歐凌股份有限公司

Sharing my experience working in sales at the company for half a year

Pros:

1. The company is on the first floor. The front half is a showroom, and the back half is the employee work area. The company provides sales staff with laptops. The workstations are open-plan, so you can work at your own desk or anywhere else in the company. The work environment is open and flexible.

2. Not long after I joined, the company arranged a one-week new employee training program covering company policies, sales techniques, product knowledge, and practice exercises. Overall, it was quite good.

3. There is a wide range of furniture products, and many colleagues are knowledgeable. The company also has a relatively high level of brand recognition and a large showroom. After half a year of adapting, I can now handle things independently. I recently signed a mid-sized project, and the bonus was pretty good.

4. Employees are required to clock in at the company, but if you have business to attend to, you can notify your supervisor and do not need to come in. Whether to work overtime after hours is up to you; no one monitors you. I usually leave at 6:30, though when I have projects to handle, I have stayed until 9:00. Weekends are normally off. Twice, I had deliveries scheduled on holidays, so I arranged time to take compensatory leave later.

5. The company offers overseas travel rewards for achieving annual sales targets. When I first joined, the top-performing employees from the previous year happened to be going abroad for a trip; this year’s top-performer reward is a trip to Japan.

6. There is a 20-minute meeting every Monday morning, mainly for the general manager to share updates. Product training is sometimes arranged as well. Branch offices participate simultaneously by video conference.

7. When I first joined, I received a guaranteed salary. Now, after six months, I have adapted and developed some clients, and my sales performance is fairly good. Senior colleagues have privately shared tips on closing large deals and earning bonuses.

8. The company is arranging a health checkup next month at the “Chuangjian Health Center” in Taipei City. Someone came to the company to explain the arrangements, and the benefits are quite good.

9. The company hires dedicated staff to clean and organize the workplace, so everything is generally clean.

Cons:

1. Honestly, there are no major drawbacks. Compared with my previous job in real estate brokerage, the work here is normal, self-managed, and holidays can generally be taken off.

2. Sales work naturally requires you to put in effort to find clients. Since the company has fairly good brand recognition, it is not difficult to develop new clients, and they are willing to come to the showroom for a visit. Clients have a good level of trust, but I am still working hard to learn and build customer relationships.

Year-end banquet cash raffle

NT$10,000 subsidy for employees to purchase epidemic insurance

Good relationships among colleagues

The sales performance pressure is somewhat high

The interview location at the head office was very impressive and professional. When I was filling out the application form, the receptionist asked me what I would like to drink, which felt very welcoming. The interviewer was friendly and explained the job responsibilities and promotion and salary structure in detail, including how bonuses are calculated.

The interview took a little long.

May I ask if the Taoyuan office is good?

I hope someone familiar with it can share their experience. Thank you.

The office looks clean and bright.

The salary is 35k for the first three months.

I’d like to give it a try, but I’m still hesitating. Has anyone interviewed and worked at the Taoyuan office who could share their experience?

Here is my experience:

Although a high turnover rate is normal in sales, the turnover rate here is really quite high. The sales colleagues are fairly easy to get along with. I often see everyone working overtime. Officially, work ends at 5:30 p.m., but when things get busy, many senior colleagues work straight through until nine or ten p.m., or even later. Maybe it is the bond that comes from going through hardships together!

Here is my experience:

There is no overtime pay here. Sales staff also do not receive subsidies for parking, fuel, telephone bills, or overtime meals. However, to start making money here, you have to stay for at least half a year (the manager will repeatedly emphasize this during the interview), and only then will you start receiving enough bonuses to cover your expenses.

Office environment

The office environment is really quite poor. When I first applied, I looked at the company's photos of its office and thought that a company selling office furniture should have a nice work environment. I was wrong. The sales office is in a mixed-use residential and commercial building next door, about a five-minute walk from the headquarters showroom (the interview location).

