What used to be great, is now just OK
Pros
- Being a leader in the EDI space, SPS is brought into many sales cycle just based on name recognition. - Additionally, their partnership with companies along the supply chain (retailers, 3PLs, ERP providers) also leads to inbound sales. - Have the benefit of selling a product that is not optional, suppliers HAVE to buy EDI in order to receive purchase orders from many retailers. This creates a required budget for companies - only question is who are they going to buy from. - Health benefits are exceptional, provide an employee stock purchase at 15% discount, provide 5 weeks of vacation after 7 years (which is ok, not great), do provide paternity/maternity leave fully paid of 6 weeks after 7 years, retirement match is 4% on 6% - Commission earnings are uncapped - Tenure at leadership provides stability on expectations - Training process has much improved over the last few years, but is still geared to those new to sales - Have made drastic improvements in implementation and customer support
Cons
- Have abused their leadership in the market to price gouge customers - Deceptive sales approach, including have exorbitant list prices that are drastically discounted to appear like customer's are getting a huge savings - when in reality we are instructed to lead with 50% discounts in many cases. Since SPS does uncapped annual price increases (sometimes as high as 15%), customer's will eventually be brought up to the list price. Also over promise on implementation timelines and customer support response. (I believe at one point this year our billing department was taking over 2 weeks to respond and general customer support was taking over 8 days. - Do not value or pay for experience, performance or tenure. All reps in the Strategic Account Executive role have the same base salary and OTE for commissions. You could be recently promoted to the role or been a top performer in the role for 10 years....you both have the same total OTE compensation. - Erratic and inconsistent compensation within roles. Some reps make 13+% per dollar sold, others earn 5%. Some reps have territory quotas of $400k and some are $950k. If both those reps hit their quotas, they will make the same amount of money. - Inability to innovate products outside of EDI, constantly attempting to repackage old ideas. Does not appear to have a strategy for when the entire market pivots away from EDI (their core product offering) - Management generally feels that everyone in this role is expendable and replaceable - and this plays out in their approach to customer service
