Dated and antiquated technologies, too many redundant mandatory meetings that conflict with valuable selling time. Management is very hands off when you need them for anything, but are quick to spot and point out deficiencies in your work when it's time for evals.
With inside sales we're expected to call on the same leads in our small book of business to somehow regularly uncover new business, we call cycle them over and over again until we do which creates a borderline call center environment. As you begin to saturate your territory with your presence and build relationships over the course of your tenure this becomes increasingly difficult and unrealistic to sustain as there's only so much potential to work with once you start gaining momentum and winning key accounts, especially if your territory alignment doesn't change much.
Being hourly employees there's not enough time in the day to complete the tasks we're graded on and anything done outside of logged calls and e-mails isn't considered actual 'work' in the eyes of leadership which leads to a stressful and overwhelming race to satisfy a call count before you have to call it a day. It's as if the people that provide directive have never worked a day in the job to understand what we actually deal with.
Meanwhile on a daily basis we're expected to plan for the next day, do market research on our customers/industries, submit collaborative cases with other internal channels, find time to conduct business reviews, create pricing presentations, work with pricing analysts to maintain P/L and last but not least one of the main things that plagues this role that leadership turns a blind eye to— picking up the pieces when other OpCo's within FedEx fall short. From customer service issues, operations, billing/revenue, the list goes on. The support tools we're told to leverage for these daily occurrences are nowhere near effective which usually results in more lost time and frustration when all we want to do is support and advocate for our businesses and sell!
When concerns are brought up on metrics and corrupt selling time it's a lot of "back in my day!" talk which is typical sales deflection. Most of these comments made by Directors/VP's who sold 15-20 years ago during simpler times, back when there was far less competition like Amazon and other large players to contend with. Customers also weren't as educated and equipped with innovation at their fingertips like now.
Your experience will vary and is heavily dictated by which state your territory is in, what type of industry/market you serve and so many other variables outside of your control.
The growth path is also too linear, the only way to move up is to actually MOVE, as in to another state to show FedEx how much you're willing to sacrifice for the company. All for a marginal salary increase and basically keeping the same title. Kiss it goodbye if you're trying to advance in your domicile location because people rarely resign from these positions if you're in a major market so you are forced to make the move if you want to advance. If you cannot do that you've essentially bottlenecked in this role.
This job has evolved to become a revolving door with the recent changes, you better move quick or it'll eventually hit you on your way out. All this is coming from a former employee that has met and exceeded plan during my entire tenure falling in the top 5-10 of my region with numbers and compensation to back it.
