Mission impossible - National Account Manager Yodle Employee Review

They have no stomach for a long strategic sales cycle. National accounts is national in name only. Don't expect a national training program or a strategic selling process. Quarterly quota for national but measured daily like their local reps. For quick hit revenue they expect their national reps to make 50 + local calls per day and they count your minutes. You can be on the phone for 500 minutes a day but if you're not calling the right prospect how affective will you be? I like to work smarter not harder. They measure the wrong metrics. Why pay a senior sales person a $75k base to call local plumbers? Outsource it to India for $1.00 a day. Anyone can smile and dial, that's not what I was sold when I signed on. Don't expect a formal sales process with strategic account reviews. They throw as much against the wall as they can to see what sticks. They also think you can hard close billion dollar national companies to speed up the sales cycle by calling them every day of the week or offering them a price discount. Some of their managers have a yellow pages sales background. One day close, slam em! This just in, national enterprise sales doesn't work like that bub. We held a web demo for a national billion dollar insurance company in Dec 2010. Their legal team approved the 3 month test and RFP just last week (4 months later). How do you speed that up? You can't but they don't understand that. Reps had national accounts in their names for more than a year calling on the same contact over and over again month after month making no progress yet this was not managed. I had zero Top 10 or Top 20 account reviews with management. They just don't manage at that level. They manage by talk time:) Most national reps call gatekeepers and take no from them. They don't know how to hunt. The reps that succeed go to trade shows for leads and get lay ups from senior management. Hard work does NOT pay off at Yodle. If you're a good self promoter Yodle is the place for you. The market is saturated and the bad online reviews scare prospects away. I landed a multi-billion dollar manufacturer that sent over the signed agreement in March of 2011. One of their dealers read some bad reviews and shared the info with the manufacturer. What was an excited manufacturer suddenly became a cautious one. This slowed down implementation, their desire to back the project with funds and a full rollout turned into a test to prove Yodle's value. Some Yodle reps use Salesforce and some don't. Management doesn't use it? It's the wild wild west. Reps can poach your prospects from under your nose so you need to print your list and check it weekly. I never understood why they give reps user authority to change account ownership? I had to print my list weekly then double check it for poached prospects.