Avantages
- casual environment - happy hours - good training - opportunities to win prizes (amazon gift cards, bottles of liquor, etc) through competitions This is a good job for someone who is interested in sales. Unfortunately, I found a lot of the people hired either haven't done sales before so don't know exactly what to expect coming in or didn't want to do sales but ended up accepting the job because they "had to" and realize this is not a good job for them.
Inconvénients
SALARY: base salary is really low. You could be hitting your minimum quota every month and only make a little over $30,000 per year. Few reps (maybe 15-20% out of the entire company) are making $40-45,000+ per year. They'll say in the interview that top performers are making up to $80-90,000 but keep in mind these are only a handful of people and given the stressful and repetitive nature of cold calling it's not common people are consistently performing at these levels. SALES RELATED: - sales is hard and cold calling sucks unless it's what you're really passionate about. you should think hard about whether you want to be making 100+ outbound calls a day trying to persuade people who don't want to buy your product to buy. I had never done sales previous to this job and overestimated my ability or desire to cold call. - can get stressful having to constantly worry about hitting quota. you may be above quota one week or even one month but then it resets and you start from scratch again. this might be a stressful work environment for some - a lot of times you can only control your success to a certain degree. you can't control how high quality the leads you pull on a certain day are or how receptive the people you talk to will be. you could be doing the exact same thing one week to another but not see the type of performance (sales) you saw previously. - the job gets very repetitive and mundane. you're cranking out calls everyday giving mostly the same pitch to merchants. CAREER GROWTH: - they'll show you a career path with quick opportunities for promotions but all these promotions mean is a little bump on your base salary (5k each promotion). the job you're doing stays the same regardless of whether you get promoted from rep to exec etc. - no good career advancement after you hit senior executive status. In the Austin office at least, a lot of management hires are happening from the outside. and after hitting the senior exec status you can either move to the account management side (which is generally a pay cut since there isn't much of a bonus structure involved) or move to national sales which is just more of the same cold calling. - after you've been doing the job for a couple of months you don't learn any new skills. MANAGEMENT: - micro manage - not very good at empathizing-- they act like cold calling is rewarding and fun and never address the common pitfalls it can have OTHER: - turn around is REALLY high. (within 9 months 99% of the people that were in the office when I started were gone) - employee loyalty is low. even if you've been there for a long time and have been successful the company doesn't do anything to reward your loyalty (like being lenient when having an off week or month) and generally act like you are disposable since they are hiring extremely rapidly.