Unorganized, little support, unrealistic quota/ metrics, high turnover, INEXPERIENCED management
Pros
Staples was not a good experience for me and it may just be the Seattle office, but no one from my training class still works for Staples, and the training class has people from several states. My manager had numerous complaints about her when I started and nothing was done about it. I know this is the pros section but it's very hard to come up with positive feedback.. I made some great connections and enjoyed my coworkers for the most part. Truly enjoyed selling and had very high hopes after training, but it was very disappointing. It is near impossible to get fired I guess that's good.... one girl never showed up for team meetings and was just really terrible, rarely closed business and pretty much just stopped coming to work and didn't get fired. It was so weird. Maybe because the regional manager didn't want the numbers to look as bad for turn over. Who knows?!
Cons
Very high turnover as I mentioned. Sales is a grind and some turnover is expected but this rate is very bad. I was the most senior person in my role after only 6 months. I saw so many people come and go in such a short time and my regret is not getting out sooner. The metrics are very high and everyone ends up lying about them in order to stay out of the hot seat. This is sad but 100 percent true. I know I worked there and heard it from everyone. It creates a very toxic environment where you always have to be fluffing up the system, which doesn't do anyone any good, obviously. The territory is OPEN and the leads in the CRM are a disaster and many are duplicated. This leads to your co worker calling on the same account as you... this is a huge problem. Apparently there was a mistake and all of the leads got integrated in Salesforce incorrectly. It didn't get fixed so we were expected to manually fix it all on our own and work it out between us. So much wasted energy just trying to do your job! You literally drive all around in one day, because you go wherever you get a meeting. It's just not efficient. I spent so much time just trying to clean up my leads list and also doing double work. I really wish this hadn't been the case and my energy could be spent on effectively prospecting and strategizing. It was impossible. The commission is really low and complicated unfortunately. I asked the sales team about the commission structure when I was new and no one could explain it. I couldn't ever explain it either. It was hard to understood how it worked or what to expect each month. It's calculated on the profit margin and total sales dollars. The specialists I was told i could use did not have a clear process on working with b2bs and I always felt that so much business was lost as a result of broken/frustrating internal processes. You have to try to sell so many lines of business and being an expert on everything is crazy which is the point of the specialists but they for the most part do not want to work with b2bs and it becomes really tough to sell certain types of products - especially hospitality, furniture or furniture deals. Nightmare. Everything takes forever and the customer is over it by the time you can get information back to them. The internal support was cut numerous times while I was there. You have to call a sales support number to help you with questions in the field or setting up an account or to get pricing - at one point you could only ask a certain amount of questions and were told to call back again to ask any more questions - there were many layoffs of support people so it left b2bs really left hanging a lot of time. There is a terrible stigma in the company or at least in the Seattle office of the B2b role. Mostly people don't even try to learn your name if you are new because there is such high turn over. If you start making progress with larger accounts they will start to learn your name. Staples is a huge FRUGAL/cheap organization that does not value its employees or customers enough. Everything is based on BS metrics. The worst complaint is the pressure to sell the PREMIUM program, which is a 299 membership fee for a staples business account. It is a total scam and they threaten you of getting fired (even though they won't fire you) if you don't sell enough premium accounts. We are told to sell everyone a premium account even if we run the numbers and it's not cost effective for the company. It's so shady and so much pressure on the b2bs. There are meetings about how amazing this program but every single B2b knows how much that is not true from selling it and working with the customers. Be warned! It may not sound like it but I truly tried to make this job and company work but I'm just telling the truth of my experience.
