Pride!

Originally Posted by xj911

I also agree with the "negative energy" creates bad morale at the company, but me being a newly former Cingular employee and former AT&TWS employee can say that this just didn't stem from employees being upset about the merger. Last year I made about $80,000 as a sales rep for AT&T wireless, this year I will be lucky to make $30,000 and I feel that alot more work and pressure to exceed was put on my shoulders. I don't care who you are but when your pay gets cut in half and the company adds to your workload THEN HELL YA I'm gonna have some negative energy! Especially when the CEO gets a 5 million dollar pay raise.

I think the only people who can see things in a positive light are ones that just got hired on after the merger or who don't care about pay, just about cool phones. There are other alternatives to Cingular that can be just as fun and pay much better, Verizon for example.

Originally Posted by theclarks1

Ok I just want to know how that is possible. Im not doubting you or saying that you are lying but 80k a year??? If a cut from 80 to 30 man thats really bad. If you guys as sales reps are making that kind of money then Im out of the agent channel and into the company owned......

Originally Posted by magiteck

I don't know any company owned reps that make anywhere remotely close to $80,000 per year. The best reps around here (4year + tenures) were doing about $40K during the best years. If he was making $80K, I can certainly see why he would be upset. But honestly? If he was making $80K, he was making too much for a person in his position. He should be glad he had the chance to make that kind of income doing this kind of work - not complaining that it inevitably came to an end .

Originally Posted by speakindutch

What do you mean too much for a person in this position? You cant compare this job to that of a cashier at Wal-mart. We are professional sales people who are responsible for generating a great deal of revenue for the company. A rep who has been at this job for only a few years is responsible for ten of thousands
of dollars in revenue each and every month. $80,000 dollars per year is cetainly not unreasonable for a top performing rep.

Originally Posted by theclarks1

I dont know of even our dealer reps that make near that. I know of one that made around 50k in one year but for a store rep to make that kind of money I just dont see that possible. That would be the total for the year for 2 reps instead of one. I know that we are valuable to the company but managers and trainers help you out so shouldnt they be also able to make that or more? They have been there longer worked there way up to that position from the one that you are, man that would be a kik in the nads. I dont think that anyone was comparing you to wal mart cashiers. I think that he was comparing you to other salespeople and upper management.

Originally Posted by magiteck

Exactly. A Wal-Mart cashier at $7/hr makes $14,560 per year. A Cingular rep at $35,000 per year makes $16.82 per hour. There is absolutely no comparison between the two jobs.

I think $35,000 is fair for selling (on average) two-year, $1500 contracts to customers. It's about net income, not about revenue. By your "thousands of dollars" logic, a car salesman who sells $20,000 cars should be making six figures. It's just more often than not, not going to happen.

You might disagree- But I think $30-$40K is more than fair for what we do.

Originally Posted by Toothless Tommy

Hey Magitech
How do you figure making $80,000 is too much for rep ?? Maybe if more reps made close to that Samgular might keep its employess longer ( huge turnover rate and low morale ) and thus they would do a better job of sales and CS . Who cares about how much they spend on benefits - I would never work for company that didnt offer decent benefits . If the fools want to work for greedy Walmart and get few /no benefits go ahead .

Cingular is in big trouble getting cleaned out by the Verizon machine by a 1,000,000 in the last quarter and the quarter before , even crappy Sprint out did us by 450,000 more SUBS !!!! I say Sam some of the big HO types - they are as usual unaccountable . all they care about is their pensions and big bonus checks .
But at least Samgular finally woke up and started paying us $8.00 to upgrade a customer . It only took 3 -4 years for the fools to see that sales reps/managers were letting people / sales walk out the front door . I have never worked for a company that lets so much money walk out the front door .



You get what you pay for !

Originally Posted by Perceptions

magitek:how long have you been working in a COR store?

Originally Posted by Toothless Tommy

Hey Magitech
How do you figure making $80,000 is too much for rep ?? Maybe if more reps made close to that Samgular might keep its employess longer ( huge turnover rate and low morale ) and thus they would do a better job of sales and CS . Who cares about how much they spend on benefits - I would never work for company that didnt offer decent benefits . If the fools want to work for greedy Walmart and get few /no benefits go ahead .

Cingular is in big trouble getting cleaned out by the Verizon machine by a 1,000,000 in the last quarter and the quarter before , even crappy Sprint out did us by 450,000 more SUBS !!!! I say Sam some of the big HO types - they are as usual unaccountable . all they care about is their pensions and big bonus checks .
But at least Samgular finally woke up and started paying us $8.00 to upgrade a customer . It only took 3 -4 years for the fools to see that sales reps/managers were letting people / sales walk out the front door . I have never worked for a company that lets so much money walk out the front door .



You get what you pay for !

