Quarterly results drive investment decisions, so a bad quarter often leads to knee jerk reactions to cut support staff which creates turmoil and ultimately makes it harder to achieve results in following quarters. Arbitrary quota setting doesn't reflect historical trends for individual markets.
No real career path. Management reviews are meaningless.
No investment in outside training via seminars, conferences. Sales training is US centric and can be painfully culturally inappropriate at times.
A large disconnect between US and overseas operations. Senior management lacks international experience.
Very little consideration for differences in markets. There is a pervasive and damaging assumption around English language capability outside of the US and how businesses makes investment decisions.
Lack of intellectual rigor around evaluating requirements for selling into different markets. New products and features are developed but the business is weak at providing the infrastructure (marketing, sales engineering and implementation) needed to communicate this to prospects and/or lead to successful execution at the customer site.
Knowledge around new functionality is often concentrated in the hands of a few specialists who have little incentive to work with sales outside of their own market. Internal systems established for knowledge sharing like Box exist but in many cases, it's still a matter of who you know when it comes to getting appropriate information.
There are artificial boundaries to knowledge sharing by departments within the business. Global Consulting is a major culprit, with fixation on "IP" related to implementing the solution and thus unwilling to share information internally or with resell partners.
