My Work in Australia

My work is in a technical consultant role. It involves traveling around more than half the time meeting customers and all. I also work closely with the sales team, a little like my previous job role in Singapore.

Though I am not involved personally in office politics at the moment (and I hope not ever), I still do hear quite a lot. Friction within the sales team (fighting for accounts, etc), between departments (Product vs Sales), and also office affairs.

Let me talk about the friction within the sales team- its not uncommon in any organization. Everyone fights to earn commissions. Teamwork can only be seen when one person goes on leave and another sales person help out with the account even though she/he is not getting a commission.

Management also plays a part. If the manager doesn't make it clear who owns what accounts, or how accounts should be split, you will have overlaps. The sales team is divided mainly by industries, or so-called verticals. Everyone has a job to develop new customers from within the industry assigned to them.

What happens when a customer can belong to multiple industries ? How then ? Or the dealer (who belongs to one of the sales) happens to get a deal that is in a different industry (which belongs to another sales) ?

If the sales person is tasked to develop a new market segment, what about his/her old accounts that he has taken time to develop ?

All these are probably common in many sales structure. Managing the team well is the job of the manager and I probably have to say in this case, the manager isn't doing a very good job. Worse if she/he is seen to practice favoritism and hides like an ostrich, not solving problems that are brought to her/his attention.

Blatant backstabbing and spreading false accusations about colleagues to management is something that I dislike very much. One person's off my friend-list now.

And what about the problem between product team and sales team ? The sales team wants more information and sell anything that is easy to sell. The product team withholds information from the sales team, because sales team is stupid and cannot be trusted with precious information. Knowledge is king and holding on to information is asserting authority, I guess.

Office affairs ? Haha, I didn't see anything. But a couple is seen coming to office together, etc. Girl's single and available. Boy's having family problems, not sure of his actual marital status.

So there you have it. Nothing as juicy as my previous work environment, but it's getting there...