% of GP unless you have about $40k in profit for the month. At that point your base drops out and you get 16-21% depending on the total GP. To put this in perspective here are some numbers of a typical AM who has been there for 2-4 years; You sell $250,000 in a month at 8% GP netting $20,000 profit for the company and in $2,000 in commissions for you. If you do that every month you will earn $24,000 in commission and $25,000 in base for $49,000/year. You aren’t poor by any means, but it is far below industry averages and around 30% of what they claim during the interview. To top it off, if you fall behind 80% attainment of goal they don’t pay commission. They try to hide this from new hires so if you are just starting ask about it. Goals are often set a few days before the end of the month so this can be a surprise $2-3k hit. If it happens once or twice during busy season then you may quickly end up at $40,000 for the year instead of $50,000. Management is made up primarily of people hired from 1998-2005. In 2006 the company nearly doubled its sales staff so anyone with experience who wanted to be a manager got the job. This resulted in a lot of under qualified and under motivated individuals in management. To compound the issues, a lot of the people they started with are now on their teams. This results in a favoritism that is toxic. As people leave the company, their good accounts are given to the Managers friends, who then send their worst to the mid-level account managers, who take their worst and send them to the new employees. This is a huge issue in government sales since new entities are rarely created meaning that hand downs are the only way to get new accounts.
