Pros
-Having IBM on your resume -Free pizza on Fridays
Cons
-Very misleading in interview process: As stated in other reviews, management does not provide an accurate depiction of the position leading to immediate disappointment and high turnover. They lead you to believe this is a highly technical sales position, when in reality you are a glorified telemarketer expected to make 100+ cold calls a day, booking hour long demonstrations where you run through a few PowerPoint slides and hand off the call to a product advocate who then reads through a script. Not much skill needed to accomplish this, if you are a technical person you will be very bored. Also very misleading in regards to potential compensation, the base salary is extremely low for software sales and quotas are unattainable for most. Even if you are a top rep, sustaining performance from quarter to quarter is unlikely, due to the software being considered a luxury by most organizations and the day to day of making 100+ cold calls leads to burning out. -Lack of upward mobility: Management likes to pretend that since you are part of the IBM community, you will easily transition into other positions in different sectors of IBM. This couldn't be any further from the truth. Management is greedy, if you are making sales, you're putting money in their pocket. They will do anything to prevent you from moving onto a new position. As stated above, it's rare to have an ISR that actually makes their quota, so if you have one on your team you do what it takes to keep them in that position. Other IBMers do not view Fiberlink as true IBM, since they were acquired in 2013 and still rather new to the organization, so other parts of IBM are reluctant to take employees from the Fiberlink division. There is only one person to my knowledge who was able to successfully transfer to a different division of IBM, but this was not without a fight from their manager. -Micromanagement: Depending on what team you are on this can be hit or miss. Some managers are very laid back, and trust their team to accomplish their work and make goals. These teams also happen to be the most successful. Other teams aren't as lucky, with managers who constantly scrutinize the number of calls, meetings, and installs they make, no matter how well they are doing for the quarter. It needs to be realized that there are many different ways to prospect, and cold calling happens to be one of the least efficient options. -Errors in compensation: It was common to have commission missing from pay statements, and errors so bad that payment of commission has been delayed by a month. Not very convenient when you have bills to pay. Also, realizing commission errors months later and enforcing clawbacks on future commission.
