KPO89
Senior Member
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2009
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Last January I interviewed for a marketing internship with a Corporation. I didn't get the internship but the manager who I interviewed with left the door open to me and said he would be willing to help me finding a job because I impressed him. I kept emailing him over the course of several months and he tried to get me interviews and internships at his Corporations dealerships. Nothing ever panned out and I emailed him a couple of months before my graduation date. I got an auto-reply from him saying he no longer worked for the company. 2 weeks later I received a phone call from him. He told me he had left his job at XYZ corporation and taken a principal owner ship position in one of the dealers. He said he would like for me to interview with him and said the prospect of getting a job with his dealership was very good.
Fast-forward to this January...I started the job with his dealership as an Account Manager. I was to do both sales and marketing with the company. I have a 60/40 base/commission split. The sales for this company is very technical and political. I am selling public safety grade radios, radio infrastructure, and maintenance to counties and towns in the Long Island, New York area. I'm happy to have a job out of college when a good percentage of my peers are still hunting but I feel there are some critical things I feel I'm missing in a first job:
1. Training- I'm a fresh grad with no understanding of any industries. The man who hired me spends 1 hour every week going over my current sales opportunities and other things he wants me to do. He calls this training but really it is more of a weekly objective meeting where tells me what I need to do this week. This is a very small company (28 people) and they don't have a set training program. The majority of the people that work there are engineers and technicians with a hobby-like interest in radios...the coined term is HAMs.
2. Atmosphere- I didn't expect the atmosphere of a Fortune 500 company but these people are stale from 35 years worth of company inertia. The company has survived for 35 years with the same 10 of the 28 people working there. They are adverse to change to say the least. The environment is very blue-collared in nature which is not a bad thing but it is not conducive to professional sales.
3. Guidance- Not the same as training. My boss(same person who hired me) is very scatter-brained. He will often have dozens of projects going at one time. I understand multitasking is necessary in a small business to keep the company afloat but this is closer to ADD than multitasking. Needless to say many of these items get pushed off on me and I have to do little task that eat into my sales time. More importantly he is an engineer that migrated to sales which means we think on completely different levels. I can't explain to you how many times in the process of explaining something the little things are so hard for him to express in terms of commonality. He will have customer conversations and develop his ideas about what needs to be done and expect me to follow through on them which often leaves me confused and continually going back to him for step-by-step explanation because I wasn't there for the customer meeting and don't understand the objectives or the reasons behind them which he never seems to explain in a way I can understand.
4.Sales/salary- Selling public safety radios to local government is very technical and political. There are multiple levels of sales and this has to be one of the hardest. Just finding the right prospect is difficult in itself with the many layers of the buying process. This is very difficult to me because it is something that my boss has never had to do and really isn't qualified to train on developing proper prospects in this industry. I haven't made a sale by myself yet and quite honestly I'm not doing to well financially because living on a base salary of $35000 a year in Queens New York is very challenging and I often find myself in a depressed mood about my financial situation. I will often work 60 hours a week on projects and find at the end of the week that none of those projects that he assigned to me will benefit me now or in the long-run with commissions. I have contemplated asking him to change my compensation plan to 80/20 or higher if I still don't have any progress in the next couple months.
5. Personal time- I get calls at 7:00AM from him when business hours for our company are 10:00-6:00 (I often work 8:00-7:00). I also get texts and calls late nights and multiple times over the weekend. He lives in NY and his family is in another state so he is practically a bachelor. I believe he expects me to work non-stop as he does because I am currently living by myself.
Sorry for what appears as whining but I do understand in your first job you have to earn your stripes. I want to work hard and show what I can do but I'm not sure if this is working smart. Am I in a bad position or do I need to just give this more time? What are my options? Do you have any first job advice to give me?
Fast-forward to this January...I started the job with his dealership as an Account Manager. I was to do both sales and marketing with the company. I have a 60/40 base/commission split. The sales for this company is very technical and political. I am selling public safety grade radios, radio infrastructure, and maintenance to counties and towns in the Long Island, New York area. I'm happy to have a job out of college when a good percentage of my peers are still hunting but I feel there are some critical things I feel I'm missing in a first job:
1. Training- I'm a fresh grad with no understanding of any industries. The man who hired me spends 1 hour every week going over my current sales opportunities and other things he wants me to do. He calls this training but really it is more of a weekly objective meeting where tells me what I need to do this week. This is a very small company (28 people) and they don't have a set training program. The majority of the people that work there are engineers and technicians with a hobby-like interest in radios...the coined term is HAMs.
2. Atmosphere- I didn't expect the atmosphere of a Fortune 500 company but these people are stale from 35 years worth of company inertia. The company has survived for 35 years with the same 10 of the 28 people working there. They are adverse to change to say the least. The environment is very blue-collared in nature which is not a bad thing but it is not conducive to professional sales.
3. Guidance- Not the same as training. My boss(same person who hired me) is very scatter-brained. He will often have dozens of projects going at one time. I understand multitasking is necessary in a small business to keep the company afloat but this is closer to ADD than multitasking. Needless to say many of these items get pushed off on me and I have to do little task that eat into my sales time. More importantly he is an engineer that migrated to sales which means we think on completely different levels. I can't explain to you how many times in the process of explaining something the little things are so hard for him to express in terms of commonality. He will have customer conversations and develop his ideas about what needs to be done and expect me to follow through on them which often leaves me confused and continually going back to him for step-by-step explanation because I wasn't there for the customer meeting and don't understand the objectives or the reasons behind them which he never seems to explain in a way I can understand.
4.Sales/salary- Selling public safety radios to local government is very technical and political. There are multiple levels of sales and this has to be one of the hardest. Just finding the right prospect is difficult in itself with the many layers of the buying process. This is very difficult to me because it is something that my boss has never had to do and really isn't qualified to train on developing proper prospects in this industry. I haven't made a sale by myself yet and quite honestly I'm not doing to well financially because living on a base salary of $35000 a year in Queens New York is very challenging and I often find myself in a depressed mood about my financial situation. I will often work 60 hours a week on projects and find at the end of the week that none of those projects that he assigned to me will benefit me now or in the long-run with commissions. I have contemplated asking him to change my compensation plan to 80/20 or higher if I still don't have any progress in the next couple months.
5. Personal time- I get calls at 7:00AM from him when business hours for our company are 10:00-6:00 (I often work 8:00-7:00). I also get texts and calls late nights and multiple times over the weekend. He lives in NY and his family is in another state so he is practically a bachelor. I believe he expects me to work non-stop as he does because I am currently living by myself.
Sorry for what appears as whining but I do understand in your first job you have to earn your stripes. I want to work hard and show what I can do but I'm not sure if this is working smart. Am I in a bad position or do I need to just give this more time? What are my options? Do you have any first job advice to give me?
