Pros
Not cooped up in an office all day. The work is enjoyable aside of the issues discussed below.
Cons
50k miles on your own vehicle, no deductions(W2), No regular gas or mileage reimbursement. You will not know your schedule for the day until 11am everyday and the 1st appointment will be at 1, 3, 5, or 7pm usually, good luck planning your week. 10-12 hour days, many of which you will not have earned a thing but will have spent gas money and bought food. They claim when you interview that you will demo half, sell half, and half of those sold will stick. My experience and the experience of those I talked to whom I worked with was that all of those numbers are less than that. At times, significantly lower. Less than half expected over the entire winter months. Promises of 100k+ but with 4-500 a month in fuel, wear and tear, taxes and horrible numbers in the winter coupled with price gouging and charging 1.5-2 times the competition, this boils down to more like a 50k a year job after all is said and done. Management are experts at diversion, manipulation, and at selling ideas that have no real value. They take that management practice and apply it to a sales process that sells the sizzle. Customers could buy similar/same product for much less elsewhere. You are expected to one-call-close each lead that you demo and you are expected to demo half of the leads regardless of if they are any good or not. The promise is that half of the sales will stick and you will make 100k+. But less than half stuck because I was demoing one bad lead after another with customers that can't afford a roof at all really much less a roof at 1.5-2 times the competition. The second they slept on it it was a cancel as they thought about their ability to pay or otherwise credit was rejected. Many others were lost to cancellation due to shop around after the sale. Erie will blame you for you this and pay you zero commission for it. 4-6 hours invested for a loss of gas money and time you'll never get back and 10's of thousands of dollars in lost commission over a year's time. They require you to purchase your own Ipads and your own ladders. It's disgusting really. The owner and other salary hungry pigs at the top are doing quite well making huge salaries that they openly gloat about. The sales guys at the bottom are getting shot out or are leaving constantly because they can't make it or can't survive on what they can make. I watched all but a few change over in my office in only 6 months time, many of them I would consider top sales professionals. I think 75% or more are less than a year on the job for a sales force. Let that sink in.