I worked in sales and marketing and had inadequate local technical support. Fewer and fewer support engineers are available and customers are sometimes left in the cold. The higher management (director+) sometimes closes positions or lets go of employees who are contributing to sales of 10-20 $M each year, and push the responsibilities to the remaining ones including those who are not technical.
Unfortunately, they lose a lot of the best engineers and application people in the process, and they do not hire more to fill the deficit. The Americas Region is what they use to cut costs. They look mostly at numbers generated by sales people and do not seem to understand or care about the value added by the technical employees who support the sales and marketing persons in the local region. The company says a lot about mass-market as a vast untapped revenue steam but won't maintain the local engineering resources to support it.
Those technical people, for example show up at a customer meeting and give the customer what the customer wants, having created the specific solution - they demonstrate it right there, and so make the sales persons' jobs easier. Part of the problem may be that ST uses the same marketing forms that are used as weekly or monthly reports by sales people, to judge the work of technical staff. This does not work as a means to measure competence or contribution from the application engineers because the visibility given by those reports and forms is a mismatch to the work done by those employees. The work of application engineers on whom my sales efforts depended had little or no visibility because of the forms used for reporting.
There is a great deal of short-sightedness, and more interest in the expenses of this quarter than what profit will come from projects underway, those taking 1-2 years each. When a technical employee is let go to save a few dollars, whatever projects were underway are then poorly executed due to knowledge vacuum. It causes a loss of sales. Basically they will eliminate an engineer's salary and claim to have cut costs, then lose ten to thirty times as much in sales in a year. That business failure is never mentioned except to blame it on the sales person, but the cost savings are trumpeted as management's accomplishment.
The company is a serious rumor mill, there are many political lackeys otherwise lacking in skills, and many of the managers are more interested in appearances, power, and empire-building than profitability. There are highly paid people who should have been let go years ago, who are quite incompetent deadwood but well-entrenched with the EU management buddies. I was there for 10 years, and have a good insight into all of this.
The comments in other posts, about European culture, are true. The European employees come to the USA, are ushered into high positions, and some, maybe two thirds of them, proceed to manage their responsibilities as if it were Sicily.
This does not work well in the US customer culture, but they do not see it or just ignore it. At some meetings, the loudest mouth wins, not the the most beneficial idea.
I have been at a few customer meetings where the ST high-management official, from Italy, told the customer what they wanted (told the customer what the customer was going to do), not the usual case of the customer telling a prospective vendor what the customer wants. How can that be a successful sales meeting? These same European managers are competent employees and could do well, but they don't seem to recognize how business is done in the USA and adapt to that. Instead, it's the Old Country all over again.
