-If you have little to no sales experience you usually start out as a TRR (territory ready rep) and you split each sale with the designated rep for that territory. Getting half commission sucks, but after a year you learn all of the ropes and are very thankful for being promoted to manage your own territory.
-Sales is tough in itself, but I also believe some of your success depends on the territory you are given. After becoming a full rep I started out with a few zip codes around the city, and was also given an "expansion territory" an hour and a half south of my normal zip codes. This expansion territory, along with others, was very tough to grow. Only a few sales came out of it...so thankfully after 2 years Paychex accepted that the territories far away just weren't worth the time/money/energy to manage and stuck with the general metroplex zip codes to assign.
-Negatives. Negative sales suck SO bad. If you bring on a client and they do not process enough payrolls to be profitable to Paychex, you get negative commission. Sometimes if you are lucky, you can sweet talk the clients out of quitting early and changing their mind...BUT sometimes negatives cannot be avoided because of business partners splitting ways, other problems, etc and there is literally nothing you can do. Negatives only happen about 2-3 times a year, but no one ever wants them!
-The only other potential con are the partners you work with. You have partners for 401k, benefits and other "add-ons" to payroll to help you win a sale. Some partners are awesome and help you close the deal (which is the goal, duh!) and some partners just. are. not. great. people. They think their business is more important than yours and don't go out of their way to make the appointments you set, but yet they hound you to take them on lunches with your CPAs (CPAs are Paychex's biggest referral source, and only Core Sales gets to call on them) and then they "take over" the appointment if you let them. You can't let this happen, and must communicate with the partners that you do feel are overpowering and tell them straight-up what you want.