Career opportunities outside of sales are nearly nonexistent, despite what management will say in your interview. People can move out of sales if they're creative in finding ways to network, which management in the sales office will not be very helpful with.
The path to move up is through field sales. If you're unable to move, or don't want to stay in sales, the best of luck to you.
While the hourly pay is livable, you're unlikely to receive the bonus checks you hear about in the offer letter. 80% of the Dallas office does not bonus for the quarter. It's not a question of work ethic. FedEx is struggling as a company, and it's a very difficult market to be competitive in. Whether or not your territory has potential is luck of the draw.
Since FedEx is doing so poorly right now globally, upper management has put all of its efforts into straining the sales team to do more, constantly. The difficulty of this is exacerbated by the antiquated internal systems that take minutes to hours to struggle through for things like pricing proposals.
The number of sales calls you're expected to make continues to grow to ever more unrealistic levels. While it's possible to make all the calls, emails, and sales opportunities that are expected of you each day, it's unsustainable. I've cycled through my list of customers, some more than once over, in the last month because I'm constantly trying to reach the daily call metric.
If dialing the phone were your only responsibility, it might make sense, but you're also expected to draft pricing proposals and present them to close business. If you spend an hour researching and drafting pricing, and then you spend another hour presenting it, this counts as one sales call in your daily metrics.
According to management, at this point, you've had an extremely unproductive day with your one measly call. Whether or not your time is spent growing revenue is irrelevant.
With such an emphasis on arbitrary daily metrics, there isn't much opportunity to actually do the job you're hired to do, which would be closing business.
All this said, I haven't mentioned how much time it can take to help resolve customer issues. You're constantly told by management to let customer service handle complaints and issues- your job is to sell. Fair enough, but customer service seems to be trained to send customers to their account executive when they aren't sure how to handle something.
This means that any time you spend not working toward your daily metrics counts as not working. If you're fixing something for a customer, working to create revenue for a company by making proposals, or doing something as important as assisting a teammate with a problem, you are wasting your time in the eyes of management.
There's not enough time in a work day, and there's not enough resources to do the job. All of the complaints I've listed have been discussed with varying levels of management, and are consistently discarded as a personal problem with time management.
TLDR: you're expected to constantly do more, your efforts are hardly appreciated, and when you try to make suggestions for improvement, you're ignored. You feel undervalued as a FedEx employee during these times. The company is struggling, and is trying to get every bit of mileage out of you it can.
I would only recommend this job to someone who lives and breathes selling. Otherwise, this job is not worth the stress.
