Pros
A decent opportunity for a single recent college grad who needs sales experience. If you can sell print yellowpages during a recession in the age of Google you can sell anything.
Cons
Most sales people DO NOT make it past their one year probationary period. If you do,congratulations you should continue in a sales career. The company seems to be moving toward centralized fulfillment of everything resulting in sales people spending much time in administrative tasks, paperwork, service and fullfillment, difficult to find time for selling. Centralized fulfillment is also resulting in lost jobs or employees being required to relocate to keep job. Customer Service is extremely lacking, often rude, and they fail to actually help, or resolve anything, and that's if you can stand being on hold for forty-five minutes to even get through to customer service. So your advertising customers get frustrated and then cancel their business with you when its time for anual contract renewal. Poor customer service department also results in the sales reps having to do more service and problem resulution to keep business resulting in less time available to go out and sell. at&t advertising has for years many fulfillment issues with various products that again result in lost business that counts negatively against the rep assigned responsibility to the account. Accounts are routinely reassigned to different reps each year, only a small percentage, mostly large or major accounts get the same rep several years in a row. These issues also result in advertiser frustration and dissatisfaction. at&t has created a selling environment where at certain times most, 90% or more,accounts are open season for any and all reps to call on. This results in more aggravation and frustration with customers getting calls from different telemarketing sales reps who often pose as quality managers or customer service reps or they say that they work with the previous rep that actually met with the customer so the customer thinks that person is benefiting when really the cyber or telemarketing rep is just tryin to make a fast buck without caring about whats actually best for that advertising customer. at&t has a damaged reputation with many businesses who no longer advertise with them, and there seems to be a lot of negativity that spreads as business owners talk to each other, making appointment setting very challenging. The company has an extremeley complicated software selling system that is extremely labor intensive and time consuming. at&t is also trying to downgrade the health insurance and increase the amount employees must pay, while also trying to negotiate with the CWA Union a contract that actually appears to pay out much much less in commissions with only a very tiny increase in base salary. The Union also revealed to members that other geographic divisions in the company are getting a much better commission plan, so there's not equality across the company.
