Well, you were bonused off the market until recently. Now, your bonused off your teams performance. That means your bonus just went from $3,600 to $850.
The work life balance is the worst I've ever experienced. I wouldn't recommend this job to my worst enemy. The support is the main problem. I've been in sales for over 15 years. I clearly understand the need and value behind owning a customer relationship. However, here you truly own each step, corner, and hidden aspect.
A typical day looks like this. Wake up at 5:15am. at 6:15 set down and look over your symphony system. This is where you pregame for the day. You the leave the house at 7am. Your 1st appointment is at 8am. It's 1 hour, on average, from your house. You then visit with the client for what takes between 1 and 3 hours. Let's say 2 hours on average. You missed 2 text messages, 1 email, and 2 phone calls while you were with the client. You now have 60 minutes to make it across town to you next appointment, return the 2 text messages, 1 email, and 2 phone calls. You can't talk while the car is moving, it's against company policy. You then repeat this for 3 clients through out the day. Then, you can sprinkle on the random (3 times a week) calls from corporate asking you to take a customer during your non working hours and add an extra customer for the day. There are no admin days or times to get your client management up to date. You left the house at 7am and won't be back 5pm. Account management takes 1-4 hours a day. When you get home you have to call customers to take payments for clients who had to "think about it" in stead of buying in the home, reschedule clients installs because of shipment issues, reschedule clients installs because their availability changed, respond to the left over emails through out the day, swap out ordered items that went on back order for new ones and then reschedule install, talk to geek squad installers about the things they didn't like about what you sold or how you wanted the job done, file expenses, get your oil changed, keep your in home advisor certificate valid and up to date, tons of trainings, make detailed and very time consuming proposals for all customers, call your clients 2 days in advance, call your 30 day, 90 day, 6 months and so on follow ups, track down your sales that you referred over to the Magnolia (extreme high end) sales team, build relationships with 200+ store team members, among others.
The GM's think they should be taken out to lunch on your company card weekly. If you are an external applicant, watch out! Most of the key players you will need to depend on at the store just applied for your opening. You might have sales experience, but your not an Audio/Video genius. These high school grads have been working at best buy for 3-20 years. They are now very sour that they were passed over for you. They then judge you all the time and tend to not be helpful.
You see your MMSM (boss) about every 2-4 months. Your truly working on an island by yourself. Your told that you have corporate support and in market support. The corporate support was a IT help desk and a call center. The IT help desk was desolved into the general help team. It now takes 3 calls or 2 hours to get what use to take 1 call and 20 minutes fixed. The call center is nothing more than a scheduling center. They call customer 5 days after the store filed their lead. It's suppose to be 2 days, but they are constantly backed up. The in market support is an IHOS. It's a person at the market office who works for the MMSM. This person does zero support. They can't take payment when your busy, they can't manage your orders when they go side ways, they don't speak with clients, they are an hourly employee who really just sends out reports and tacks on things you didn't do from the day(s) before. They set deadlines and you have to adhere to them. Even though your the Manager and they are Hourly. Nothing like what support has meant to me at any other company.
Your career advancement is gone when you take this position. The DM never speaks with you or acknowledges your being. That means your never going to be promoted to a GM. This position is equivalent to an Assistant GM, on paper. In reality, only ASM's who are being passed over for promotions or are burnt take this position. That adds to the fact this is a death sentence position.
Your treated as an hourly employee by the store staff. I'm a salaried manager. The issue here is that when this program rolled out, they filled all the initial positions with the hourly Magnolia Home Theater System Designers who reported to a store. Therefore, the culture hasn't changed a bit. They still treat us as hourly staff and give us no respect or authority.
This company has the worst work culture I have ever experienced. The GM's blame their sales loss on you. They don't give you good leads because they are hungry for the instant sale. They can't risk the chance of a bigger sale because the customer might cancel the appointment. Your target is $20,000 a week in personal sales. This won't happen unless your in the top 10 percent of the company. The leads we get are more along the lines of the customer wants you to test their wifi and sell them a google wifi set up for $269.
I have just learned that the company plans on closing the call center down and having us book our own appointments. We don't have time to eat lunch, let alone call customer, wait for them to respond back, and then play phone tag with them for days during the time I would like to be spending with my family.
