AT&T

Excellent tools and resources to find sales.

Unmatched benefits.

Rapidly changing industry.

Business relationships with select customers.

Everyday brings something new.

You will hate working at this company in a sales role. You will have zero motivation to come to work. You will be miserable.

Unrealistic workload: 70+ hours a week is the norm to even keep your head above water. In this role, you will be essentially working three jobs: sales, order manager, and billing manager.

Every single wireline sale I've placed this year has been royally screwed up in either billing or ordering. I have lost multiple sales because of a billing/ordering problem that is beyond sales' control. This obviously makes it incredibly difficult to hit your already unrealistic monthly quota.

How is it possible that EVERY SINGLE SALE GETS SCREWED UP BEYOND REPAIR? HOW?

As an anecdote: I have a customer with whom I have an incredible relationship. He was choosing between a product he would need to manage and was wildly more expensive, or AT&T's, which was (shockingly) less expensive and he wouldn't have to manage it.

Because of a back-end office billing problem beyond sales' control, he decided to go with the more expensive product that would cause him more headache than the AT&T solution and was a worse fit, all due to the incompetent billing/ordering people.

You will be the whipping boy for your customers. You do not get paid nearly enough to get cussed out, relationships ruined, and made to feel like a worthless human being because AT&T can't seem to ever have any flipping order get installed smoothly nor not have billing screw up.

Management is a nightmare. The culture is incredibly toxic and akin to playground schoolchildren. Those who don't suck up and drink the Kool-Aid are ostracized.

Make a suggestion to management on how to streamline some process? Expect an hour-long one-on-one with your VP where you are shredded to pieces because you "spent time coming up with an idea rather than spending time selling."

Quotas and commission change at the drop of a pin. There truly are no redeeming qualities in working in a sales environment at this company.

You hired your sales people to sell, let us sell!

We are working three different roles: sales, order manager, and billing babysitter. Anyone in a non-customer-facing role is incredibly lazy, incompetent, and refuses to take ownership. Who takes the hit? The sales people.

Every sale that I have had on wireline has either been cancelled and re-ordered, was installed improperly, or has a billing catastrophe. To rectify this so that we don't lose the relationship with the customer, your sales people have to babysit every single ordering and billing, which wastes the time in our day when we could be selling.

Further, because these ordering and billing problems have only increased in scope and frequency, your sales people are quickly losing motivation to sell when they know that things will not go well with the sale. We hate the fact that these incompetent billing and ordering managers you hired control my paycheck.

Why should your sales people be punished on commission (and future opportunities with customers) when it is a screw-up of the back office billing/order people? It's not our job to babysit these people all day to ensure things go smoothly.

How about instead of making your sales people the ordering and billing managers, something we don't even get paid on to do but have to do at the expense of precious selling time in our day, you hire a "babysitter" per sales team (sales manager level, not market level) who can take this off of our plates?

But no, even bringing this (which clearly helps our sales people) up to management will probably result in a one-on-one with my VP and getting yelled at for an hour. Never mind.

And you wonder why it seems that just about every sales person is on a CAP, struggling to hit their numbers, depressed, or just up and quits.