Pros
Offers an entry level position for young sales reps, but most quit out of frustration before long. No pressure on anyone to perform, great place for slackers.
Cons
Ricoh is run by incompetent executives, who after five years of trying to realign the company after merging with IKON have failed completely. The best thing Ricoh could do would be to eliminate a third of the management above the level of branch manager. Including the CEO. Branch Managers are constantly being called away from helping the sales team to submit reports or attend endless teleconferences. The sales staff is kept away from doing the job they were hired to do by the insufferable stress of dealing with the countless non-productive activities foisted upon them by management. Ricoh is trying to position itself as a full service provider of network and information management services. Yet it has failed to hire enough qualified people to enable these services to be smoothly implemented or to support the activities of the sales reps. The market is there and we find the opportunities, but the “specialist” are so slow to respond that often the opportunity to sell is lost. This is especially disheartening because so much of the commission plan is tied to selling services. The fundamental problem is that Ricoh has too many managers and not enough support personnel. They have eliminated the local administrative staff, which has alienated customers and added so much workload to sales reps that it is often impossible to leave the office due to the countless paperwork issues. Ricoh’s bureaucracy is so massive that a sale that used to take a week to complete now can be expected to take a minimum of two to three weeks or longer. Getting paid? Plan on another month or two (and in some cases a year). Commissions have been steadily reduced and the plan is so complicated there is little or no real understanding within the company of how reps are to be paid. And don’t count on the commission being right when you get paid. Salaries have been reduced to below what they were in the early nineties and the prospect of making it up in commissions is virtually impossible. In my office, incomes have dropped around 40% over the past four years. Good sales reps don’t stay around and those who do have for the most part lost their motivation.