Pros
Customers - Variety of products to sell clients - Colleagues (co-workers are Great and very team oriented) - You're able to manage your own time. hibu is a good training ground if you would like to learn about B2B and sales. It's fun to learn about different business and to build positive relationships with clients.
Cons
Pay - Back-office - EVERYTHING is outsourced over-seas, you honestly can't make any money as a Sales Rep when you are constantly getting calls from complaining customers because the product you sold them got screwed up by somebody overseas that has a name like John Wayne. If I had a dollar for every-time I got a complaint from a client about the oversea's staff I'd be retired by now. Some regions are good - Like the Milwaukee Office - that place rocked. Leadership went above and beyond to help the reps and customers. But come to the corporate headquarters - Forget about it. Local management wouldn't let you escalate anything above him, kept getting smoke screen answers and would never really step in to fix. They just say sell, sell, sell, but how can you sell, when your customer's just complain, complain, complain? They end up canceling because hibu forgot that customer service is the most important thing. If you want to compete in digital marketing you better not only offer a great product but be able to deliver that product. hibu fell short on the delivery by like 150%. My reputation started to suffer. I would get comments like, "We love you, but hate your company." And those were from some of the nice client's. I told a few that I was no longer with the company and I would get comments like - You can do SOOOO much better. Very sad. I loved what I did and taking care of customers. But when you get 2 to 3 customers a week calling to yell at you and even more sending scathing emails about things you can't control because it's a delivery issue it's very frustrating. The only thing you can do is to send and email or tell your manager (there is no phone number for you to escalate technical problems, it's ALL done by email). And if you don't stay on top of it, it get's lost in shuffle. Over time these 'escalations' add up, and to follow up on each one every day takes time. Local management would just say things like "It's part of your job." Local management increases your quota, pays you less and then expects you to field more complaints. If you are new to the company you are almost destined to fail. Tenured reps have much larger accounts and easier to sell the more expensive digital products which help you make you quota. But as a newer rep you get so many small budget accounts they can't handle more business nor do they want to. There had two clients I sold digital products to. Once you sell a product it get's handed off to a digital specialist for that product to create/deliver. Both clients ended up getting talked out of the sale by back office support. This happened twice to the same clients. One i was able to save and resell them them their product. The other ended up canceling, which cost me several thousands of dollars in revenue dollars for the year and cost me several thousands of dollars because I ended up losing my bonus. If you want to make money in sales - this isn't the place. It used to be, but not anymore. The company received a bad name after laying off huge amounts of people. If a customer hasn't had a bad experience with the company yet than chances are they had a friend or business associate that has and let's face it - word-of-mouth is still the best form of advertising - good and bad. If you're a serious sales professional and value your reputation in the community, you may want to think twice before working here. They don't know what they are doing. At least not in Cedar Rapids.
