While Cisco throws countless families and individuals into despair with layoffs on 9/16, they announce yet another expensive acquisition and offered the sales folks an extremely high SPIFF just to barely reach their goal with payout this month (SPIFF target was between 60%-80%). How many millions will be wasted on this SPIFF and GSX just to get people to do their jobs? How many headcounts could have been saved with that money?
This double standard is so absurd that it's almost laughable.
Disgusting GSX spending waste in midst of layoffs
Cisco supplies food at Cisco GSX cafeterias but everyone goes instead to expensive restaurants and expenses tens of millions of dollars at overpriced Vegas hotels for sushi, steaks, booze etc
If Cisco wants to truly motivate their company, they should stop the "sales only" GSX event. All my sales friends ever talk about from that event is how much they partied and how much "non-qualified" expenses they charged to the company. And meanwhile, the rest of the company gets no party or motivation event.
If Chuck wants to finally get the books in order, he must cancel next years Aug 2025 Vegas GSX boondoggle now to save some jobs during the next rounds behind the current one
@iqs+1ueT6SYQ, I agree. I work with a lot of them and could use some help. But to broaden our horizon, so do some other teams. Sales operations, renewals specialists, CSMs, TAMs, TAC leadership, HR, finance, ELT (LOL!) for example. They may also not face a lot of pressure (and wouldn’t survive at other companies) and have a Cisco bonus even though it is trash this year. If you just don’t pay that bonus amount at all to all these employees, the company could also save a lot of “millions and headcounts”. The world isn’t a perfect place. Singularly calling out a subset of teams and arguing about them “not contributing” is not right, because there will always be 1000s of employees who fit that category of “not contributing” and yet earning bonuses and spiffs.
@fdx+1ueT6SYQ, if you knew how little pressure the PAMs and BDMs at Cisco actually face, you’d have a different opinion. They wouldn’t survive at other companies.
@sfs+1ueT6SYQ, I agree that some teams don’t contribute to the sales process and may benefit from the Spiff, but couldn’t the same thing also be said about the Cisco Bonus? It is paid out to all teams (except sales) and most teams may not contribute a great deal to generate revenue for the company, but enjoy the Cisco Bonus? It is not a perfect system. Just because a sales team does not directly contribute to a sale, doesn’t mean they aren’t working enough to justify the spiff. If their role is redundant to the sales process, it isn’t their fault, it is some leaders’ somewhere that once thought BDMs, PAMs make sense. They have different duties. They train partners and distributors that help us sell. The account facing teams do not do that at all. Without a partner system, we cannot go to market. BDMs, PAMs ensure we have a healthy knowledge transfer and working relationship with our partners. Their duties are different and they impact the sales revenue differently. They deserve to be spiff’d for it!
@ryw+1ueT6SYQ, the problem is that many overlay roles and other positions that don’t directly contribute to revenue (like BDMs, PAMs, etc.) benefit from SPIFFs without actually contributing anything, not they’ve put in more effort because of the SPIFFs. This is just a waste of money at the expense of laid-off employees and shareholders.
Regarding GSX: Cisco has been laying people off for years, yet continues to waste millions every year on this drinking binge of an event. Many people have to travel long distances to Vegas, and they don’t even want to go, but they’re forced to. And then Cisco tries to parade its commitment to sustainability. It’s just disgusting.
“Just to do their job”. While I partially agree with GSX being an overkill, the company isn’t stupid to offer SPIFF to sales folks to reach 80% of their quota. Also GSX is mostly paid for, and is something I’m sure the company does to balance the tax books. Cancelling it this late would waste the money anyway.
This year, Cisco gave most teams a very challenging quota to attain. I personally got a 45% higher number than last year which is as good as cutting commission/salary by a substantial margin, for some folks, almost half their salary. Sales teams have a huge portion of their salary as commissions and the SPIFF was a reasonable way to allow a hardworking sales team to get very close to their full OTE for the year. Even with the spiff, understand that the sales team wasn’t paid fairly all year, because the spiff payout was a month after the close of year. Imagine you having a house and kids, and almost 60% of your normal salary every month with a small chunk of salary coming in August?
Without the spiff, there would be an exodus of sales teams because most sales people live their life on commissions. The 61% CPF of the company has hit the employees hard, but you don’t hear sales folks complaining that they barely got paid all year.
Yes, the nature of the sales system in the company is rather flamboyant. They are everywhere. Mostly for reasons with high salary and perks like GSX, but they also bore the brunt of a large salary cut during tough times like this year, while ALL OTHER TEAMS in Cisco, like CX, Marketing, Operations, etc enjoyed a 100% salary. Cut us some slack and understand that we are all one team. In your own words, this double standard is so absurd that it's almost laughable.
High SPIFF only means one thing ~ decline in orders to resort to this level of incentives to motivate sales. If Cisco doesn’t meet its revenue and EPS targets, the stock tanks, and real bad things happen. Read between tea leafs.