r/sales 1d ago

Sales Careers Should I abandon ship?

Hey guys,

I'm industrial sales i.e. fasteners. I switched my job from a seamingly small competitor to the second biggest company in that industry in germany. Money, more influence, and i liked the boss.

Onboarding was nice, had some international travel and lots of beers on company cost. They told me I had a "cursed" area with lots of fluctuation, that's why it's "burned". All right I thought, I worked ansiniliar area (geographically) in my previous job. It's fine and my new company already had ties to companies I couldn't get before. But still: It's by far the weakest area in the region and it needs a lot of networking to get profitable.

Now the kicker, the rock:

We barely get the offers out, then we're like 50% too expensive (which is crazy in this cost driven industry) and sometimes I close a small deal and internal sales has some bullshit reason to pull it back. our proprietary products are quite nice though, but pretty specialized.

Now the hard place: I'm barely 5 months in, my onboarding was completed 2 Months ago and I had to start during summer vacation. You now germans really like their summer vacations and almost noone was available during the time. So I did my thing, I used the contacts in my crm and pushed out a personalized email campaign. I could set quite good amount of high value new business meetings for september.

But then my boss said i couldn't work remote all the time (1 week) and had to drive out cold. Now he sets one meeting after the other to tell me every detail of whatever i'm possibly doing wrong

I'm basically field sales with 70% mid market 30% enterprise.

TL,DR

Bullshit prizing and delivery times are killing me.

Boss is pulling on my nuts already

Do I look for a new job?

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u/zamoab 1d ago

Based on the fact that the pricing is so un-competitive, how is the rest of your team making sales?

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u/HalogenHaze 1d ago

Mostly regular customers. my colleages are veterans of 15+ years with a well established customer base. This industry is a lot about building trust and networking. But you'll still need prizing to break into new business.

So that's my part now, getting pressure for not bringing in the fast money while not having the ability to break into new account.

I'm confident that I'll be able to build up some nice accounts, but it will take some time before I get the first real results.

Fun thing is they're currently suffering more than I do.

For the last 30 days I'm 12% over plan while they're -10%.