The sales staff work in a purely office area shared by the production and sales department, accounting department, and Sales Departments 1 and 2. It is very cramped, and there is only one restroom for all these people—yes, just one (shared by men and women).

The office area is right next to the restroom. Apart from often having to queue to use it, you can directly smell the gastrointestinal health of the people inside from the office area. It is terrifying.

Besides the threats to your sense of smell, the place is also visually chaotic. The office area is assembled from partitions in various colors, with different styles mixed together in a haphazard way, and the space is very cramped.

Then there is the noise.

Because there are no partitions at all, the phone calls and voices can be very loud.

There is also the sales department director—the highest-ranking person in sales—who often sleeps at work. Usually, after the morning meeting, he sleeps until noon, about three or four days a week. Sleeping is his business, since he is the director, but snoring constantly is really unacceptable. It is extremely loud—I am not joking; you can hear it from the office entrance.

Honestly, he is the highest-ranking manager in the sales department, so there is nothing we can do about what he wants to do. But his snoring has already affected people's concentration at work, and it creates a feeling of, “Why bother working so hard?” It really hurts morale.

About the sales department

There are so many large and small meetings that I thought I was working on some major enterprise.

Here are two examples:

Monthly departmental operations meetings (usually lasting from noon until the end of the workday, so half a day's working time simply disappears 🙂)

Irregular morning meetings every day (the director calls them whenever he feels like it, and he even takes attendance every morning. I thought I was in elementary school.)

There are really far too many pointless meetings, and they all take up a lot of time.

(If a delivery has already been scheduled for the morning or something similar, the director will say, “You knew the morning was reserved for my meetings, so why did you schedule it in the morning?”

“Are customers more important than meetings? Do you not take me seriously? The way you are acting means you are not a team player and have no discipline,” and other truly baffling things.)

The company seems to frequently hold competitions, such as presentation competitions and showroom introduction competitions, and they are all held on Saturdays (you can only exchange them for compensatory leave).

But taking leave is not as simple as just applying for it, because there are often meetings, and the director wants everyone to attend.

No matter what kind of leave you want to take, you first have to get approval from your own department manager and then report it to the director as well!

If you have to make a delivery at a construction site early in the morning, telling the director in advance will make him feel that you are disrespecting him by scheduling it during his meeting time; telling him at the last minute will make him feel that you did not inform him early enough. Deliveries must be scheduled after his meeting, not early in the morning. It is really asking too much 🙂

Customers are expected to arrange deliveries according to the company's meeting schedule~

One more thing about the sales department director:

He has poor emotional control. In addition to frequently raising his voice, he also publicly berates people with extremely offensive remarks such as “Goddamn it,” “Your ears are covered with foreskin,” and “Go home and drink milk,” as well as other sexually harassing comments that make people uncomfortable.

He also spreads gossip everywhere, asking things like whether people have partners and whether certain sales staff are attractive, which makes people uncomfortable.

Year-end bonus

At this sales-oriented company, a few days before the year-end bonus was paid, the director held a meeting and said: “When you see your year-end bonus, don't feel aggrieved. Sales staff should think about how they can increase their income. For example, promotions, landing major deals, and higher sales-ratio bonuses are what will improve your compensation. Don't expect much from the year-end bonus.”

For the 2022 year-end bonus, administrative staff received N months' salary.

Sales staff with a 100% achievement rate received less than N months' salary, while those with achievement rates over 120% all received the same N months' salary. Even if you exceeded that by much more, it did not make any difference.

This proves that there is no need to work too hard—no matter how hard you work, you will receive the same amount of money anyway~

The above is for everyone's reference ٩(｡・ω・｡)و

Okay

Keep it up

1. Harmonious relationships among colleagues

Since most colleagues have only been with the company for a few months, there is little seniority-based hierarchy.

2. A good platform for making friends

Because the turnover rate is very high, you can meet quite a few friends in a short period of time.

