In the group I was in, we were expected to be "available" to the job 24x7, regardless of family obligations, personal life needs, blizzards, etc. The IT infrastructure is a cluster (you know what!) with too many systems that can't communicate with each other which makes it extremely time consuming to produce all the reports required from sales reps. And be ready to drop everything to spend an entire day collecting data to generate a spontaneous report request from a middle or upper manager. Then you'll be criticized for having not spent time selling. Overall, 20% of my time was spent on actual sales-generating activities. The other 80% was dealing with internal report requests, pointless conference calls, training sessions that 50% of were a waste of my time, making excuses for why Ingram shipped incorrectly or didn't ship as promised, or a plethora of other operational mistakes largely due to the mess of an IT infrastructure or lack of accountability.
I spent more time going to Buffalo for mostly useless meetings, presentations etc than I was allowed to spend with my customers! Customers only bring revenue you know. Without exception, all my customers frequently commented that they wanted to see me more than once per quarter, but my manager wouldn't allow that. Tech Data filled the gap. Poor management by inexperienced or unqualified personnel costs sales. Too much time is spent on "reactive" rather than "proactive" activities.
Customer issues come out of sales commissions. Issues that occurred before I was even employed at Ingram were resolved by crediting the customer and taking money from my commissions. I'm not sure that's even legal, but it happened. Probably still does.
