Just an honest review - Sales Associate Professional Sports Publications Employee Review

While I have a lot of cons about this place I’ll try to keep it as objective and level headed as possible because I think it’s important people take this part seriously. While it’s just a job and you can always find another that is not how it will feel once you are here. The base salary as mentioned above is great, it’s hard to leave that. There are companies I’m sure are much healthier to work for that can’t match the base salary and you begin to feel stuck. There are many other issues pertaining to salary. Mainly that raises are few and far between. The base pay is sold as a salary but explained as a front on commission. Theirs is a constant running total for your career. For example. Let’s say you have a 10% commission (these are not their actual numbers I believe it’s closer to 18% but don’t quote me on it) you would have to sell 400k in sales to justify your base of 40k. Let’s say you only sell 200k your first year. The next year you can sell 450k and think you’re owed an additional 5k. You would be wrong because technically you are still in the red from year one where they paid you 40k even though you had only earned 20k in commissions. This is where the grey area is. Some people will say it’s totally possible to earn commission and others will say 90% doesn’t. There is truth to both of these statements. Commission is not something you should expect to earn in your first 1-2 years. The other issue I have with commission is that there is no way to track it. The only people who know how much commission you’re owed are the managers. You can do some math yourself but the issue starts to be with the way they structure their billing. They give advertisers and year to pay out what they owe for an ad. So you can sell something in year 1 and have no idea if it’s paid or not by end of year so there’s no way of knowing if you’re actually owed commission. Other than this if you’re happy with the base pay then you’re all set. The next issue is pertaining to micromanaging. I see a lot of comments talking about this. While micromanaging probably isn’t the best description for it I wouldn’t say I liked their management style. They have a script. If you stick to it you should be okay. There are some punches you have to roll with but that’s the same with any sales job. There can’t be a script for every scenario you’re going to come across but they have most of them covered. You are expected to make in the range of 200-300 calls a day which is a lot you mostly get answering machines and secretaries who know exactly why you’re calling and can be quite combative. This can get old quick. But I’m sure you’ve heard rejection is a part of sales which is true. Where management struggles is understanding the ebbs and flows of their business. Most of them worked for the company in the same role many years ago and fail to understand 2 things. 1: the world has changed and called Id is a thing. These places know exactly who you are when you call. 2: the business has a terrible wrap online. There are multiple bbb complaints and articles online talking about how deceptive their practices are. I will explain below momentarily. The other biggest issue in my opinion with management is that they don’t really help. Many of them think they could do the job easily but it’s not as easy as they think. We once had a manager try to get past secretaries just to show how easy it was for him to get denied on all ten calls he made. He just shrugged it off but that was the end of the calls for him. He failed to empathize with the fact that we had to continue to do that over and over for days on weeks on years while making half of his salary. They just think anyone that isn’t successful is a complainer and can’t work hard. It’s not as black and white as that. Some people just have lower thresholds for this type of work and that’s understandable. The managers also won’t help you besides give the cookie cutter advice of make more calls. The statements that this company values quantity over quality are all true. They think everyone should have a good response to negative criticism so you can expect a lot of that. They tend to compare you to other employees to draw a competitive spirit out of you but when you’re at an all time low confidence level and questioning yourself this isn’t always the best leadership or the kind of mentoring you need. Again it works for some people but not the vast majority in my opinion. The other thing I took issue with was the unwritten expectations. They want you to come early and leave late. The managers themselves won’t do this but they do expect you to do it or at least they’ll use it as reasoning for your lack of progress or advancement. Not meeting your sales numbers? Have you tried working more hours? If not they’ll have to start with that before addressing anything you’re doing in call. While they do listen to some calls, in all fairness this is done mainly when you are either new or dramatically underperforming or displaying a glaring lack of effort. They don’t do this to most middle of the road/ high performing employees. Finally there is the shady business tactics people mention. I’ve already touched on the lack of transparency regarding the salary but lack of transparency is the name of the game at PSP. Try calling their phone numbers. You most likely won’t get an answer if you do ask who you called. They will likely answer your questions with questions such as did you receive a call? Who called you? Etc. As a sales associate you are not explicitly told to lie but you are told to give impressions. Remember earlier when I said they’re target demo for employees is recent college grads? That’s because you’re supposed to sound like a student. You are told to say you work with the athletic department for whatever schools program you are selling at the moment. When you say you work with an athletic department it can mean two things. I as one entity work with another entity ( the athletic department) or it can mean what most people think. That you work at the athletic department. You are taught, when asked who’s calling, to say first name last name school name. Which implies you’re calling from the school itself. They may say they are not trying to give that impression but the number that shows up on their caller id is always a local number to the school. While the company does in fact have deals negotiated with the school (at least that’s how I understand it) you the employee don’t actually work with the athletic department. The publications are usually owned and published by PSP themselves with little to no cost the schools. It’s self funded through the advertisements. The pitch includes saying that the publication is in the hands of the heads of all the departments in the school. You’re even taught to examine companies and get specifics on what departments they work with to mention in the pitch. While it’s never exclusively said the point of this is to lead these companies to believe that their involvement will lead to more work at the school. The smarter companies know this is all bid based work and usually use this an objection during the sales pitch to which there isn’t much of a reasonable response. This is why people are saying there is no value to the product you sell. There really isn’t. Objectively. It does nothing to help the school or the companies. It only benefits PSP. In addition to the shady tactics outlined above the company will do things like give employees aliases or false names they can use to continue calling businesses that are familiar with a certain rep. The distribution of leads is also a grey area. I was told there was no rhyme or reason to the way leads for certain schools are distributed. You can imagine it’s much easier to sell ads for Ohio state football than it is to sell ads for bowling green states hockey team. Somehow someway the premier schools always seem to end up in either the best sales reps hands or the sales rep that has caught the attention of the management. (Not always performance based. I won’t say more but I’m sure you can deduce what I mean when you remember this company hires young college grads). When you ask management they will say one of two things. 1: you think we sit around all day and cherry pick leads? Or 2: why would we give out best leads to people we don’t think will give them the attention they deserve. They’re conflicting statements. Now for what is probably the most important thing to understand when reading this and other reviews. You will see good reviews and bad reviews. I highly suggest discarding the reviews from current employees. PSP monitors reviews frequently and will often ask employees to give positive reviews to offset the constant bad reviews. As you’ve read there is a high turnover. While it’s not always PSPs fault you can imagine most people who have walked through those doors have left bad reviews. I would suggest taking everything with a grain of salt. Some of the reviews are pretty open and honest. Others, one in particular that says anyone leaving a bad review just wasn’t cut out for it are laughably positive and are clearly current employees trying to save the reputation of a company they have been a part of for many years. There are quite a few other issues I have had with the company but most are antidotal and only serve to distract from what I can honestly say is a pretty objective review of the company. There are pros and cons and it really depends on who you are as an individual and what you want out of life. What I can say is that if you can survive here you can likely work in sales anywhere and be happy and successful. It’s probably the hardest product I’ve ever had to sell but it is sellable. I hope this helps with your journey.