Stocknovice,
While your stock picks currently do not make it onto my spreadsheet for company weighting, I always eagerly look forward to your write ups either monthly or on quarterly reports.
However, after reading this thread and the transcripts I tend to have a less absolute take.
I was technician, now I am a scowler, I scowl for a living. The pay is decent, the
work it easy and I get a decent tan. Can’t complain. A few years ago my company was moving our network support group from purely insuring network reliability to some customer facing work, I commented that it had been so long since I had seen a customer that I forgot what they look like. Personally, I want to keep it that way.
Some years ago I thought I could be a good customer facing person, sales, sales support or customer facing technical support. For the most part I failed at those jobs. In at least two of them I was terminated. In both cases it was a relief and a life upgrade.
I say all this to say, if you are selling all that you can put out, having incompetent order takers is better than having no one
answer the phone. However, once the infrastructure of the company catches up, either because the economy slowed down or the you start reaching TAM, then the quality of the customer facing team starts mattering. I say all this to say that the under performing sales personnel may have been pushed into sales work when they should be doing something else, being thrown off the bus when you don’t fit in and don’t want to go that way anyway is not a terrible thing.
Second, in an environment where there are no bodies available, you take what you can get, when the environment changes, you realign. We do it here. (Mostly) I do it in my
personal life, my employer does it, shouldn’t the CEO do it also?
My guess it that identifying removing and replacing customer facing people at scale would take in excess of 120 days, maybe as much as 180 days in a well run nimble
company, a couple of year or never in a company like AT&T.
Just laying off 100 people takes minimum of 60 days, then on boarding and bringing sales people up to speed probably another 120 days. I cannot imagine trying to come aboard my technical job and trying to be anything more than a warm body in 120 days, typically when I change job titles, staying within network reliability, it takes 3 to 4 years to become a technician leader. Even moving from territory to territory can take 3 years to become a full journeyman.
Worse, reading the glass door reviews, it appears that there is no well made sales organization to bring a new hire into and train them and mentor them up to
speed.
As the CEO was able to go to the report with a fairly detailed assessment, maybe he is already into the 120 to 180
day time frame to get better results out of the sales organization.
The question that you and others have had a difference of opinion on is: Can he engineer, and manage this change? Is it outside his skills tool box?
He has proven to be a good CEO so far, but is this situation overwhelming?
Cheers
Qazulight (Glad I am paid to be a grouchy old man and scowl at people while they work)