SMC does not invest in their people! Your are a just a tool that leverages your hours for more market share in North America. SMC's latest management decision is to hire more direct salespeople and more distributors in effort to execute the "Lanchester Strategy" .
As an salesperson you can choose product/industry specialist route or sales management if you want a career path. Remember, your titles and responsibilities can change but your salary is frozen wherever you go. Personal accomplishments are not recognized and rewarded with equal compensation. There is no real investment in salespeople as training is all about "the product".
SMC does not have many long term fluid power or industrial automation veterans left within their ranks, as many of the goods ones have jumped ship to Festo, Parker and other technologies. My guess would be SMC sales force in 2010 maybe a little over 500 and maybe 75% have been there less than 4 years.
Long deliveries used to be the main complaint because people didnt want to wait 4 to 6 weeks from Japan. They have improved there delivery times and seem to be getting better. Now the biggest internal problem is there are multiple distributors overlapping each other and just shuffling their market share. It is not uncommon to find areas of the country with over 10 different channels calling on the same customer.
