Pros
1. The founder has an unmatched, American rags-to-riches story. 2. The work is active and involves climbing, crawling, walking, and some creative graphing. 3. Approachable leadership. 4. A sense of humor is mandatory. 5. Company Perks - $100 Exercise credit, Amazon gift cards for positive reviews, take home car. 6. Great services, or at least in theory. 7. Great entomology training will set you apart from competition.
Cons
1. Certain Pay Guidelines will be conveniently “obscured” until after your pay has been withheld. 2. Your territory largely determines lead flow / pay. 3. Software is beyond frustrating and unreliable. 4. Important emails must be deleted to “keep storage space”. 5. High turnover – I saw 9 people resign (not fired) in my district in less than a year. 6. Low technician pay - $17 hr = extremely careless work, upset customers, and increased headaches for sales people. 7. Scheduling – Some days you will be asked to call in via the customer line and wait on hold for 15 minutes to schedule a basic appt. 8. Combat between Inside sales and Outside sales. 9. Bimonthly Pay is pushed back about 3 weeks in the rear. So after your first day you go about 3 weeks without getting paid and then from there you are getting paid for the work you did 3 weeks ago. INITIAL THOUGHTS I wanted to work at Truly Nolen and spent hours researching them before I applied. Outside sales employee income was advertised at $65K. I liked that they were a stable, family-owned company with good values. They have decent employee and customer reviews. I was excited to sign up. I loved getting to learn a new industry and appreciated everyone’s sense of humor that I met. ...but then I worked for 11 months and had made only ~$32K, and my opinion quickly started to change. My biggest complaint is how misleading the pay structure is and the borderline useless sales software. “OBSCURED” PAY GUIDELINES Basically, the standard operating procedures are communicated verbally instead of in writing, so the rules can change with no recourse to you as the employee. Example 1. For a sale I made, I was asked to include an additional form (one that required a signature) beyond what I was originally told I needed to collect. My question was this; if I didn’t have to get this form in the past, why do I need to do it now? Answer; for accounts that have been canceled for X number of days this additional form is a requirement. My second question; where can I find these “requirements” in writing so I don’t make these “mistakes” anymore? There was no clear answer. At this point, I put my foot down and refused to collect any more documents. We have the money, the signature, and the docs, now I just need to be paid for what I’ve done. I took it to my manager, the manager above them, and finally I went to the CEO in Orlando and asked her for help. “We cannot make an exception [and pay you on this]” was the answer. ...but they did. Less than a week later the additional form that was “required” turned out not to be required and it was a “mistake” made by someone in payroll. This was beyond frustrating and extremely unprofessional. Example 2. If you make a mistake on your paperwork you won’t be paid. Okay, I get that. However, there is no portal available to see in advance which projects are flagged / missing required documents, so you are essentially in the dark until payday. Additionally, if you are able to catch a mistake yourself and try to fix it, you will quickly realize it is about a 2 – 3 week process before it is resolved by payroll. Example 3. In order to correct most “mistakes”, you will need another signature from the customer. The easiest way to do this this is to send them a digital form with an e-sign. However, if the customer selects the “Typed signature” option instead of the “Drawn” signature, you will not get paid. That said, “Typed” signatures are okay for some sales, but not all. Give me a break. Of course none of this will be explained until after it affects your pay. Example 4. Vanishing signatures. When performing tertiary services to boost your pay, like annual inspections, you are required to collect signatures from the customer on your ipad. No problem, they sign and it will appear to accept the customers signature without issue. However, once sent off to payroll the signature vanishes. Without a signature you cannot get paid. Isn’t that convenient. During my time at Truly Nolen this was a “known issue” that was being “worked on”. I wasn’t paid for many of the inspections I did, and once the issue was finally fixed, there was no mention of back pay. TERRITORY: In my territory I received about 1.0 good lead per day. I had an industry standard closing rate of about 39.8%. Average sale was about $1200. My commission rate was 12% as part of a draw. Do the math; pay is about around $45,000. Not exactly motivating. If you are on a “senior” plan (no salary) you are at 18% commission and could make about $60,000 on the high end in my territory. UNRELIABLE / FRUSTRATING SOFTWARE: I trained with the top salesman our the district for a day. Using this software, it took him a 15 MINUTES to sell and schedule the most basic pest control service we have. For lower dollar amount industries like pest control, this is not acceptable. If he sold 8 jobs that day, then he spent 2 hours of his workday simply fighting the software. The reason this is so difficult is because they’re using 3 different CRMs together. To make it worse, the main one is designed exclusively for the desktop, even though we all use Ipads in the field. Have you ever accidentally clicked on the “request desktop site” on your phone browser? You know how the buttons are all super tiny and you have to zoom into everything to see or do anything? Yes, this is where you will spend all your time on the road as a sales person. FORCED EMAIL DELETE: Account storage is limited to 2 gigabytes which, in my experience, is about 10 months worth of emails. After that, you have to start deleting your messages to maintain storage space. Email is the only way many employees can access their paystubs because their payroll software is in a perpetual “upgrade”. This means saying goodbye to all your paystubs or other important records you may want to keep handy. SCHEDULING: You will use Teams to schedule work, which is fantastic until one person calls out of work. Then the entire region has to call customer care (the line that actual customers call) and wait on hold for about 10 – 15 minutes to schedule any work. INSIDE SALES BATTLES: Inside sales can take your customers if you don’t have notes on the account and it is after 30 days. However, if you do have notes the top inside sales guy can still take your customers because “your notes aren’t good enough.” I can’t believe what I had to put up with.