3. Opportunity to learn the expertise of different positions

The company's sales-related work includes sales assistance, purchasing, engineering, design, site supervision, cleaning, courier services, and other tasks, so you can learn about the expertise required for many different positions.

4. Opportunities to learn a variety of skills

Crisis management (the factory has an extremely high rate of errors)

Emotional management (when handling external problems, you must absorb customers' dissatisfaction; internally, some administrative colleagues have low emotional intelligence and become angry easily)

Financial management (because salaries are relatively low, you need to manage your existing funds carefully; there are also multiple records of late salary payments!!! June and August 2020)

5. Intensive training in sales skills

Contrary to the description posted on the job-search website, only a few of the company's products are developed in-house, and it does not have its own factory. Most products, like those of other companies in the industry, are purchased from factories. However, the company may set relatively high profit margins, and quotations to customers for identical products are often considerably higher than those of competitors. Since the products are the same as those offered by competitors and lack core value, salespeople must rely on their own abilities and methods to sell them at a high price.

6. Year-end banquet and spring banquet are both provided

Employees who have been with the company for less than one year cannot participate in the year-end banquet lottery and receive a NT$600 participation prize. Employees who have not yet become regular employees receive one NT$200 “Endless Hope” scratch-off lottery ticket. However, the lottery prizes are not very large, and there are also instances in which bonus prizes appear to be preassigned to specific colleagues.

1. Poor office environment

The interview venue is a relatively spacious showroom, but don't misunderstand—that is for customers to see, not your actual work area. The actual workplace is a nearby office. Although the company primarily handles space planning and design and sells office furniture, it places 30 employees in a cramped space with only one restroom. You can even see the unusual sight of women lining up to use the restroom as if at a tourist attraction.

2. Extremely long working hours and routine overtime

Working hours are from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but sales staff are required to leave by 9:30 a.m. at the latest and cannot return to the office until 5:30 p.m., when they can finally begin preparing quotations and other paperwork. Even though everyone is already extremely busy, there are also piles of internal reports and data to enter. Working overtime until 8 or 9 p.m. every day is normal, and working until the early hours of the following morning is not unusual. The current record is delivering goods at 4:30 a.m.; naturally, you still have to clock in and work that day (without overtime pay). Calculated this way, you would earn more working part-time at 7-Eleven.

3. A seemingly transparent promotion path

The company appears to provide a well-planned promotion path, but once you achieve your targets, other explanations are used to block your advancement.

4. A seemingly systematic company culture

All policies are decided by upper management, but they are frequently changed overnight, leaving employees at a loss.

5. Company values: integrity, efficiency, and sharing

Integrity: There is no integrity at all. Promised delivery dates to customers are often changed repeatedly, and shipping quality frequently has problems, causing sales staff to become scapegoats.

Efficiency: Sales colleagues cannot handle the documents, quotations, and presentations required by customers in the office during working hours. It is also common for customers to request a simple change to data or an item on a quotation, but the response cannot be sent until the following day.

Sharing: The company provides a sharing mechanism. After sales colleagues are promoted and become eligible, when the company believes that enough people have accumulated (enough to cover the cost of the meal), one promoted colleague is compulsorily required to pay NT$2,000 to treat the boss and other sales colleagues to a meal, and must drink a pot of draft beer to entertain everyone. This sharing system is mandatory: participation is required, and the designated contribution must be paid without objection.

6. Annual leave

Company supervisors do not want employees to take leave on Mondays, Fridays, or immediately before or after long weekends, but supervisors themselves mostly take leave at these times!?!

7. Too many unnecessary meetings

Every Monday, a regular morning meeting chaired by the general manager is held. The content is basically the same each time, consisting of announcements about various reminders. Afterward, sales staff are routinely asked to continue into the conference room for another “spiritual education” meeting!? On Tuesdays through Fridays, irregular morning or evening meetings (after work) are held, mainly to review performance and promote how promising the company is.