TDS does not appreciate its sales force - every year was a fight with senior leadership to not get taken advantage of. Any decent company who understands the value of a sales team will find ways to incentivize their sales reps, but not TDS - each year, there was less and less value in the position. Each year, more would be taken away. This is, of course, contraindicated if one wants to inspire a sales team to greater achievement. Poor top-down leadership. They would enforce rules that affect the rep's paycheck that would give the company every advantage in finding ways to cut commission payouts. They would rigidly hold to their rules, claiming that they had to be consistent for the sake of legality, but really it just helped them save money, because there are SO MANY things that can, through no fault of the sales rep, go wrong because someone else failed to do their job, or the system itself is flawed because it is not automated, but rather, based upon actual humans having to remember to click this or that, and check a box here or there. Which brings up the other issue, and a great irony - for a tech company, TDS is beyond reluctant to invest in technology. Their systems are archaic and totally outdated. Multiple platforms that are spreadsheet based and are not compatible with other platforms. We had NO CRM tool!! How is that even acceptable in a modern sales force? Oh, they had a spreadsheet all right...but a spreadsheet is NOT a CRM. And it didn't matter how many times we explained this to management, they just couldn't understand what the problem was. They are so behind the times, it's not even funny. They are total penny pinchers - they would sacrifice millions in potential business to save a few grand up front, I'm sure of it. Totally myopic in their vision. "Poor execution" when it comes to deploying new service in new markets would be putting it mildly. They would have our team going door to door, having us believe that customers would have their service up and running within 5 or 6 months, and to "sign up now"! And then, in town after town after town, they would fail to deliver. Then customers would cancel because they'd been waiting for service for so long, and TDS would charge the sales rep back for the canceled order! So in other words, we would make the sale, but wouldn't get paid for it because TDS failed to deliver the goods. So we got punished for their failure. It was beyond absurd. Highly unethical (which I pointed out to their abysmal failure of a VP), and, I suspect, rather illegal.
