University Directories Reviews

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – Managers were very friendly and fair. Working in team atmosphere is motivating. Every once in a while you run across a friendly customer who'll save your day.

Cons – The daily grind of a sales position gets rough at times. Door-to-door cold calling gets old really quick.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the motivating words. Having college kids do the heavy lifting is actually a pretty smart thing, but stinks if they get discouraged.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – The training in North Carolina was fun and a great learning experience. Great internship for experience cold calling outside sales.

Cons – Do not expect to be paid well. The sale of a school directory is very hard in the internet age.

Advice to Senior Management – The management team is very unmotivated. There are many levels of management and the local sales leader is just your fellow sales person.

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – -Great experience
-Great for resume
-Learn more about yourself
-Fly you free of charge for sales training in NC

Cons – -Long hours
-Tedious training
-Management can be too harsh at times

Advice to Senior Management – -Understand that the interns are college age and are not experiencec sales people. It takes time to learn and develop.

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – Great training program for internship. Training is very fun (you are with 500 other college students for a week) and helpful in covering sales presentations and product. Good internship to decide whether or not you would like to pursue a career in sales.

Cons – Main product (College Yellow Page Ads) is becoming very hard to sell to businesses. Territories can become unevenly divided among sales reps.

Advice to Senior Management – There needs to be a shift in just trying to sell yellow page ads. Initial ad prices should be considered more carefully.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – *Great training program and a very good place to receive real world sales experience.
*The senior management is very encourgaing
*At training, you have the opportunity to meet people from all over the country

Cons – *Management keeps sales associates very poorly informed about upcoming events. It is almost as if they are trying to hide information.
*You will be lucky to receive any compensation other than draw payments.
*The overall corporate environment seems a little shady.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep sales associates informed. Don't keep upcoming events, like renewals, a secret. Also, be more clear with the commission process. Make commission reports more clear and frequent.

Current Employee – been working at University Directories

Pros – Meeting new people...work at your own pace....only 3 months!

Cons – More training....more organized...be more friendly!!

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to everyone!!!

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – It was a really great learning experience. I learned a lot about how to speak to business professionals of all types of businesses. I do much better in interviews now.

Cons – It was a really difficult summer. Store owners could be either really rude or really nice. Rejection is a huge part of sales, especially in cold call sales.

Advice to Senior Management – Similar jobs would allow their sales teams to go out together. We ran out of territory about half way through, so had you let us go out together we probably would have made more sales and been able to encourage each other to keep on going. It was really hard to be on my own at times!

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at University Directories as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Sales Managers and upper level mgmt are very invested in sales interns

Fun, passionate collegiate environment

Fantastic networking opportunities

Extra perks for top-performing interns

Cons – Aggressive Sales Culture

Products not innovative enough to be competitive

Advice to Senior Management – Steer clear of print advertising if you want favorable margins

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at University Directories

Pros – This company is great for college students that are still doing their undergrad. They offer a summer sales internship that is great to get some sales experience before you graduate. There is also a great training week in Chapel Hill with all expenses paid

Cons – In the sales internship, you have to sale print ads in your universities directory. This is super challenging, considering print is a thing of the past. Depending on which territory or city you are in can affect your performance. Your best bet is to try to love the product.

Advice to Senior Management – My management was good, but one of the guy's was too pushy.

Former Employee – worked at University Directories as an intern for less than a year

Pros – - A paid internship (though not much) when most of what is out there is unpaid
- very supportive management team, even if they're not always with you in person. company culture is energetic and fun
- great training program - useful and fun...even more so if you "drink the kool aid" (or as they put it...lose your "cool card")
- if you want to go into sales or marketing, this is one of the hardest and therefore the most impressive thing you can do
- i had this internship the summer before my senior year of college, and when applying for post-grad jobs this was easily what I talked about most in interviews. I could draw an experience from my time with UD to answer practically any tough interview question. Companies would specifically ask me about this experience.
- while I was miserable for a lot of the time, I learned a ton about myself, my teammates, and sales in general.
- after, you will have concrete numbers to put on your resume with how much you sold and how much your team sold (even better if you hit goal and/or were one of the top in your region)

Cons – - lots and lots of rejection. you are trying to sell an outdated product (print ads), and trying to get businesses to reach out to a target demographic with limited spending power (college students). At training you are obviously told there will be many NOs and to treat those answers as "not yet" but I really didn't understand what that meant until I was out there doing it. you definitely need to have a thick skin, lots of motivation and energy.
- success depends a lot on your territory and who your teammates/managers are.
- you are alone the majority of the day, aside from team meetings AM and PM and meeting with business owners throughout the day. I found it to be very lonely and wanting to share the experience with my teammates, but we all had to be off doing our own things.
- the days are long and physically/mentally tiring, and when you do the math you will likely be making far less than minimum wage
- you likely won't see your additional commission until the fall.
- depending on your market you may face stiff competition from other college marketing companies, and other students doing/selling pretty much the same thing as you

overall, I would recommend this internship if sales/marketing is what you want to get into (or if you just want to try it, like i did). Even though I probably will not go into sales after this experience, the skills I built (time management, people skills, reaching a goal, teamwork, overcoming challenges, etc) are applicable in any sort of interview. You need to be extroverted, energetic, determined, and organized to do well. So, bottom line, there were many days where I hated what I was doing, but to this day I still call and thank my managers for the unmatched experience on my resume.

Advice to Senior Management – More prep for overcoming objections in training, more on-site management support. Company culture is great and what kept me going through many of the tough days...always encouraging and high-energy. Loved the little contests and promotions throughout the summer.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend