Let me preface this by stating that I quit while making six figures and with over 50k in unvested stock sitting in my account. Also, I was there for years.
There’s a lot to say about what’s wrong here but let me sum it up in one word: management.
Management. It’s all over the board. While I was there, I saw every single head position change. In one day, both the commercial manager and the CPO announced they were leaving. Nothing stays the same for long.
The current management team turned down over half a million in sales last year because it didn’t fit what they were trying to sell. They would do this by pricing their services at 4x what they were going for with other clients. I heard arguments ranging from “this isn’t who we sell to” to “this isn’t big enough” to “these services don’t align with what we do.” What’s weird is, they don’t know what they do. By their own admission, they’re no longer a hardware company and they’re no longer a solutions company, so what are they? If you ask them, they can’t rightly tell you.
CalAmp made the decision last year to start forever charging for subscription services offered to anyone who purchased their hardware. When I asked the CPO at the time, he said without skipping a beat, “we’ve projected that we’re going to lose 1/3 of our total customer base with this move.” Who does that? Why would you do that?
Management does not listen to its employees. RFP’s with clear directions are ignored by managers and are routinely lost. Customers complain on a regular basis about a lack of customer service and tell reps they are going to drop, but nothing is done to retain business. For a direct example of how tone-deaf things are, the CEO recently stated they’re fine with customer waiting up to 12 months to receive product they’re contracted to get.
Now let’s say you do get a customer that can buy. They have to sign and review a 24-page contract as well as a purchase order. You read that right. Most companies in the telematics space have a 3-page agreement. CalAmp also fights any redlining, and in my tenure there, I never saw a contract be signed without redlining.
There is no acknowledgement of experience or achievement. I saw reps with a decade of experience ignored in favor of people who hadn’t sold a thing and had only been with the company for a handful of weeks get promoted. Departments were run by people located on the other side of the planet who never took the time to get to know their teams or what they could do. It was infuriating.
Then beyond all this, is the product. It doesn’t work. Well, not the way it’s advertised, at least. The camera system was only operational for one client, and that was because of customizations done by one technician, whom they fired because they didn’t want to pay for anyone in tech working remotely. The cameras never, in the three years I was associated with CalAmp, actually worked as advertised.
There’s also their smart trailer solution, which they push at every corporate function they can. Aside from some pilot work with Hyundai trailers, there were no active clients using it. There was no active pilot data for reps to refer to. It was all based on the word of the tech team, who admitted that the product didn’t work the way we were being told internally.
CalAmp purchased Synovia Solutions in 2019 for 50 million US. They then proceeded to fire 80% of the employees there, including most of the head techs that developed Here Comes the Bus, the chief educational product offered by Synovia. At the time of writing this, only one original tech was still with the company, and the team that inherited HCTB did not view maintenance or advancement of the product as a priority.
There’s no direction, no guidance, and no clear instruction on what to sell or how to sell it. On the subject of selling; the commission structure is a multi-page spreadsheet that is deliberately designed to confuse you, and they do. Not. Pay. What. You’re. Owed. I left after being swindled out of a 20k commission, which I fought for a year. Another rep who’d been in the industry for over a decade left after he was stiffed multiple times. They won’t pay you for your work. They will always find a way to argue what you’re owed. Always.
In short, don’t waste your time here. The base pay may be good and the benefits are admittedly nice, but looking at how things are managed, the company is not positioning themselves to make a profit. It’s more like they’re setting themselves up to be broken up and sold off, as the company is quickly becoming more valuable as individual pieces than as a whole.
