Pros
- Work/Life Balance - Flexibility - Brand name recognition
Cons
- Little to no resources are provided. Aside from a phone allowance and mileage that is capped per month at an unrealistic number, you're on your own. You have to pay for your own laptop, printing, meals when on the road, luggage to carry your book samples, office supplies, etc. - Not only are there no yearly performance reviews (that usually come with a cost of living salary increase), but you actually now have to hit a certain goal to even keep your base salary year-to-year. - There are no professional development opportunities internally or externally. And there is zero room for upward mobility (at least in sales). - Company culture is the worst that I've ever seen. You can count the number of happy sales people here on one hand after a 4th of July fireworks accident. - Interest in World Book products is steadily dwindling. Print encyclopedia sales continue to decline (it's 2021 after all), World Book Online subscriptions being cancelled far outweigh new business subscriptions, and non-fiction (which has been the only growing segment of World Book) is nowhere near enough to bridge that gap. - Not only do you have to compete with other publishing companies, but you also have to compete with World Book. New Business Development reps call into your territories for online business, if a customer orders through Amazon or WorldBook.com you won't get commission credit for it (or even know about it), and I've even heard a rumor that Marketing gets commission on orders received via direct marketing campaigns that they e-mail your customers. - Speaking of Marketing, I don't know how a department could be any more useless. Instead of working hand-in-hand with sales to try and help drive business for the reps, it's almost as if they just do their own thing, There is zero communication. We don't know when e-mail campaigns are going out, what the content of those campaigns are, etc. We only know when we see them in Salesforce. We'll have a print promotion running for a certain month, and instead of marketing helping us with e-mail outreach, they are e-mailing about something completely different. We can't even get flyers or PDF's to send customers, and the ones that we do get look like they were done by a high school intern. - Customer Success and Customer Service are both understaffed, which means they aren't very helpful. There is no proactivity - everything is reactive and Customer Service pushes almost everything back on the sales reps. - The customer experience is AWFUL. We make it so hard for customers to order. Management has no idea how hard reps have to work just to cover up the archaic way that World Book does business.