Pros
Great if you are out of college and building a resume. It is good not to have any solid sales experience or methodology that they can reteach in a lowest common learner fashion, ad nauseum.
Cons
First of all-be sure to look at all the positive reviews and the city of origin-most are from Atlanta, GA.- the headquarters of Coca-Cola. And most are in top management positions-or aspiring to be. It all starts at the top where senior leadership has taken on a status of Deity proportions. Because all are managing there careers through the "Coke System", all have a pet project that needs to be 'top priority'. Result: 20 Priorities that push down to the field to manage. All processes that were managed by other departments with staff now have been streamlined to the field to manage online including; HR issues, Payroll disputes, Hiring posting, Debt collection.... the list goes on and on. Add tracking spreadsheets that track other tracking spreadsheets and you get the picture. It is a paranoid culture that does not trust it's sales staff to make reasonable decisions in the trade because Senior Leadership has placed unreasonable expectations on them in the first place. Complain and you run the risk of being a malcontent and could be let go. I have left the company and still am being cautious about what I say here. As much as Coke says they are aspiring to high performing teams, they ignore what might truly help save the company; let people get used to processes before continually changing them and keeping everyone off balance. The chain of leadership continually moves the goals as they travel down to the field level in a series of 'stretch goals' that are intended to impress the level above like a Mr. Universe pose down. The result-why bother hitting a goal when it will be moved tomorrow. I know no-one that doesn't like to have a win once in a while. The new urgency for technology that has been bought on the cheap is already 5 years obsolete by the time it gets to the field and bottlenecks the workforce from doing their primary jobs to sell product. Having email connectivity in the field still does not put more hours in the day to complete the new and expanding work load being dumped on the doers of the company. New does not = better in most cases. There are way, way, way, too many software platforms where only one unified one should be in place. In some cases they are no more than glorified excel worksheets that take 5 minutes to load. A sales rep that started with a pad an paper in 1998 now needs to be Steve Jobs to set up his software, but a 3rd grader to run it! Add to that there is no Beta testing on the new processes, patches need to be downloaded and the staff re-trained how to use, there is no confidence level that ANY new software will work-so no one uses it until they absolutely have to. Who gets blamed for poor performance?...the sales teams. In January of last year, we were encouraged to stop purchasing products that our competitors manufactured; Quaker Oats, Potato Chips, etc...with the buzz line "What will $16M buy?" What it really bought was half of Muhtar Kent's Bonus package for the year 2012. Is anyone really worth that much in bonus alone when the sales force has to battle just to get their quarterly goals before the end of a recording period? The worst part is that I cared about my Direct Reports, quality of work and reporting, but my concerns were looked at as 'Too far out of the box', or ' Is not with the program'. Ironically, Coke says it wants to develop leadership when in fact, all they are looking for is Followership. "Open Happiness". Not likely.