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Any of you guys ever heard of Concur? I hear they're hurting for staff to expand their marketshare. I've been ahead of the game on this and know that Concur seems like a pretty great system to have in most organizations that want to move away from the usual excel spreadsheet expense management system. Would probably be a little tough to convince some of the smaller and more old school firms to go with it but I see a lot of growth potential here if I get in now. I also think it's neat how it is a part of the SAP umbrella and I think streamlining something like expense management with your ERP is a great idea and can go a long way to improving a business and saving time. I personally would love to have Concur so I don't have to collect easy to lose receipts and scan them all from a photocopier to send to accounting. Any thoughts? Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 05:39
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Alfalfa posted:It's not so much what I'm doing that bothers me. It's more that this was not the role discussed at all during the interview process and definitely does not play to my strengths (especially in selling). NBD I'm fine with and I'm really fine with rejection. The way you talk about the titles and what you were hired for reminds me an awful lot of the job I passed on at Salesforce. There's a massive turnover rate at that company and a lot of people have wanted out. Do your time there for about a year or two and then bail to a better position in another company. I have to do the entire sales process in my company including project management for the account when the sale is complete. I'd rather have these specialized roles instead.
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Feb 3, 2016 02:06
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grvm posted:Does anyone have any experience in sales with Cintas? A recruiter reached out to me about a senior sales position and I had a phone interview with the regional sales manager today. He gave me some info: It is an external sales position, looking for new business-to business sales. He told me it's a base 43-45k, uncapped commision doing outside sales. He also said the average sales rep (company wide) made $113,00 /year (median average I think, he wasn't sure), they offer $355 /month allowance for a car which goes on Cintas company insurance and I get a gas card. They also match 401k up to 6%, and after 6/mo's I get 1 week off per year. I got offered a similar deal with my company (not Cintas). Only my car allownace is 580 with a 12 cent per km mileage thing. No gas card (which IMO is way better than a mileage payment). I also got 60k instead of 45k base and a 25% bonus if I hit a certain target for sales. My job turned out to be relatively safe but I received no sales training or real guidance in terms of lead generation and penetrating into the companies I'm supposed to sell to. My advice to you is to thoroughly research your market. Make sure it isn't oversaturated with competition and incumbent suppliers like mine is. You're kind of selling a commodity in that most other companies will source/manufacture the exact same products you offer. Price will be one of your primary determinants as a result unless Cintas has a very powerful marketing game. Here's a list of things you need to watch out for: 1. How powerful is their marketing (I've seen them everywhere so they're a household name at least. That means most of the heavy lifting is done for you and you just gotta hustle harder) 2. Is your territory already saturated with existing business - Incumbent relationships are practically bullet proof. Facility services are among the last things people think of when it comes to purchasing in businesses. A company like Cintas is more likely to get traction with big corporations and fancy companies that can spend more on their facilities. 3. Training? Make drat sure you are getting trained. If they plop you out there like a naked baby in the woods you're just being set up to fail. 4. Lastly I'd try and do a dry run. Ask your connections and friends what they're using in their buildings. See if its a cintas product. Try to get a feel for what they're looking for. Maybe even do a dry run where you get on linked in and find people who might be your customers if you worked there and test out the field to see how receptive they are. Look around lobbies and washrooms and see what's being used. Think about your experience with that. Try to put that into perspective relative to the cintas product.
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Feb 9, 2016 02:15
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Jon Von Anchovi posted:If possible find out their biggest competitor; see what that competitor has that they don't and then ask the RSM how or why he doesn't see that as a threat. Market and competitive intelligence is key Yeah, take this advice. I didn't know what I got myself into and our competition is mopping the floor with us despite us being the biggest player in town.
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Feb 18, 2016 04:15
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devoir posted:My wider team is hiring a significant number of Sales Engineers - http://newrelic.com/about/careers/job/oBXgZfwx Holy poo poo. My recruiter is actually looking into new relic for me as an option for when I inevitably jump ship from my current company. I heard a LOT of good things about this company. Do you have any information about what it's like being an Enterprise Field Sales Executive there? I live in Canada right now, would you take someone who's had aerospace sales engineer experience? Within a couple months I figured out how to discuss deeply technical subjects with airline customers at my old job and did technical backup for sales teams. If I can figure out how to discuss aircraft and aircraft components I think the core mindset of understanding technical products can be re-purposed to software too. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Feb 19, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 00:34
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What's it like working for Netsuite? They're interested in having me join them.
