Pros
Account manager level sales teams are doing their best under poor sales leadership. Great bunch of sales people doing their best to promote ProQuest.
Cons
Sales management is not from the library space and doesn't understand the challenges facing account managers. It's all about the forecast and closing business, but this request comes with no guidance or support- only criticism. This private business made a decision a few years ago to abandon library relationships and put sales leadership in place that manages via a bully mentality. Every sales decision a front line sales person needs to make must be approved by a micromanaging approval process that sometimes takes weeks to get a response on. When sales don't meet expectations, there is no advise from management because they are not interested in "excuses" The North American upper managements answer to quota misses is to restructure and blame the shortfalls on inherited staff from previous sales management. This practice is done to show the CEO that they are making changes and buy time. And all this is at a cost of relationships and lost business due to trust issues with a provider. At one time ProQuest had a reputation as a thought leader in the library space. Providing thoughtful and well planned releases of platforms and content. What they have developed over the past 2-3 years is a coverup for what should have been fixed 5-10 years ago. Platform management is a sham and search results are so poor that most libraries rely on discovery services and avoid native platform shortfalls. ProQuest has lost so much key content that they've had to develop a "content diversity" market campaign to keep libraries interested. Its really nonsense as most of the content they are adding has little value and a low impact factor. With only a handful a key titles, its only a matter of time before those move to an aggregator with a solid sales management team. Commission plan is a joke, they will tell you how much money you can make if you overachieve quota by 10-15%. What they fail to realize is, that quota is set at 4-6% growth rate YoY, this means an AM has to do 15-20% above target to see any real money. And if you don't maintain that level of selling you go into a "liability balance" which means you owe the company for providing millions of dollars in revenue. The commission plan is based on YTD sales, if you fall behind you will never see a commission check even if you land a large deal. Great sales people have left the company because of this terrible - profit driven - compensation plan. We can only hope this family owned business wakes up one day and fires the upper management or the company is driven down so much it is sold to someone who can grow it again. Really sad to see such a great company in the hands of poor leadership that is only interested in their future. Most of these guys will move on in a year or two and leave the company in shambles.