Pissed off

Yesterday I was really pissed off. Here's why:

In March my company's sales team split into 2 teams and the existing folks were given a choice which team the wanted to go with. The team of which I'm a part was decimated. My old boss was able to hire replacements for 'the deserters' who started in June.

Since June, 1 of the new people quit, and 2 others 'swapped jobs'. Another new person was hired to replace the 1 that quit, and another was hired to fill a vacancy just before the holidays.

Then my old boss took a different position in the company and a new boss was hired. He left 6 weeks later to pursue "an opportunity of a lifetime". He was replace by my new, NEW boss on Jan 7.

On Jan 11, 4 days later, he announced that he was reorganizing the sales team, resulting in clients being transitioned to different sales people and account managers. Many of us voiced concerns that months and years of work with clients (and commission) would be lost when they were transitioned to a new rep. The new boss said that existing clients would remain in place and that the changes would only affect new clients. We were all glad to hear this.

On Wed I reiterated the idea of keeping existing clients with whom we'd worked long and hard (and whom pay our commission!) and the new boss told me he understood and did not want to break up these valuable client relationships.

But then yesterday we got this spreadsheet showing how all the existing clients were going to be re-assigned. The top revenue client in the company has been mine for over 5 years, and it was re-assigned to someone else. Same goes for the #4 and #5 revenue producing clients, who also belonged to me. Nice, huh?

So yesterday morning I sent the new boss an email outlining my surprise/shock at the apparent reversal of thought (not breaking the valuable client relationships). He called me back a few hours later and we discussed the situation.

I was told that they had to help out some of the newer sales reps by giving them some existing accounts, to give them some base revenue while they began signing new clients. And because I am so f'ing awesome at my job, my high-revenue clients were among many that were re-assigned to others. But to replace these clients, they gave me a handful of tiny, small-revenue accounts that are practically worthless.

I told the new boss that sales people (and account managers like me) work hard for incentive, and the incentive is commission from our clients' accounts. I asked him what incentive was there to work hard on a client account if that account could be re-assigned to someone else at any point 'to level out the playing field' for the new reps? Just like a politician, his 'answer' was canned rhetoric that didn't answer my question at all.

That's big business! Although the new boss was too polite to say it, what he really meant was 'yeah, you're loosing these top revenue clients, but look at all the little tiny dud clients we're giving you instead!'

I felt so de-motivated I wanted to shut down my PC right there and then, and I was tempted to call in sick today. But the new boss scheduled a team conference call today at 4pm to go over our Jan sales numbers. Yeah, that's right. Its the 18th of the month and we're just going to find out today what our sales objectives are for this month! I sure hope we get some stability in our management soon. I hate being pissed off.

So today I'm not as pissed off as I was yesterday, mostly because I'm the type of person who makes the decision to 'move on' once I realize there's nothing more I can do to change what's gotten me pissed off. But I still don't feel like working hard today, which is just as well, because we're having 12 people over tonight for a birthday dinner, and then our friends Bugs & Roger arrive tonight and will spend the 3-day weekend here with us. In other words, I've got things to do around the house today and I'll be doing them before 5:00.

Crush du Jour: James Marsden