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Mar 6, 2016 23:30
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In my industry where I'm essentially moving a commodity around I find that relationships and how well someone likes you can make or break the deal. My coworker controls about 1.5 million in business because he ran his own company for 30 years and has fostered relationships with operations managers and executives at companies who will deal with him and pay any price he asks due to the trust and reputation he's built with them. Conversely about 8 months into my job as a rookie salesman I've managed to eke out a few hundred grand in business at razor thin margins while being pressured by auto industry suppliers to take their payment terms instead of going by my standard terms. I'm about ready to throw in the towel and concede defeat. Maybe I'm just not a good salesman or lack the charisma to be effective at my job. I definitely suck at the whole witty comeback thing and how well I respond to challenges depends more on anticipating the challenge and being prepared with a response than coming up with one immediately. I grossly underestimated how little it matters that you can present and explain things if you don't have the charisma to get a guy to talk to you and agree to a meeting in the first place. Some of it is my company's fault because it's industrial packaging and they're a little known player in a saturated market but I'm going to have to accept a portion of the responsibility as well. It doesn't help that when I do get projects I'm forced to baby sit them and wrestle with my engineers to get timely delivery instead of focusing on filling the pipeline. On the same point I've had a lot of people working on the auto dealership side of things hounding me to try and work for them at least part time due to how much knowledge about cars I've accumulated over the years. Even my boss asked me why I've never worked as a car salesman. If I wanted to I could probably get a job at a Toyota or GM dealer no problem. I just don't think I'd ever clear 50k per year on a good day. I make 60 right now with semi decent benefits. This is Canada so I can't see myself moving the kind of volumes a Los Angeles or Chicago dealership could. The one good or bad thing about my situation is my employer has been reluctant to set any targets for me or pressure me to hit them. From their perspective they think I'm green and in a tough market where they bungled my training and haven't prepared me properly to win business. As a result I can probably keep my job for a while until I quit for another sales job in a more organized firm or leave sales entirely. Sometimes I wish I was that social frat boy in college- I could have used that experience to help my personality and network. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 16:26
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I think one of my problems is I can be a bit awkward or stiff. This is because with each interaction I'm feeling the pressure that I need to walk out of it with a certain objective achieved (a meeting, a closed deal, a date etc). This ...stress caused me to either appear bolder than usual or just plain awkward as I try to put on a facade that I think the customer wants to see. Inevitably I also fail to read my audience sometimes (although I'm better at it now) and talk about the wrong things or use the wrong words. There's no sense talking about inbound and outbound flows or ergonomic benefits to a Joe buyer who's primary concern is purchasing a cheaper version of exactly the same product he used before. Walking into a call sounding like a Rhodes scholar just alienates people and hurts my chances. This job has taught me a lot of hard won lessons about what it means to sell and relate to people. I find it much much easier to look for a new job for example because I understand that almost every interaction is based on the same principles as sales. I also use linked in for lead generation know and bypass gatekeepers on my cold calls as a result. The rate at which get meetings has increased quite a bit. But at the end of the day I have a very polarizing personality. I'm a very direct person which at times makes me seem abrasive and untactful. It's hard for me to discuss non essential topics like sports or the clients kid because I don't give a poo poo. My best sales calls have been with people I could relate to on a personal level who would have been friends with me in real life if I met them at a party. The need to appeal to wide audiences and get everyone to like me is both extremely tiring and taxing on my psyche. In spite of this I've succeeded in closing some deals but I don't think I'd ever top the board at any sales organization unless I found a way to become witty and more likeable to more people.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:26
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Lyon posted:My new sales skill I'm working on is saying no. I try to be very accommodating and I really don't mind providing discounting and working to get the lowest reasonable price for the customer but sometimes I think just saying no is the right solution. At my old job I had customers coming in and promising me P/Os for 100,000 items if I give them deep discounts that I managed to get for them. Then they change the entire scope of the order so that they only order 25,000 items instead. At those volumes the discounts don't make sense. It took me a year to learn that customers will push you to see how far you can discount them and really the best way to deal with this is to never give them breaks because they aren't gonna give YOU a break either.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:36