Originally Posted by Toothless Tommy

Hey Magitech
How do you figure making $80,000 is too much for rep ?? Maybe if more reps made close to that Samgular might keep its employess longer ( huge turnover rate and low morale ) and thus they would do a better job of sales and CS . Who cares about how much they spend on benefits - I would never work for company that didnt offer decent benefits . If the fools want to work for greedy Walmart and get few /no benefits go ahead .

Cingular is in big trouble getting cleaned out by the Verizon machine by a 1,000,000 in the last quarter and the quarter before , even crappy Sprint out did us by 450,000 more SUBS !!!! I say Sam some of the big HO types - they are as usual unaccountable . all they care about is their pensions and big bonus checks .
But at least Samgular finally woke up and started paying us $8.00 to upgrade a customer . It only took 3 -4 years for the fools to see that sales reps/managers were letting people / sales walk out the front door . I have never worked for a company that lets so much money walk out the front door .



You get what you pay for !

Originally Posted by magiteck

Yes, I think that negative energy is a large part of the problem. More importantly, though - I think (the elimination of it) is a big part of the solution. There are individuals, especially on this site, that seem to have a sole purpose in life of making it sound like working for Cingular is so bad that they might as well go work fast food.

My point is, that for some of those individuals, nothing management does will make them happy. Everything is a big conspiracy theory about how upper management is out to destroy each and every employee. And that I don't buy.

My point was for non-Cingular employees reading. People love to complain. A lot less people like to praise. I'm offering a positive opinion about the company, so that guests have something more to read about than how much Alfred hates his job. Because honestly - I come on here for information. And I used to love this site and get loads of great information from it. But now, I spend so much time filtering through complaints from a few select whiners, that it's often a waste of my time.

Freedom of speech reigns. If others can announce to the world that they hate their jobs, I'm going to announce to the world that I like mine. It's that simple. If they get to spread their negative energy - I get to spread my positive energy as well! :-)

Originally Posted by ivwshane

Some good points.

However I think if the pay was good enough the reps would overcome these negatives. When at&t was going through hard times the reps were able to overcome issues and I believe they helped at&t to start improving itself (which it was doing before the sellout completed).

Originally Posted by Alfred_Neuman

not all of our frustrations is just about pay magictech.

theres no point in explaining to you, as you're so blinded by the orange spew.

Originally Posted by theclarks1

I know among other things but I would be happy with 35k a year and excellent benefits. Anywhere you work you or anyone else is going to find something that you dont like about your job that your going to be negative about. The only way that you get out of the negativity is get you some joy, thank god(I dont know who believes this and who dosent but I believe it for myself and I want to be a witness I have a great family most of us are healthy and I even have good inlaws!!! so I dont want to offend anyone but this is how I feel.) for what you have and make the best you can of it. There will never be any perfect job until you make billions and like thats going to happen.

Originally Posted by xj911

I'm not offended, but I think the opinions of someone who hadn't worked for either Cingular and especially AT&T through the merger up til now cannot really know what front line employees are going through. Honestly I can live with 40K a year but just like was said before all the other BS I can do without. You know how frustrating it is to sell someone on Cingular service and then lose them to web pricing, dealer pricing etc? Cingular doesn't care about their sales team, they only care about the almighty dollar. While I was with Cingular it only seemed like they cared about bottom line and as long as money was rolling in they could care less about where it was coming from. It also seemed like they wanted to squeeze every last drop of money they could from our commissions while having higher expectations of me.

Now I'm not saying to boycott Cingular or everyone should quit, but what I am saying is I do not agree with the way Cingular is doing business either for the customer or for their hard working sales teams. In my opinion until they actually take a look at the big "R" and fix some of these issues, you will see them lose more and more customers.

Originally Posted by Alfred_Neuman

not all of our frustrations is just about pay magictech.

theres no point in explaining to you, as you're so blinded by the orange spew.

Originally Posted by theclarks1

I have worked on the front line with an agent from 5 years ago till the termination this year. So I do understand what you are going through. I had to deal with loosing things to the web, to retail.

Originally Posted by ivwshane

There is a very big difference between corp and agents. I'm not saying you didn't have frustrations but the frustrations corp reps have are really unnecessary add to that alot of bs and huge pay cuts and you got yourself a recipe for a disgruntled employee.

Originally Posted by Alfred_Neuman

want to know why im disgruntled?

cingular hasnt done much if anything to really entice people to switch to us. those who do and are smart, usually find themselves at wirefly.com,amazon.com or best buy. cingular will then turn to us and yell at us for not convincing them to pay our store prices and write up reps for not even hitting 80% of their quota.

cingulars pricing is beyond inconsistant in all 3 main sources: store,cs,online( you can include b2b as well)

theres too many stores in a given area.

