Pros
You get sales experience and sales training. They have anything you want or need online to help with a sale. If you could only figure out where to find what you need at a given time, since there are so many websites and passwords to navigate through.
Kontras
You are expected to work 10 plus hours a day, in addition to working from home at night and weekends. Sales Quotas are extremely unrealistic unless you are one of the lucky few that have a large account that always buys. Service pricing is not close to being competitive. There are constant meetings and conference calls that keep you from the field. Commision structure is bad. You are micromanaged to the extreme. You are rarely congratulated on a good sale, but on the flip side you are constantly beat on to sell more month in and month out. The billing is horrible. Customers continue to deal with the same billing issues for years and they are never resolved. As a sales rep, your hands are tied and customers no longer trust you because their issues are never fixed. Service is extremely short handed. As a sales person you are expected to fix all issues. Billing, service, deliveries, etc. etc. It leaves very little time to sell. You are not paid nearly enough for all of the aggrevation that you deal with on a daily basis. Writing a simple order for a printer or 10 hours of network services is about 30 to 40 pages long and the admin billing these orders seem to want to tell you that there is a problem with the order instead of billing it. The running joke is that after you sell a product and go through the steps of the sales funnel, you then have to go through a whole different funnel to get the order to be processed. It takes forever to bill an order. Since Ricoh and Lanier merged there has been nothing but problems, and now that Ricoh purchased IKON, when that merger happens it will probably cause even more issues. The company also takes care of their dealers more than their own employees. When you compete against a dealer and they already have Ricoh equipment ( or Savin, Gestetner, Lanier), we need to walk away, but if we have a current customer, the local dealers will come in with the same product, undercut our price and they are allowed to do it. If I were to start again and didn't care about promotion opportunities, I would work for the dealer because they can do whatever they want, and if we even cold call one of their accounts, they'll run it up the flagpole to the higher ups and scream bloody murder. This job has not been a good place to work for a couple of years now. I'm loyal, and I've been hoping for a turnaround, but it doesn't look like its going to happen any time soon.