World Book reviews

-Very poor coaching and growth experience (I'd say the worst I have had in my career, by far) - no time spent to shadow, coach or even learn and understand skills of employee, no development personal and professional goals, limited tracking of progress -Equally as poor training - about 3 days of training to learn very complex online educational databases, then we were expected to start calling and assisting customers - nearly no training on purchase process and renewal process -Poor onboarding experience and not setup for success -Lack of collaboration between teams - when asked for help, other employees are allowed to lash out on phone calls and in email. Extremely unprofessional and a general lack in any kind of communication between teams (between Customer Success and sales, customer service, marketing, billing/accounts, HR) -Almost nothing done to help connect teams and ensure any collaboration (for reference, the company is maybe 80-90 people and I met about 10 or so when I was introduced/'onboarded' with the team) -Limited information on commission pay-outs - you are expected to construct your own report, in order to determine commission (no number is tracked for this) -Stingy PTO policy - accruing only 10 days throughout the year to use -Culture of overwork - employees would mention how they were working away on things on the weekend and late nights and this was not met with any resistance from management

- Little to no resources are provided. Aside from a phone allowance and mileage that is capped per month at an unrealistic number, you're on your own. You have to pay for your own laptop, printing, meals when on the road, luggage to carry your book samples, office supplies, etc. - Not only are there no yearly performance reviews (that usually come with a cost of living salary increase), but you actually now have to hit a certain goal to even keep your base salary year-to-year. - There are no professional development opportunities internally or externally. And there is zero room for upward mobility (at least in sales). - Company culture is the worst that I've ever seen. You can count the number of happy sales people here on one hand after a 4th of July fireworks accident. - Interest in World Book products is steadily dwindling. Print encyclopedia sales continue to decline (it's 2021 after all), World Book Online subscriptions being cancelled far outweigh new business subscriptions, and non-fiction (which has been the only growing segment of World Book) is nowhere near enough to bridge that gap. - Not only do you have to compete with other publishing companies, but you also have to compete with World Book. New Business Development reps call into your territories for online business, if a customer orders through Amazon or WorldBook.com you won't get commission credit for it (or even know about it), and I've even heard a rumor that Marketing gets commission on orders received via direct marketing campaigns that they e-mail your customers. - Speaking of Marketing, I don't know how a department could be any more useless. Instead of working hand-in-hand with sales to try and help drive business for the reps, it's almost as if they just do their own thing, There is zero communication. We don't know when e-mail campaigns are going out, what the content of those campaigns are, etc. We only know when we see them in Salesforce. We'll have a print promotion running for a certain month, and instead of marketing helping us with e-mail outreach, they are e-mailing about something completely different. We can't even get flyers or PDF's to send customers, and the ones that we do get look like they were done by a high school intern. - Customer Success and Customer Service are both understaffed, which means they aren't very helpful. There is no proactivity - everything is reactive and Customer Service pushes almost everything back on the sales reps. - The customer experience is AWFUL. We make it so hard for customers to order. Management has no idea how hard reps have to work just to cover up the archaic way that World Book does business.