AT&T

I was always a fan of my direct managers that I had. Being close with them made the program bearable.

Great CRM integrations (i.e., Salesforce and others). Pay is great. Bonus structure is great.

Extremely cheap rent at the on-campus apartments.

Food is provided in the office during the program.

Classroom training is extremely beneficial; they do a lot to ensure your product knowledge.

Great prospecting tools are available.

Desks in the office are very flexible. You sit wherever there is a set of monitors available.

Company laptop, iPhone, and iPad Pro are provided.

The network of people you meet is incredible, whether you stay with the company or not.

The feel of the job is that of a call center.

Your day is mostly spent cold calling small to medium-sized businesses.

There was a lack of training people in having solid cold-calling strategies and talk tracks. I would have loved having managers cold-call in front of us for training.

There was a lack of formal prospecting training. Most of it felt like trade secrets around the office.

An inbound sales call program was introduced to help sellers hit their quotas. If you don't have luck with this portion of the program, you may be out of luck and not make it.

Even though this is an acquisition-based job, many sellers resort to converting current customers from old to new products (often reducing monthly revenue). This felt like it became the basis of success in the program. So, if someone wanted to focus on new logo acquisition, there wasn't much room for success given the long sales cycle.

The program felt overcrowded, considering the amount of space in the office. The business is growing, so it makes sense to have lots of us, but at the peak of the program, many sellers might have gone without desks.

Leaving the program was not necessarily something that I would have preferred.

If there were some way to truly reward selling new logos (outside of inbound leads), I think that the program could retain some great sellers. It seems that there was no real incentive to do true acquisition sales, which felt really discouraging.

If there could be more dedicated time for managers to show off their cold calling strategies live and in front of their teams, I think sellers could really benefit. I think that an increase in sales managers available would be helpful, considering how overloaded our managers were during the program. It felt hard to get time with my manager.

I think this program has so much potential, and I think it is taking steps in the right direction, but it will definitely take time to get there.