Death of a Great Sales Job

When I arrived at the Verizon Yellow Pages a few years ago I was told by some of the older guys how the glory days had passed. Being new to my career I casually dismissed their regular rants about how the new leadership (primarily from Texas) had maintained profitability by cutting expenses and implementing cost controls. I didn’t really grasp (in those early days) how dire many of those guys must have been feeling. Now that I am a quasi-one-of-them, my head too is about to explode - and this is the best way I know to keep my brains off of the walls.

When Bell Atlantic and GTE got together in July of 2000 to form Verizon, the Bell Atlantic contingent in the northeast took somewhat of a whack when corporate operations landed in Dallas and the GTE leadership began calling the shots in terms of corporate strategy and day-to-day decision-making. For all intents and purposes this marked the beginning of the end of “The Golden Age” for what was once known as “the best sales job in America”.

With spreadsheets in hand in a declining print market, and with added pressures from print competitors and the internet, the Texans started the job of wielding the ax at items like labor contracts and support staff, instituting back door personnel culling practices in the form of unattainable performance standards, and holding performance for shareholders as the pinnacle in a hierarchy of values. Employee satisfaction and happiness as cultural mandates vanished.

Somewhere lost in this formula was the fundamental reality that the Verizon Yellow Pages (now Idearc Media Corp) had ceased to be a great place to work. As a relative newcomer, I am not nearly as invested (financially or emotionally) as many of the people with 15-20 years of service. However in speaking with them, their angst is palpable. It is a travesty to have been in love with your career and to have your affect for it skewered like a pig. It is more than distressing.

In a past area sales meeting, the company had the audacity to hire a speaker / sales trainer whose message was “work is not supposed to be fun… that’s why they call it work”. That sent a shockwave… We surmise she didn’t understand the concept of passion for doing a great job, aspiring to exceed customer expectations and providing value that goes beyond schlepping ads in a book. I don’t remember her name, but in retrospect, she was the perfect prognosticator for how my time with Idearc would evolve. Work is not fun. Goal accomplished.

I have a list of topics that I have written about that deal with corporate culture, decision-making, managers and management style… the transparency of values postured and their rub with the reality of working day-to-day… I encourage you to come back or subscribe to my RSS feed and get a real sense of what is going on with Idearc – employees, prospective employees, investors and casual observers alike. (will be up soon)

We are witnessing the demise of a once great selling enterprise. Now, as a self-proclaimed second-rate sales organization, we collectively show up every day to hold on to our security – tentative as it may be. Very few are optimistic as most mumble, “there must be a better way to make a living”. In the interim, we are stuck - held hostage by the necessity of health benefits and the crunch of mortgage payments.

We persevere. Why, many cannot articulate other than the inertia of the river continuing to sweep us downstream. And somehow every day we wake up and go “do it again” in a passionless culture for which we have supreme contempt. The reason for this contempt is very straightforward…

They killed a great job.