Pros
Hours: 8:15-5pm. 15 min break at 10am and then again at 3pm. Hour lunch from 12-1pm. Warning: YOU WILL NEED TO HAVE YOUR OWN LAPTOP FOR THE JOB. They have no internal computers on job site. Must use personal laptop. Location: In the Trump Building on Wall St. Salaries: Industry Business Lead (IBL) - They sell Sponsorships to CEOs, CMOs (they hold the budget), and SVP of Sales. Base salary $50k Delegate Acquistion - They get the end users to come to the events. Base salary $45k Business Anaylst - They just book meetings for their pod leader to try and pitch to make a sale. Base salary $40k Health benefits are good and they pay for it fully. Not bad salaries for those 3 positions. I was an IBL so my reveiw will mostly be from the perspective of that position. It is very true you need to "blag" how its called in the office in order to get CEO's cell phone numbers. I found this skill (although maybe you can say unethical as you're lying) to be a great way to get a hold of people and a great learning tool. Not just for business, but personal life as well. I don't see whats negative about the cell phone blagging, so out of everything about this company, they have taught me this skill in which not many people know and is useful in other sales gigs and life. Opportunity after acquring CEO's cell phone numbers to actually speak to them. I like how the headsets eliminate all noise but your voice. This allows someone on your team to listen to your call who is more experienced and tell you verbatum what to say on the phone. It's tough at first, but if you cancel out the person on the phone and just listen to your team member or management it's not that bad. I found that to be very creative on GDS's part.
Cons
For an IBL you MUST make at least one sale in your first 3 months or you will be fired, end of story. You will get compensated via a severance of your biweekly salary and paid your accrued vacation days when they let you go which is nice. I complained many times how I didn't have enough companies to my pod leader and the trainer and management. They all said, "Oh I can show you tons of companies you haven't found yet." So I said, "Ok great! Can you please help me find them then." Not ONCE was I ever assisted. See how I work? When I say something, I want to back it up to the best of my ability but not management. Pure shame they do not hold an integrity for themselves. GDS's entry level sponsorship package of a whooping $56,500 cannot afford sponsorship b/c for 95% of the companies you will call that is their entire budget for the year! All the big companies (1000 employees and up) are already taken, so you're cold calling the high hanging fruit in hopes that someone else isn't calling them and that they actually have funds to do a sponsorship. Then of course you're cold calling, which is extremely hard. Most of the time you're dealing with rejection. I believe cold calling is a dying art and the only sales jobs that are worth having are the ones where the leads come to you through traffic on a company website, not cold calling.
