The compensation (ie commission) used to be solid, especially for contracts - was making 140-180k as a sales guy. However, the company made a change and dropped our comp about 30%. All the while, senior execs on conference calls were making it seems like we are going to do great with the new comp plan. Either they are extremely patronizing or they actually had not thought through the consequences of their actions. I fear it is the latter, it seems corporate decisions and edicts are not thought out, halfway implemented and then everyone sings the company line like we actually did something. I have never seen so many people drink the cool aid out of fear (see next paragraph) As an example of the initiatives that are not thought out, they decided that they wanted to sell more of an offering so they gave every part of the business a goal to sell it. What happened? Did they sell more of the offering? Heck no, all they did was pit everyone in the branch against each other in competition to sell the same offering as opposed to before when we were collaborating for our clients.
The next real issue is the way this company is managed. First of all incompetency runs rampant. I don't know when they started hiring incompetent middle managers who used to sell copy machines or life insurance the day before but I see it everywhere. And then the incompetents are hiring more of their incompetent brethren and so on... A good sales/branch manager is very hard to find at JCI (although there are some excellent ones). These managers then spend 85% of their time trying to make sense of the excel spreadsheets computed by our archaic CRMS (yes that's plural because we have many and they are not intuitive and disjointed). So basically I am constantly getting questioned on these spreadsheets that I really don't know how to change and almost never getting any feedback as to grow in my profession. Finally these managers will almost never stick up for us, specifically on compensation and operational issues, because they are all deathly afraid of becoming the next head on the "layoff" chopping block. This last issue is probably the worst because it creates resentment among all groups because no one is willing to speak up that something might be wrong. It's interesting to see if someone does bring something up they will be attacked for any number of other issues just to get them to shut up. I.e. Manager asks superior: sales guys complaining their comp statement is wrong, superior will say: why don't you focus on selling XYZ offering instead, I noticed you are only 80% of plan, I want you to come up with an action plan by tomorrow... I know crazy!
