Inept Senior Sales Leadership is the only thing that didn't change when Ziply got bought by Bell Canada
Pros
I thought long and hard about the pros, but at the end of the day there really were no pros compared to working for a different fiber/broadband provider. The kool-aid drinkers will tell you one pro is the network - but a good product or service for sale should just be table stakes for an AE position.
Cons
The list of cons started in the first few weeks, where the lack of skilled training was a start contrast to any other sales role I've held. To clarify - I was told I would be in training for 2 weeks, but the reality was a maybe two or three hour tops Zoom call each day. I learned nothing new about sales and not much about the product beyond the superficial (fiber is better because it's faster and more reliable). Making the abbreviated sessions even less impactful was the fact the trainer had their infant son with them during the calls, taking priority at times but highly unprofessional in my opinion (the lack of focus on the training was obvious). Why the long paragraph about training? Well, that was basically the last training I got, until the same trainer came to our office a year later, and brought their two preschool aged children (the youngest was out of the car seat a now a toddler) into the conference room with us, and proceeded to split time with the training and the kids. To be fair, there were two other employees helping with the training, although not part of the enablement team. Leadership operates reactively rather than strategically — the approach often felt like throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. There's little long-term vision communicated to the sales org, which makes it hard to build pipeline with any consistency. Salesforce is locked down to the point of being nearly unusable for reps who need flexibility to manage their pipeline. Business intelligence tool subscriptions were allowed to lapse and never replaced. In close to 2 years on the commercial team, we received a single new piece of marketing collateral. You're expected to sell enterprise-level solutions with almost no air support. The physical office spaces are dated and uninviting so most people who can work remotely or in the field do so just to avoid them. During the acquisition by a monopoly Canadian telecom company, leadership repeatedly assured us that nothing would change. In reality, expectations shifted on a near-monthly basis with very little transparency. By the end, the role I was hired into no longer existed. What was positioned as a consultative, mid-market/enterprise sales role was gradually restructured into a transactional, door-to-door small business position focused on one-call closes. The "retention" offer that came with this shift included a title downgrade, reduced earnings potential, and a significantly narrower market segment.