The compensation plan was changed four times in the six months I was there, in fact the first (major!) change took place in between the time I accepted the job offer and the day I started. The recruiting material initially indicated a target of 150K, then it was shortly revised down to 100K and by the time I left, even as a top performer the real compensation was about half of the number discussed during recruiting. There might have been barely one or two reps who just cracked into six figures but it was extremely rare. I personally don't understand why any company would want to be deceptive with the salespeople they hire, we're just going to move on if you sell us a bill of goods.
However, the much bigger problem I experienced in the last month or so of my employment was the Neaderthal-like behavior of a VP while leading a quarterly sales meeting. During that meeting, among countless inappropriate comments and profanities in front of over a hundred employees, this age 50+ individual actually singled out a very young female salesperson and mentioned that he would make out with her and then glanced at one of our openly gay colleagues and told him that he wouldn't do it with him. It was one of the most bizarre incidents of my professional career, as I watched women in the audience cringe and some of my gay colleagues roll their eyes and shake their heads. Quite a few of us in the audience looked at each other in disbelief, not sure how that could even happen in the 21st century.
I struggled with what to do for a week or so and then I decided the right thing to do was to bring it up to HR. I have a daughter who is about to enter the workforce and I consider it everyone's responsibility to stand up and expose people with power who display such appalling behavior. Initially I thought HR was appreciative of my actions, however within 2 weeks I was placed on a PIP mid-month, even though I had never missed my sales quota since passing the 3-month probation stage. 2 weeks after that I had a meeting with my manager where he handed me my final paycheck and said the company decided to "separate". This happened within a week of the end of the month, which was the very first time I had missed quota, although I was definitely not at the bottom of the list and was ranked in the top 10% at the end of the previous month. HR had already stopped returning any of my calls or emails so to me it was fairly obvious what was going on; feel free to draw your own conclusions. I was never able to reach anyone else in the company, my last expense report of nearly two grand was never paid and that was that. Fortunately, I was able to find a much better position with much better pay within three weeks and I moved on.
