A word of warning: If you read this 100% accurate review, and still go to work for this company, you will have no one to blame but yourself when the inevitable occurs.
All reviews should start at the beginning, and the beginning is the hiring/interview process. Are you alive, over the age of 18, and not a convicted felon? If you answered “yes”, you’re hired! Vivial is desperate, DESPERATE to hire sales meat for the grinder. More on this later, but if you apply for sales, you’re going to be hired. Don’t sweat it.
SHOULD you apply? Do you need a job for 6 months or so? Then, sure, why not. Are you looking for anything more than that? Okay, here’s what you’ll need to have a fighting chance. A) Know digital advertising inside and out. B) Have an existing book of business you can “convert” over (non-competes may come into play here…you can dance along that legal blade if you choose). C) Become one of the “Haves” and not one of the 90% of the “Have nots”. More on this later. If you can’t check at least 2 of those 3 boxes, you’ll most likely be fired in 6 months. Maybe you’ll make it 8 months. Good luck!
So, say you ignore all this and foolishly apply (which means you’ll be hired). Next up will be training. Do you know a lot about digital advertising? SEO? SEM? Websites? Online Display? Social Media? Content Creation? If so, great! Do you ALSO know how to sell to people? If so, that’s also great! You may last 8 or 10 months! Woo-hoo! Do you not know how to sell? Do you not know digital advertising? Well, you ain’t gonna learn much about either in the very fast and completely inadequate “training” you’re about to be quickly rushed though. A note here: This is NOT the fault of the trainers; they do the best they can. This is a private equity owned company in its final stages of cash extraction where training is simply an expense, so the cheaper and quicker the better. At one point, classroom training was 6 weeks long (and this was when there were almost no digital programs, just print) with another 2-3 weeks of on-the-street training to follow. Now it’s a quickie 2 weeks where you are expected to learn how to sell, everything about print, all the systems and software, AND all the incredible complexities of a dozen digital products. Jump back up to the top of this paragraph and ask yourself those same questions again.
So you’ve completed Vivial’s “training”, and you’re ready to hit the sales floor. What next? One SHOULD expect a lengthy ramp-up period, with commensurate pay as you are nurtured and coached along so you can succeed in your new career. Nope! You will be responsible for your FULL quota from day one, and if you don’t hit it, your “coaching” will be a write-up (Get used to these). Vivial calls these write-ups “Performance Improvement Plans”, and, while it does sound nice, it really just means “Sell more!”. You should not expect much in the way of coaching, although if you get one of the better managers they may try to help as much as they can (To be fair, the managers are saddled with constant panic/crisis management meetings where mid-to-upper-management tries to come up with new ways to hit the impossibly high digital quotas, but I’m getting ahead of myself here), but you’re pretty much on your own now. Touch point here: Do you have prior sales experience? A book of business from a prior company? Digital ad sales experience? If so, you may be doing okay at this point. If not, you’re……….well, you’re in bad shape now.
What next? You will begin to be fired. You will be handed your “Expiration date”. At this point, if you have some sales experience, I’d recommend starting to send out resumes. There are many, many, many, many, many companies that do the exact same thing as Vivial who treat their employees as more than income generating automatons. In fact, some companies out there actually treat their employees quite well. And they probably won’t have the same insanely high quota….
Ah, now….here we go. The quota. The digital sales quota has increased approximately 450% in the past few years. That is NOT a typo. When Henry Ford invented the Model T, when there was nothing but demand and virtually no supply, I would expect a GIANT quota increase. Same with radios when they were invented. Color TV’s. Cell phones. But……digital advertising?
EVERYONE sells digital advertising. Every yellow page company (the few that are left). Every Billboard company. Every TV station. Every magazine. Every newspaper. Every radio station. Every Ad Agency. In fact, some of the companies that these industries advertise on (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing, et al) ALSO sell advertising, so you’re competing against your own partners. Add in every website developer, every start-up, all the overseas scam companies that are trying to steal money from hard working mom & pop companies, and it can literally make your head spin. Digital advertising may very well be the most competitive industry in the HISTORY of not only advertising, but in sales itself!
In a normal sales situation, a quota would usually stay close to the same as the year before. At one point, the quota for a yellow page salesperson was +8%. Meaning that you should grow your business year-over-year by 8%. Simply put, if you have $100,000 in existing revenue in year 1, you should sell $108,000 in year 2. There was no need to RAISE the quota, because plus 8% represented significant growth, so the quota would stay at +8% for years at a time. Occasionally, the quote may be raised a point or two. So your quota would go from +8 to +10%. This would represent a really big jump in revenue for the company, and a real challenge for the salesperson. Vivial has literally raised their quota every year by double digits. One year it literally doubled, and I mean it was raised by 100%. In one year. In (arguably) the most competitive industry in the history of sales.
Still want to work here? 90% of the salespeople at Vivial cannot consistently hit their sales quota. That means 90% of the Vivial sales staff is on some kind of write-up (cough cough I mean a “Performance Improvement Plan”). They all have an expiration date.
I mentioned earlier that you could become a “Have”. If you still, for whatever crazy reason, STILL want to work for this terrible company, here is the coup de grace. The playing field is not level. MOST reps have to fend for themselves. They have to work in tiny markets where people spend almost nothing each month on advertising, yet these reps quota is exactly the same as other reps who work in major metro areas where it might not necessarily be unusual to hit your quota with one nice sale. Why would anyone stick with the tiny market? One word: Print. This company is still tied to print, so your revenue clients you HAVE TO HANDLE are your main opportunity to sell digital products to. And Vivial has fired/forced out so many reps, now they are desperate to hire more sacrificial lambs just to handle the existing revenue. If you’re still reading this, THIS MEANS YOU!
It gets worse. A very, very few reps just get to look for new sales. They can work in any territory. They don’t have to cold call. They get good, qualified leads (that come in from marketing campaigns), they have appointments set for them (by phone reps who are dedicated to setting appointments for them). They just need to do a little preparation, show up, and sell. There are less than 10 of these “haves” in the whole company. Praise is heaped upon them, and they are constantly lauded for their great and incredible sales acumen. I guess that’s fine, but here is YOUR problem: They have the exact. Same. Quota. As. YOU!
So, there it is. The benefits and vacation time aren’t bad. They match 401k up to 4%. There are some really good people who work for this company. But, at the end of the day, this is a dying company, private equity, in cash extraction mode. Whatever lip service they pay to caring about employees is just that. It’s a nice opportunity for someone to make some money while they look for a real career, but you’d better find that real job in 6-8 months, or you’ll be fire and Vivial WILL fight you on unemployment. So, do yourself a favor…look elsewhere. This job is bad news
