Drink the Kool-Aid, stick with the bourbon - Market Development Representative Sazerac Employee Review

This will be a long winded response but if you're thinking about applying for the MDR or MDM position please read. Best place to work? No way. When I first started at Sazerac, I literally said to myself "I could definitely stick with this company for decades". Then it all went south. First of all, everything really hit the fan after they had switched distributors, seemingly without any plan or idea of how to motivate a BEER distributor to drop everything and hop onto selling spirits in the off/on premise. This went how'd everyone would expect: huge decline in sales, distributors generally throwing all blame on Sazerac sales reps for mistakes and a huge decline in morale and quality of upper management guidance. Many great people who were burnt out just quit, and the rest had to go to therapy and pray that we would switch to a different distributor. This continues to happen years later, but it's even worse now that we are actively competing with the same distributor who recently picked up monster brands like Tito's and Jack Daniel's. Did Sazerac make a huge mistake with this distributor partner? Yes, but they'll never admit it. More issues include unrealistic quotas, especially in the realm of brands like Fireball. Fireball is a older brand that is declining because the newer generation does not have a desire to drink it and the flavored whiskey market is starting to decline as most of the elderly have moved on to drinking water in their final years at the nursing home. End of story. It is NOT the sales team's fault that consumer tastes are changing, it is the marketing team and their lack of insight. New brands will also pop out of nowhere and you will be micromanaged heavily to make those brands work in your market. Are you prepared to sell a flavored Mexican candy tequila to a high end steakhouse? You are not just a supplier rep, you are the supplier, distributor and customer service. Another huge thing at Sazerac is the mentality of 100% or nothing. Upper management is entirely clueless on how to motivate a spirits sales force, as most of the recent hires are from the consumer packaged goods industry. I cannot tell you how many times upper management has decided to "motivate" us by being cynical, constantly telling sales reps they are not good enough and they should quit if they're not selling 100% everyday. In one meeting, upper management had crossed a line and we had to receive an apology the following day. This used to be a company that was compassionate and understood some of the challenges in the industry, especially in a recession. Now it is just causing massive burnout through the company and we are still losing fantastic sales representatives everyday. There is also issues of dedicated and loyal employees never even hearing of a promotion. How do you get promoted? Well you can work for P&G or maybe Frito-Lay and they will most likely hire you for an upper management gig. Or you can play the office politics, drink the Kool-Aid and you might get a middle management job. Now for the biggest issue Sazerac has thrown at their sales force, the standard operating procedures, AKA what you should be doing everyday according to company standards. This role is a salaried position, you do not clock in or out and for the past few years if you had hit your account quota for the day, completed your tasks, that was it. It was actually very refreshing when I joined and the attitudes and positivity was great due to the absence of micromanagement and the sales force generally agree we were more efficient and flexible in our day to day. One day upper management had the fantastic idea of tracking everyone's hours in field and putting in place a policy that all sales reps need to be in field 8 hours a day. This is a huge problem due to not all work is centered around account visits, AKA: long meetings, administrative work, receiving POS, driving to the warehouse, etc. This new SOP policy makes absolutely no sense for this role. It is rigid, mundane and the pinnacle of micromanagement. During the meeting that revealed this amazing plan, many questions were asked concerning the specifics of an hourly day and how are we supposed to track work that does not involve going into an account. No one had any concrete answers and we are left our own devices of how to actually navigate a system that could lead to reps getting in trouble for spending their morning doing admin work. The company is also now geo-tracking and has had another great idea of having TWO team meetings EVERYDAY. These meetings include what you're going to do today, and what you have achieved at the end of the day. Absolutely no one asked for this and even MDM's openly mention how useless these meetings are and how disruptive they are. Some of the sales reps at Sazerac are industry veterans that have been around for 20+ years. They are not babies, so stop with the useless "big brother" strategy. I'm very curious to see how Sazerac deals with the mess they've made. I think there will eventually be a case study on how to absolutely kill a fantastic sales force. Quick thoughtless decisions are absolutely dragging down a great company, and like I said before, I thought I could spend years here, but now I have to take it one day at a time.