1. A strange mix of total lack of oversight blended with crushing micromanagement.
-The worst kept secret in sales at this company is that many field Account Managers (henceforth called AMs) actually do less than 75% of the work that they report. There is a ton of free-riding going on at the field level, and it's obvious that the in-house management has no capacity to change this. It is stunningly easy to take half days or not to go to work at all and still get paid because nobody is checking up on you to see what you're doing.
- At the same time, everything is driven by data (I'll go more in depth about the data management later). If you hit/exceed your numbers, you're expected to go on and on to the rest of the team as to how you did so well. If you're not hitting your numbers, pressure comes down from upper management like a ton of bricks to fix the problem. By "pressure" I mean endless Lync meetings, conference calls, and lunch meetings where the management will continuously ask you to present plans and metrics for how to turn the ship around. Whether you're numbers are good or need improvement, the bottom line is that the managers will constantly breath down your neck for one reason or another, presumably to foster a culture of sharing in mutual learning. In reality, it just makes AMs avoid management.
2. Management isn't taken very seriously by the AMs.
- Management's constant presence in all of the wrong areas often leads the AMs to ignore instructions from the higher ups and just do things their own way. Instead of figuring out who's actually seeing the right customers and when, management concerns itself with pushing out instructions on how to utilize programs which often receive lukewarm receptions. Management also seems to be disconnected from what actually happens on the ground, leading the managers to assume that all territories are created equally (which they're not) and therefore they all should be performing equally (which they don't). This leads to unrealistic expectations for hitting hollow metrics (such as # of calls per day) being elevated over spending quality time working with customers. Again, these unrealistic expectations are, for the most part, wholly ignored by the AMs.
- At the same time, the practices and culture of the AMs leave much to be desired. Communication is hit or miss, but everyone talks quite a bit about "improving communication". It's great to recognize that there are communication missteps, but nobody ever corrects their habits of not telling partners 1. when are the best times to see customers, 2. who are the important office staff to know, 3. what to follow up about in your next visit. Those things should be in the call notes, but many teams have developed informal cultures of not filling out call notes, or only putting in a bare bones outline of what happened. Coordination of events is hit or miss as well. The problems on the AMs side stem from a culture of resistance to change on the part of the AMs, especially the much older ones who were in the industry long before the Sunshine Act and all of the new healthcare regulations.
3. Terrible, no-good, very-bad data!!!
- Title speaks for itself- IT infrastructure is simply terrible. Data usage at this company is comically inept across the board. There are AMs who can hardly use Excel for the most basic of data manipulation purposes (e.g. importing data from an email into an Excel sheet, creating tables & graphs, etc). This doesn't really matter though, because the sources of data are woefully unwieldy and usually wrong. Basic pieces of info on doctors and hospital staff (e.g. addresses, names of staff positions, best days/times to visit offices) are either missing, partially complete, or there are so many variations due to AMs and in-house IT constantly tampering with information.
- The apps available to AMs are not useful for the most part, yet management insists AMs use them as primary selling tools. Also the data lag on the sales numbers means that AMs' most up-to-date information on what their numbers look like are usually weeks behind the current activities. All of this combined means that AMs are usually left sorting through waves and waves of data (if they can even manage how to do that) in order to find a data-point that is, at best, only marginally useful.
4. Disconnect between in-house and field
- Company culture is everywhere in-house; you feel like you're part of a tight-knit community when you're there. All of that company culture goes right out of the window when you're on the field. The only culture felt on a day-to-day basis by the AMs is the culture of the pod and (to a lesser extent) the territory and the region. AM teams are largely isolated, which kills the cohesion of AMs regionally and beyond, and also has the knock-on effect making the in-house culture seem rather fabricated to AMs whenever it's time to spend a few days in-house. For the most part, though, the in-house staff are intelligent and competent. Also, aside from a single mediocre trainer for Nuedexta, the in-house training is superb.