Pros
As an outside sales rep you control your time and workflow. Decent benefits, company gas card. Trainers are good but the info is very outdated and they don't train you enough on the actual product.
Cons
You do a lot of running around for very little money. Base is $50K and you may make another $10-$20K in commissions your first year. There is no residual money so every year you are starting all over again. Company culture is micro-managed with focused cold calling blocks that are tracked. It is not uncommon for your manager to literally be sitting next to you as you are on the phone making your calls. Your manager will likely call you every day and try and play the gotcha game with you meaning if you show you have an appointment somewhere he/she will out of the blue just show up. As those that have worked in sales-sales is fluid and schedules change all of the time so what you may have in your calendar changes day to day but they (managers) live and die by whatever you put in there. Trainers are good but the info is so outdating and they spend way too much time telling you how to sell rather than educating you on the actual product. There's a lot of stuff you have to carry around in your car and some of the products in the catalogs UniFirst doesn't carry but they never bother to tell you. Internal systems are way out of date and cumbersome to enter in orders. Speed is the name of the game to make money and their processes are probably the worst I've ever seen. Additionally there are delays in when customers receive the items they ordered as it takes close to 8 week sometimes longer which in my view is way too long. Give customers the ability to change their mind. Lastly turnover very, very high. It is not uncommon in any UniFirst sales office to find out that most of the people there are under a year. That's a pretty big indicator that things are not going so well when everyone you work with also just started. So if you are college aged this is a good start or if you are older and don't really need the money this could be a great place if you don't mind putting up with everything. Otherwise if you don't fit into either of those categories you will probably find yourself frustrated with very little money to show for your efforts.
