Pros
Weekly pay, freedom to plan your day
Cons
Sink or swim environment, arbitrary sales goals/activity metrics, contract-based selling, auto renewing contracts, poor reputation, low morale, high turnover, crappy zip codes, highest prices in the market, hidden fees, unreliable service, lip-service from management. Imagine a prospect in Pittsburgh wants to buy a dumpster, they can call a 412 or 724 number and be directed to a call center out of state that can sell to them on the spot. If that call center can't close the deal, you are sent a stale lead, and prospects that become angry when you try to offer a lower price (I was told by a prospect that it was a very shoddy business practice). Apart from many many former customers, they mistreat their new ones by having no way of ensuring their "99.9% reliability rate" is actually true. Lets not forget, contract based selling isn't a slam bam thank you ma'am transaction. Closing deals takes months, and sometimes years of waiting for a prospect to be in a window of time that they can cancel with their current provider. No one in their right mind wants to spend hundreds if not thousands to leave a contract. Most people are unaware that they don't even have the choice to switch even if they wanted. On top of it all, many competitors will match or beat whatever deal you have. You can't sell to businesses that are associated with an account that already exists, as that goes to the account managers. You can't sell to national accounts, either. I can not tell you how many doors I knocked only to be fed horror stories of how they were mistreated. Try selling someone a dumpster when their neighbor has an overflowing dumpster that hasn't been serviced as it should. I had to respond to customer complaints that would take away from my time selling. Management failed to tell me about how every single rep with my territories failed within a year. If you don't produce, don't plan to have a job. Don't plan on taking a vacation either, because your call/proposal/and visit metrics have to be met regardless if you take a week off or not. The office has bad juju. Its full of ghosts. You need to burn some incense before entering as it is just a black pit of misery. Some very wonderful people work there, but my goodness is it gloom and doom. Thankfully you won't spend much time in the office but when you are prepare to take the blame for lost business and not generating enough revenue. Do you know how many dumpsters you need to sell to achieve your monthly sales goal? More than possible. It is a churn and burn sales job. You will need therapy by the time you're 6 months in because your boss will scream at you like a child, or just not show up to planned ride along days. You'll hear one day that the sun shines out of your butt, and then the next day get put on a PIP. The training consists of memorizing a corny script that you will have to recite, which quite frankly, is laughable. The local competition wipes the floor and is sweeping the market because people don't like to be locked into auto renewing, rate-increasing contracts. The garbage game is TOUGH to win. They'll tell you how bad Waste Management is for locking their customers in auto-renewing contracts, but Republic does the same thing, and pissed Waste Management customers are really the only ones you can go for. You will eat sleep and breathe garbage. The job gets very lonely and you very seldom hear the good things you do, only that you are somehow the reason people don't want to buy an unreliable and over priced garbage service. At the end of the day I was not proud to attach my name to a company that takes advantage of the people that put money in their pockets and food into their bellies. Treat your customers and employees well, and you'll thrive. Punishing customers who have stuck by you by continuously raising their rate is criminal. & once they find out how much more they can be saving with the local competitors, they're never going to return. I get it, you get what you pay for. But you are NOT getting what you pay for with Republic. I've witnessed grown adults cry in the office. Garbage drivers, as lovely as they were to me, they lie constantly about what they've serviced, and honestly, they're probably overworked. However , you can't correct them because they're in a union and will strike. God forbid. Also, you will not have much upward mobility here. Unless you want to become an account manager and get screamed at all day and do wrong by customers by constantly raising their rate and explaining why they need to pay for a service they don't receive :) Also 95% of the sales reps don't meet their goals, so good luck if you want to sip the Kool-Aid!