I got 3 cingular stores less than 1.5 mile from me. two fo these are corp stores. considering theres lower number of people signing up and those customers spread between all 3 of us, a lot of us wont be hitting quotas.

cingulars mentality as far as treating their employees.

I dont know about you, but if over 80% of a specific market did not even hit 80% of their quota, i would review why that is and not bother punishing their sales force.What did cingular do? write up 82% of their sales force up!.

i stopped caring about my payout for features. ive accepted it. the other things,however, i dont.

how is it my fault wirefly gave the 7290 free? what value do you expect me to give him, the customer over the dealer? everythings over the phone: warranty,insurance claims. theres no or very little value of me over online dealers. we go the same route as they do nowadays.

Originally Posted by magiteck

Im not blinded, Alfred. I can acknowledge each and every one of the concerns you've ever addressed. I've had them myself. And there was a time I let things get to me. But, being adaptive to inevitable changes, and looking at the positives of everything that happens, makes life a lot easier.

I've gone through critical changes at every job I've ever worked. A lot of times they suck. But it's part of business... things will get better, get worse, get better again, and get worse again... that's business.

It's no fun for a company to balance the needs of employees, investors, customers and society. Raise pay? Employees are happy, investors are not. Lower prices? Customers are happy, investors are not. It's a viscious cycle, and it's not at all fun.

If/when there comes a time when I see a job out there that I think would make me happier than the one I already have, I'll jump on it. But until that time comes, I'm going to do everything I can do to help improve the company I work for, and do everything that I can do to make sure I'm happy with what I do.

The "worst of times" at my job, were when other local employees wouldn't stop complaining, complaining, complaining. That made me see things ONLY in a negative way, and it made going to work not fun at all. By ignoring all of that - and doing only the things that are within my power to do to enact change - I've made myself a lot happier, and a lot more successful. That's all I'm saying.

Originally Posted by magiteck

I don't know any company owned reps that make anywhere remotely close to $80,000 per year. The best reps around here (4year + tenures) were doing about $40K during the best years. If he was making $80K, I can certainly see why he would be upset. But honestly? If he was making $80K, he was making too much for a person in his position. He should be glad he had the chance to make that kind of income doing this kind of work - not complaining that it inevitably came to an end .

Originally Posted by magiteck

If Cingular took all the sales reps that were making $35K and paid them $85K, Cingular would not show a net operating income Then, in time, there would be no Cingular.

You don't need a college degree to sell wireless. In today's society, $35K is a great starting salary for a job that requires no secondary education and no manual labor! Around here, a starting teacher with a BA will only stand to make about $25K. And tell me which job is more important.

Originally Posted by xj911

I don't think that we can convince magiteck otherwise, he is entitled to his opinion, but the majority of Cingular's employees are unhappy, that is a fact and obviously there is something not right in the Cingular universe.

Originally Posted by adlman

The orginization needs to learn from its mistakes and not be afraid of being an INNOVATOR, rather than a follower.

Originally Posted by adlman

Employee morale needs to come from within and not from "the top down". If I was worried so much about Stan Sigman and what our Regional VP were doing I would be miserable. I try to focus on what I HAVE CONTROL OVER. I have control over my attitude, my pay (we work in SALES and can personally control our commission $$'s) and my customer's experience. I have control of the immediate things around me but unfortunately I don't have control over whatever...

Originally Posted by adlman

Magiteck does not make any claims that Cingular is a perfect place to work. Every post so far has brought up some valuable points. Things have changed and will continue to change at Cingular. Some things are for the better and some things I will agree are questionable. I may not agree with many of the changes personally, however as a manager, it is my duty and responsibility to communciate these changes to my team members in a honest light. I could easily make these communications negative and extremely pessimistic, however I could also focus on the positives and how we can be successful.

Employee morale needs to come from within and not from "the top down". If I was worried so much about Stan Sigman and what our Regional VP were doing I would be miserable. I try to focus on what I HAVE CONTROL OVER. I have control over my attitude, my pay (we work in SALES and can personally control our commission $$'s) and my customer's experience. I have control of the immediate things around me but unfortunately I don't have control over whatever comp. plan Cingular tries to roll out. I do have control over how I change behaviors as a result of new comp. rollouts to try and increase my success.

Cingular is trying to do way too many things at once and many many people are getting burned out. I believe in the organization and miss the BLUE days but am committed to the new company. It is with the dedication, and hard work, of people like MAGITEK the NEW CINGULAR will be successful. The orginization needs to learn from its mistakes and not be afraid of being an INNOVATOR, rather than a follower.

Originally Posted by ivwshane

And if an organization is to be successful you have to create an environment in which it's employees can be successful.

They both go hand in hand and one without the other will lead to an unsuccessful business.