Pros
UniFirst is a solid place to develop B2B sales experience. The training is stellar and is renowned for its depth. You won’t be a master of sales by any stretch of the imagination, but it is good training. The people at UniFirst are very hit or miss. Some are extremely hard working and dedicated to success, while others just coast. Sales leadership at a regional level is the exact same way, with some being very in tune with each branch’s quirks, while others are wildly out of touch. Generally speaking, UniFirst isn’t the worst place to begin your career in sales, but it is a far cry from what it used to be.
Cons
Your experience at UniFirst will be highly dependent on your branch. Some branches are incredibly professional with great, tenured leadership, while most are complete meat grinders with extremely high turnover. If you get a branch that is the latter, success will be significantly harder as regional managers and VPs put you to the back burner. Everyone at the company knows which branch is which, and you will be treated accordingly. Quotas were constantly rising and corporate applies broad changes based off what limited areas are seeing, thus leading to frustration and failure to meet KPIs and quota. Nothing at UniFirst is simple, and seemingly easy tasks like ordering sample garments are needlessly complex and often take weeks, if not months to fulfill. The commission structure is incredibly complex with multipliers applied seemingly at random. Tracking earned commissions is incredibly difficult. As I stated above, sales leadership beyond the branch level is super hit or miss. Some regional sales managers are very out of touch with the differences between a branch in a city/suburb of 1m+ people and a branch in a smaller city. Typical industries can vary widely between the two and strategies for success in turn vary greatly as well. In my experience, regional managers force you to use strategies and techniques even when the local team vocalizes doubt that they will work. Installation of an account after a successful sale is usually embarrassingly slow and riddled with issues. The issues usually take months after the initial install to correct, at which point problems generally decrease. Regardless of what leadership says (after successful sale, all issues are dealt with by service side), you as an OSR will have to answer for issues and often correct them yourself. If you live in an area with a large national account presence, your time could potentially be consumed with dealing with the issues that go along with installation of these accounts. These issues can take weeks if not months to correct and offer nothing to your quota, just an insultingly low percentage of the installation value. With the potential acquisition of UniFirst by Cintas, the future is anything but certain in an already difficult job. I would steer clear of this difficult industry, especially if this acquisition is successful as there will be redundancies galore. Pay is not the best and the benefits are completely average. You will be given a gas card to use which is nice, and one paycheck a month will have compensation for vehicle wear and tear. If you have any form of success in B2B sales with the years to back it up, I would avoid working here. The pay is not great, and the industry/company is generally viewed as a stepping stone to better gigs. I would not recommend working at UniFirst unless you are desperate/know you will be at a branch that has a positive reputation.
