Long, tedious, difficult sales cycle
You are the highest priced vendor in a cost cutting environment
Market is saturated with other vendors
You must understand how employee benefits work and how they are administered (it takes time to know the numbers inside and out)
Ability to understand math and how proposals are built
You will experience a lot of turnover on the sales side (sometimes 6 or 7 new BPAs in six months) aka don't get close to the person beside you. They may not be around for long.
Putting together numbers and a deal takes a lot of work. You could spend days putting together a proposal for nothing.
Outdated CRM. Think no Salesforce. No integration with Outlook.
In larger cities a re-tread of potential clients. Calling on someone who was just called on.
Heavy emailing, cold calling and in person visits your first year.
Few to zero leads from corporate
Heavily metric and activity based managing.
Unless you are familiar with this industry or have connections with medium sized business owners you will STRUGGLE initially. This job is not for beginners or entry level.
In the end, for success it really depends on what office you are joining, the amount of tenured BPAs and most importantly your direct reporting manager. If you can find a place that has all of those in order this is a great job. You join a office with one or two of those items out of place you will struggle and probably won't make it to year 2. At the end of the day this is a hunter driven, aggressive B2B sales job. At least until you are able to build your own book of business and have new BPAs bring you deals that you split credit and commissions with this job will be a lot of rejections. If you can get to year 2 your odds of success increase dramatically.
