Pros
It’s definitely a team atmosphere. Everyone was supportive rather than hyper-competitive with one another. Trainers, senior reps, and managers were great and always around to help or troubleshoot. I’m sure things have changed since WM restructured its sales department, but they offered a good base salary and commission structure. You can make some decent money selling for WM. Also, their training methods for new reps learning about the industry were solid. By the time I was ready to go out on my own, I was very confident, which made it easier to rack up those elusive cold-call-closes. Being based in a smaller market, the large accounts were sparse (or had already been sold by the more tenured reps), so I had to target smaller accounts that didn’t bring in large dollar amounts. That made it hard to close enough to hit monthly goals, especially once the pandemic hit. The sales managers were always understanding and willing to help though, which isn’t always the case for a sales job. That, along with the base salary, made life a little less stressful.
Cons
I suppose the biggest con would be the restructuring of the sales department. It was a major shock and seemed to come out of nowhere. I went from having a job I truly enjoyed to being unemployed in the span of a 5 minute Teams call. That’s upsetting on its own, but during the worst pandemic in a century, it was devastating. We all thought our jobs were secure, and the company had made a point to reiterate that starting in March 2020. We were well taken care of until until we suddenly weren’t. We were given severance packages, which was nice, but it didn’t really help with the hurt of being cut loose without warning by a company for which we were all proud to work. Another con - hitting salesforce metrics every month. A HUGE emphasis was placed on this. Of course, it was theoretically done to help reps build their pipelines and succeed, but it never felt that way. It seemed like more of a “everyone make sure to hit your salesforce numbers so corporate won’t be mad at us” type of situation. When the pandemic hit, I guess having good salesforce numbers was the only thing we could hang our hats on since sales slowed so much, but it wasn’t helpful and most likely caused some reps to put less than legit stuff in purely to keep themselves and their managers out of trouble.
