Generally, neither enough respect nor recognition was given for the numerous sales achievements and results that corporate sale team generated. My role was at the front end of the complex sales cycle - to schedule appointments (calls and F2F meetings) with C-level and VP executives of my target accounts for Alsbridge's Consultants/Managing Directors to nurture and close these opportunities. Tremendous effort was put into generating such opportunities with key decision makers of Fortune 1000: hundreds of cold/warm calls, emails, hours of research, and planning. Sadly, most Alsbridge’s Consultants/Managing Directors were not even prepared for such meetings, prospects quickly lost interest and were not willing to continue communication. Hence I lost sales that I was not allowed to control yet was still held accountable for. When I tried to get more involved in the actual sales process, I was told by the Chief Revenue Officer that “it was not my job” to sell, but to generate opportunities for Consultants/Managing directors to sell" But I was still held responsible for lost sales! What a major gap in the sales process! In addition, the pricing for Alsbridge's services/solutions are higher than competitors'. Proposals that resulted from my prospecting efforts got rejected because they were overpriced (per decision makers' feedback). Amazingly in less than one-year period our corporate sales team had 4 different bosses with almost no direction from any of them except from the very first team manager. He did a great job managing our team, but for some unknown reason he got demoted. All our corporate sales team members did the best that they could with the limited resources and with no support or guidance from the senior management. At times we did not have a joint team call for weeks. Nobody knew what others were doing, working on, their success stories or failures, etc. Without getting any feedback from the corporate sales, the company/Marketing kept brining new sales tools and technologies that were cumbersome, outdated, and not useful for our process. However it was mandatory to learn and utilize them - This took time, effort and brought no results.
I never had a formal or even informal performance review while I was with Alsbridge for almost one year. I have been entering all my activities, call notes, opportunities info/details into our CRM system, however from our senior management's comments it was clear that they did not ever look or analyze any of this data.
Overall there is a major problem at Alsbridge - Company holds Directors Enterprise Solutions (corporate sales) accountable for revenue from closed deals – that they have no control of. It is expected that deals are closed by Consultants/Managing Directors! This is a huge gap in the sales process, structure and organization. The way that Alsbridge operates now is NOT the company I'd recommend for any sales professional to consider joining. Perhaps the environment will be different a couple of years down the road.
