Not a bad stepping stone, but not much more than that.
Pros
- A lot of flexibility in scheduling - Snacks on Thursdays - Free Caribou Blend coffee!! - Decent look into what it's like to work for a large corporation, and entry-level sales experience - Large parking ramp - Helpful coworkers - Casual dress code and environment - Fairly comfortable chairs - Can be interesting accounts and conversations with prospects - It is an on-the-job learning environment. You can learn from your coworkers, managers, and prospects/customers that you interact with every day, and apply those things to your future calls and even future jobs, if you make the effort to seek out that information and strive to improve.
Cons
- Low wage, little flexibility for raises. The incentive that you'll get a bonus by getting a lead to a certain point in the sales process is not all it's made out to be. It happens, but not often. - No benefits - Casual dress code and environment. While it's nice to be comfortable, it is unique to the microcosm of PT Business Development. I also suspect that this is part of the reason why professionalism is a little lax. - Approximately 8 hours of classroom training (over 1 week) + shadowing coworkers' calls (for usually less than a week), and then you're on your own. Very little additional education/training. - The mentality from management is often: "It's okay, someone will come behind you and fix it later", which makes it feel like the work you're doing has no meaning or lasting impact. - Computers are dated, and run very slowly. This has a substantial impact on productivity. - Can have interesting accounts and conversations with prospects, BUT most time is spent leaving the same voice mail message over and over. Monotonous and repetitive cold-calling. - Scheduled to a different cube almost every day (which is good for hearing other coworkers' conversations, but doesn't allow you get into a groove or routine) - Former customers are often frustrated with the quality of customer support, and/or felt neglected by their account manager (this is often due to mix-ups and duplicates in the software we use to organize and catalog our customers and prospects) - Metrics are pushed and the most important thing, so attention to detail and quality of work is low. - Very high turnover in employees - Moderate turnover in management - Few chances to increase responsibility - After sending a lead on, you get few (if any) updates on whether or not it is going anywhere - Company mindset is very much about the bottom line and high call volume over quality. It doesn't seem to matter if, for example, a prospect is going out of business. They will still be called every 90 days and asked whether they want to purchase new software. This often produces a poor image of Epicor, and it isn't resolved...instead, someone just calls them again in 90 days.
