Verizon is a US company and a old telco, everything is centralised and driven by processes and if a process is broken you define a new process to help fix the old process, which means you have two processes before long, and so one and so forth. It's impossible to do things fast. the time-zone delay doesn't help either (. For a sales person this is a very big minus, it means you can do fewer deals and have less change to make your target.
Verizon is also addicted to numbers, Sr. management tends to forget that looking at numbers and rearranging them and asking for some more numbers doesn't improve sales. The end result is that Sr. management isn't as effective as they should be in selling and help navigating Verizon's complex organisation (see above).
Within the group I work in we're selling complex, high value, projects, non transactional more business development. Yet Verizon's mode of operations is very transactional, week by week reporting, it's a model that works for retail wireless sales, not so much for complex IT solutions. This result in unreasonable pressures (both sides).
The result is that even after 2 years I find it very hard to close a deal without escalating, it's simply not possible the follow the process (there are too many!) to get things done. In the end this means that everybody is screaming for attention all the time and it's very much a 'my deal is more important that yours and needs more resources' environment.
