Pros
Grainger was a great place to work for a long time. I don't know if upper management really had a plan beyond rolling the program out, but it was clear that there were too many sellers getting experience to promote internally. It was a great job to get great sales experience, the sales training was first rate, and I worked with a lot of great people.
Cons
There was no plan for how to maintain a high-activity sales force once they had some success. The accounts that grew to be too large to manage while still uncovering new business became a millstone to those that had some success, and too few of those were reassigned to more low-activity, high-impact sellers. The writing was on the wall for at least three years that they had no mechanism for (or apparent interest in) providing career paths for this massive number of sellers that were gaining experience. Something creative could have been done realign account packages to create a middle-tier sales force, which would have allowed the TSR team to continue focusing on the high potential, low spend customers. Instead, Grainger is going back to an inside sales force (which was previously disbanded because the TSR program was having so much success). I suppose in 5-7 years they will restart this process again and send out an outside team for small and mid-sized customers to recover the share of business that deteriorated by losing the local presence.