Going into my employment at Insperity, I knew PEO sales was complex and a long, consultative sale, not a quick transactional sale. They touch on it somewhat in the hiring process, but they try to downplay it, and I can understand why.
So the first con of this job is that the sales cycle is long for most sales. Now and again you hear of a unicorn sale that only took a week or two, but if you contrast those few and far-between stories to the rest of the sales made you would find that most sales take weeks, months, and sometimes years to complete.
The second con of the job is the training. You take three weeks of training early on in your career. The first leg of that training is prospecting where they teach you to work on a good elevator pitch and how to cold prospect using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Zoominfo, and Salesforce.
Note that the company does very little marketing and produces very few leads. I have received a lead so I can't say they do nothing, but they do very little. This job is about prospecting, making cold outreach, and networking with your centers of influence for referral business. If you're not down with cold outreach, this job is not for you.
On a side note, Salesforce is new to Insperity and for the most part, is a hot mess. They are trying to get it all pieced together and slowly but surely it is getting better. However, this month they just moved from a lead-based system to an account-based system. They had you identify your top ten accounts (high-value prospects) and said they were going to market to them on your behalf. However, when you ask about what marketing was done, or if there was any response, you get non-answers and no one knows if it was done, what the results were, and what to do next. The communication around this initiative is poor at best.
The second leg of training is how to conduct a discovery call, should you be successful in cold prospecting and getting a meeting set with a decision maker. They teach some good, basic selling skills in the week-long course like how to ask probing questions and respond to questions by probing for the real reasons behind it. These are good skills to learn but if you ever do a sales call with someone more senior than you, they rarely employ the APAC techniques they spend so much time training you on. Some may, but in my experience, I haven't seen it.
The least effective part of this training is that they portray this sale as a straight line. Make prospecting calls and set a meeting with a decision maker. Attend the meeting, present an agenda, ask questions about the business (being curious and conversational), share the Insperity solution, and tell the prospect you think you can help his or her business with one of the two Insperity solutions. Then collect a ton of business information from the prospect, including an Insperity Business Profile, an Insperity New Client Risk Review, and a Mutual Non-Disclosure agreement, the entire roster of employees, their age, zip codes, job, wages, which medical benefits they use and more. In addition, you are to get information on the various medical plans that the business offers, including recent billing and renewal notices as well as plan descriptions, information on their worker's compensation insurance for all states where they have employees, information on their state unemployment rating for all states in which they have employees, a copy of their employee handbook, claims history for their medical plan, and detailed cost information for all of their human resources administrative and compliance costs. The last one is difficult as most prospects do not know what these are.
They train you that this entire process should take about an hour from walking in the door, learning about the business, positioning Insperity as the solution, and gathering all of the information referred to above. It's not a realistic training by any stretch of the imagination.
It's only later, after you've failed to do it the way you were trained to do it that they explain that you need to be having several more "value development" meetings and conversations before and while collecting this cache of documents. So it's not a straight-line sale, it's complex, requiring many meetings and conversations with the prospect. I'm OK with this notion, but this should be discussed a lot more in the initial training.
Finally, you get trained on how to present Insperity's incredibly complicated pricing to prospects. To their credit, Insperity is very transparent with its pricing but it's displayed to the customer in a very complex document that needs to be unpacked for a long time during the proposal. What's more, they train you that this proposal is a valuable budgeting and forecasting tool that the business owner can use in business planning even if they don't become a customer. It's not, but it sounds impressive.
Insperity tries hard to provide good training. The people who run the training are good people, and well-intentioned, but none have ever had the BPA role. They teach a curriculum without ever having lived it.
Then you get into the real world.
Here's my real-world experience. As a BPA, your manager is known as a district manager and although each office is not a district, your sales manager is the district manager.
Your district manager has a regional manager responsible for hiring your district manager who reports to a regional vice president.
I have nothing personal against my regional vice president, regional manager, or district manager. I like them all. They are all good people with good intentions and have been mostly helpful when needed.
The con, for me, is my district manager, my direct supervisor, had never worked for the company. This person had been in sales for a couple of years at a competitor and was put in charge of the office where I work. This person has never closed his own business at the company and, in my opinion, doesn't know enough about how to close the Insperity sale. It's difficult to depend on a district manager to help you when that person has not done it for themselves.
We have a hybrid work model. Two days a week we come to the office for a meeting, the other three days we are free to work from home. You would think with such a complex sale that these bi-weekly meetings would be a good opportunity to train on all of the various complex parts of the sale. We hardly ever do any training. We give a forecast of our activity, sometimes there's a speaker from another part of the company but most of those have not been very relevant to the training necessary for success in this industry. 80% of these meetings are a waste of time when I can just email a forecast and not be forced into a useless meeting with no agenda or real value.
What's more the district manager has taught some things that have not sat well with me. For example, part of the prospecting training, and a part of the company culture is to do door-to-door canvassing. No problem, canvassing is old-school, but not a bad idea if you're in an area with some time to kill, make use of it, and prospect. My district manager however believes that canvassing businesses that have a "no soliciting" sign is good. He even went so far as to highlight how, at another company, he would play games with building security by hiding in elevators and sneaking around the building deliberately "messing with" building security. To him, going against the wishes of the various businesses by soliciting them, and getting run out of the building by security, is a badge of honor. To me, this is disrespectful and not how representatives of a Fortune 500 company should conduct themselves.
What's more is, recently, because "the company needs more activity," my district manager encouraged our entire sales team to ask prospects to just go ahead and complete all of the paperwork, and provide all of their business data "as a favor to help our office meet its activity goals." Seriously, a Fortune 500 sales organization resorting to asking prospects to do its sales team a "favor" because it will help us look better at Insperity is beyond the pale to me. It reeks of desperation. What kind of signal is that for the prospect?
Finally, because we are forced to use our personal mobile phones for business calls, we are encouraged, while prospecting, to call the cell phone of the prospect irrespective of the federal do not call list. We are not given the tools or training to know if we may be in violation of the do not call list when calling a personal mobile phone of a prospect.
I don't think the regional manager is aware of many of these issues, and I don't interface with this person very often. However, they were responsible for putting this inexperienced district manager in place and therefore created a problem.
Finally there is the regional vice president. I've had even less contact with this person since my journey began. But this person does habitually, while speaking to us, repeat again, and again how they have no life outside of Insperity, and how it's always been that way. All they do is live and breathe Insperity at the sacrifice of any outside hobbies or interests. It's incredibly de-motivating to think that the only way to get ahead is to so subjugate your life, hobbies, etc. to Insperity. I wish this person would stop saying that.
I wish I didn't feel compelled to share all of this. There's a lot more. Just remember this, Insperity is a good company that provides a valuable service to businesses. If you become a seller here, you can feel confident that you're delivering value. But think long and hard before you jump in. It's a very diffucult environment where things don't always make sense.
Insperity is in year two of a five-year plan of improvement. They constantly mention that we are not on track to meet that five-year plan's goals but never say where, how, or why.
