Disappointing experience - Account Executive Reynolds American Employee Review

Executive Leadership is poor and inexperienced. Micromanagement to the 10th degree at every level. They track start and end times of exempt field sales reps and continually have "talks" with field reps about everything they do wrong. Little praise is given when one does something good. The company dangles a carrot over succession candidates to get them to behave like lapdogs begging for a scooby snack hoping for a promotion that doesn't exist. Only single, apartment renting individuals are promoted to the few positions that become available. You must be willing to move to a minimum of 12 places to be considered for promotion and then only if you are a chosen one (which means you are a campaigning yourself to management like a governor candidate). Management leads by fear and will crucify anyone who disagrees with their opinion or suggestions. It's like they can't handle that someone might have a better idea than them so they'd rather not hear it. They expect everyone to follow them but preach about leadership dimensions. There are no true leaders at this company but a group of inexperienced individuals who were promoted because they would relocate and they spend their time micromanaging every aspect out of fear of being criticized themselves. The culture here used to be fabulous and it was a happy place to be. Not anymore. The only thing this company has going for it is the fact that it has a niche product at the right time and it continues to grow despite itself. Job expectations: Field reps have 600 sales calls to make quarterly, Key Accounts Reps have in upwards of 40-50 chain headquarter calls in 2-4 state territories so vast that there is no humanly way possible to meet the expectation unless you sell your home and live in a hotel 7 nights a week. The majority of the employees are hoping and praying for RJ Reynolds to merge the 2 companies sooner than later. Evaluations: They believe in a full management panel process so everyone in management gets together for a week to talk about each field rep and decide if the employee is worthy whether or not they've ever met the person. They thinks it's fair. It's not. Why? because the sales job is highly demographically driven and some territories are not going to sell the product while some are saturated with it. So there are reps in CA that are rated highly and don't do much because all their accounts have the product in distribution and then there are reps in other parts of the country where the product doesn't do well and they are penalized because of it. It's difficult to sell a premium cigarette to an impoverished population. One last thing: If you sneeze wrong on scratch your nose and someone in management sees it, you are pulled aside and told you are ruining your credibility. Ridiculous.