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There's this company that wants to hire me to sell a cloud based ICM solution. I passed their first interview and will have a second one soon. I've learned from my experiences at my previous employer and I am diving back into the sales world again as it's probably the only way I can make any reasonable amount of money with my current interests and skillset. The concern I have here is I'm joining a startup company that's trying to disrupt the hold that IBM, Oracle, SAP etc have on this industry. My targets will be CFOs, Controllers, Finance directors of large enterprise level firms looking to track their sales performance. After reading several white papers and watching the IBM Cognos videos I'm having a hard time understanding what the value proposition of sales performance management software is. Top 3 benefits include: 1. Better direction of sales performance strategy - OK this one makes sense, but why should you pay for a cloud based software application to do this? 2. Preventing data errors with your compensation plans - This one is probably the most compelling argument. I've seen some mickey mouse outfits where they work with live "working document" excel spreadsheets that they e-mail around to determine how to compensate sales people. Data is slow, there's overpayment and it costs time, money and labor hours on what essentially is overhead. Cut those costs and there's a potential saving to be had. So how do you quantify that? How is for example Cognos better than Business Objects or whatever other ICM you can get on the market? How do I steal business from large companies like that who have way more resources than the tiny startup I'll be working for? 3. Shadow Accounting - So most sales people keep their own spreadsheet calculating how much commission they're supposed to get based on their revenues. How does software prevent them from still doing this? The average sales guy I met would never trust some software to properly calculate his commissions. He'll keep his personal spreadsheet regardless of the system you deploy so that 5-10% in labour hours you save is basically moot since a piece of software isn't gonna change old habits. I'm planning on asking some very pointed questions during the next interview. Especially after reading this article and realizing it describes my last employer to a T. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-...ontent_res_name
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Sep 12, 2016 05:16
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Xguard86 posted:How big are they? They started out as a consultancy that does implementations and systems deployment. But then 2 years ago they got into the Business Intelligence, Performance Management etc world. I had the interview today and they told me that they are in a young market and predict they can capture a sizable amount of business. In the 1st quarter of this year they hired over 25 people. They gave me a lot of the same arguments you did about how IBM might be too big, too expensive and that this company is positioned as a more agile, cheaper and user friendly solution.
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Sep 14, 2016 00:54
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ellic posted:I work in sales for tech hardware. I was recently brought into a global account set with some of the company's largest customers. I'm very grateful for the position and I'm always trying to streamline my workflow. now more than ever as I am learning what it takes to keep up with these accounts I want to max my efficiency with routine tasks. Do you guys have a CRM? It sounds like Salesforce can solve most of your issues with the opportunities tab. You can create a specific report by opportunity and automatically have it show you views with the relevant parameters you want.
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Oct 9, 2016 17:39
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Sorry for the double post- but could anyone elaborate on LinkedIn Autopilot? Is it any good? I don't think anyone at my work knows about it but they do use enhanced LinkedIn accounts so if I buy autopilot I may get a major edge over my coworkers.
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Oct 13, 2016 16:53
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Hello sales thread. It's been a long time since I left my last sales job in Industrial Packaging. When I last posted in this thread I was severely frustrated due to a combination of a mature market, low volumes, poor training etc. I gave up on ever returning to sales again. I now work for a chemical company on the procurement side of things. My boss is really good and he's been mentoring me more on how to deal with suppliers. He's been with my company for many years and because we are a distributor the sales and procurement sides of this company are very tightly knit. That being said I'm well aware that my job is glorified data entry with limited salary expectations. I'm getting tired of living paycheque to paycheque. I've once again developed an appetite for selling. Every day I spend working with my boss I've been getting the mentorship and learning I wish I had when I was at my old job. I feel more confident now in properly qualifying my prospects and learning how to avoid getting into paper shuffling RFQS that don't amount to anything. Anyway while my current job is really cushy, the gravy train won't last forever. I think automation and AI is threatening my job prospects in the future. I'd like to start applying to companies that sell data science and AI based solutions. It's a brand new virgin market that threatens to displace over 40% of the workforce. I'd rather not be a casualty and I'm cognizant of the fact that I suck at programming and data science skill sets. But I recognize the value prop, I know how to talk to the technology on a high level and promote it to potential buyers. What are some of the current players in this field that might be looking to recruit some sales talent? If you can't beat em, join em.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:10
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