Pros
You can come and go as you please despite the fact that it's an office environment. Managers and individual contributors alike, arrive late, leave early and take time off both scheduled and unscheduled whenever they please. You can even take a week-long vacation and another one the following week. Unfortunately, this is due to the low moral and zero-accountability standards amongst employees.
Cons
With a compensation plan that's anything but comprehensible it's near impossible to figure out what you will make one month to the next. Despite how well you track your sales, you will never be able to control the install delays, incorrectly designed engineer solutions, customer cancellations, accelerator/decelerator components, account disconnects, commission department errors, failed audits (to verify it installed and billed) and 60-days-in-arrears-fuzzy-math formula that makes up your check. The two main (there are others) components that make up your commission is the Total Billed Revenue (total spend for all assigned accounts to you) and Sales Order Volume (your monthly sales quota/new revenue). If they realign account bases, or accounts end up in your base because they've been dumped mid-disconnect by another team, you take the hit. This disconnect goes against your monthly Total Billed Revenue quota: $100,000/quota - $5,000/disconnect will quickly put you in the negative for comp, and this can happen a couple of times per month. I've received negative comp checks while at 180% to plan. The Sales Order Volume (those monthly sales) are not paid out in full just because you sold it, you have to wait for it to install and then audit to get paid in full. This wouldn't be so bad if installs didn't range upwards of 6 - 12 months and the audit comes months after that. Make sure you stay on top of it all, because 12 months from now you may have to submit a ticket to have your commission adjusted on a sale you made a full year before. However, the ticket may be denied without explanation and since management doesn't fully understand the comp structure, they can't assist or override a prior decision -- they're powerless in this area. Management says they "empower" sales pros to take their paychecks into their own hands by giving you a 4-hour block every month to dispute commission check errors and customer account disconnects that were dropped in your base by other teams. This isn't empowerment, it's poor leadership and laziness. If you're new, be cautious about what you sell in those early months. You'll be pushed hard to sell right out of the gate and told that your lower new-hire quota works in your favor, but this isn't accurate. Early sales don't count, so you won't be paid for them. If you're told otherwise, ask your manager to draft some examples and send them to you in an email. They won't do it. The average tenure for a Sr. Inside Relationship Manager is 8 months. It's around this time most people generally quit or get fired for failing to produce. You quit because you never get paid or end up getting charged back due to "over payment" by the company. Those who have been there for 12+ months have so much time and energy invested in the sales they've made they don't leave because they'll never end up getting paid for their work. The Sr. Inside Relationship Manager role is a catch-all position for billing issues, tech support, sales, retention, install complaints, etc. In some cases you're expected to dispute your own decisions to not credit a customer account -- meaning, you have to submit a billing ticket against your own decision because Finance and Billing won't research an account or explain to the customer why the decision to not credit them was valid (it's as bizarre as it sounds). When it comes to implementation, it doesn't happen easily. This is where you sell the customer a solution and CeturyLink's sales support and field technicians see that it installs. Between you and the install are 10 - 15 other individuals, most of whom don't care whether your customer gets what they ordered or not. The ones that do their jobs well are rewarded with the responsibilities of the others who don't either know what they're doing, or want to do it, leaving the good ones overworked, underpaid and burned out. Look up "social loafing" and you'll get the picture. There are 30 years worth of documents you get to sift through when looking for information on how to complete a task or process an order for a less commonly sold product (there are ~1000 products) and no reliable human resources. Your engineer can often design product solutions for clients, but the install, billing, order placement, project coordination, is up to you to figure out. In case you were unaware, CenturyLink is made up of multiple companies with different systems, pricing, product availability and regional restraints -- no one knows definitively what rules apply to where. It's commonplace for only 20% of the staff to meet their monthly quote across the entire sales organization. But in one of the dozen or so monthly meetings leadership will use an outlier to pervert the success or metrics of sales pros to demonstrate it can be done. Top reps that are recognized and held up by management don't actually hit the numbers that are being highlighted. You record the revenue of your own sales and that's what is fed into the reports. You're not paid on these numbers (remember, it has to audit) but you get to keep your job and management uses it to keep the shell game going. The revenue that you believe a sales pro has achieved is far different than what they will get paid on. One way to land a "sale" is to tell your customer that in order to complete a site survey (field tech visits their site/office to verify product availability) you require them to sign a contract knowing the product doesn't exist. The customer just wants to know what you can offer, not actually buy something, but you lie them (are explicitly told to do this) into signing because it's "required" to send over a tech. You get to book it as a "sale" (it won't audit, so you don't get paid, but it looks like you sold something) and on the back end the order is cancelled due to unavailability. Management gets to put the sales on their dry erase boards, the rep is applauded for their efforts, and the customer never actually receives any services from CenturyLink. You can do the same thing with long distance as well, or just about a dozen other products, but at the end of the day there's no new net revenue added to the books, just signatures on contracts for people who only needed to know product availability. They run incentives from time-to-time like gift cards, or an internal prepaid Visa card for setting scheduled appointments and so forth, but they never seem to end up in your hand. Team incentives like outings for hitting sales objectives are never awarded. They tell the floor that you won it but then you never receive it. The Visa card scam is successful because they never send you a confirmation that you've won, they just hold a contest and give you a verbal confirmation that you'll be receiving one, but there's nothing in writing for you to dispute it when you don't receive it. All-in-all it's the the worst company I've ever worked for. Companies of all sizes, in all verticals, have struggles and this can often be used to your advantage to demonstrate your skills and abilities, or your eagerness to learn how to improve processes. This is not the case with CenturyLink.
