morale lowest ive ever seen it

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anonymous

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How is it for every one else?

Can't remember people ever being this miserable, and that's saying something because every iteration of this company (Intervet, SPAH, now Merck) has been a shithole to work for.

Hordes of people fleeing every department and all management can do is stand up there and say "we're doing fine." Rick's a nice guy, but come on -- someone has to address the massive elephant in the room. Turnover in finance is crazy high, no one wants to work AH sales, I'm sorry, but if you're in IT and the only job you could manage to get was Merck AH IT, then face it, you're bottom of the barrel and can't get a job anywhere else anyway and you're stuck here with the rest of us.

Friends in R&D are telling me it's even worse over there, with people are dropping like flies. The entirety of the pre-clinical team quit, major pipeline studies are delayed more than 2-3 years, and they've been firing people who want to WFH despite not being able to hire anyone.

I just don't see any of this is sustainable?
 












I work for one of the big 3 distributors, and if you’re saying the morale at Merck is low, by all means try the dist side. Crap margins, dwindling account opportunities due to taking account away and putting them on telemarketing, tech sales focus that has no real incentive tied to it (except sell them or get fired), continual commission cuts, I can go on… for me this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have the same elephant in our room.

If you happen to be one of the chosen, you’ll receive a guarantee, with accounts gifted to you from other territories. We have people leaving for Merck seemingly every week, and they end up making $40000+ more than they do here. I’m thankful I have a job, but the fun and sense of accomplishment has disappeared. Sad.
 






I won't even hint about my job function because of how psychopathic I know upper management is (you guys don't really believe the VOICE surveys/etc. are anonymous do you? Ever wonder why you can only access it via the VPN/your own unique link?), but it is absolutely as you describe it.

Upper management's old school mentality is completely wiping out talent where I work. What's even crazier is that we are losing talent internally. What I mean by that is that the human-side is poaching talent, and they're doing it without even offering salary raises!

They're throwing WFH/home office stipend/wifi/cell phone paid for in low-ball offers and people are jumping ship left and right (including many of my colleagues). Even in scientific positions, parent-company side pre-clin/discovery/tox/translational teams are taking our DVMs/PhDs by the fistful.

Shit is nuts.

MAH is lucky it is run almost like a whole other company, with little oversight/say over the animal health division. There's no way Merck (parent company) HR could ignore the loss metrics stemming from the AH side otherwise. But obviously MAH's real strength lies in its sale force -- as long as we keep delivering the right numbers, no one looks too closely at the rest of the business.

When we inevitably stop moving that line up, people are gonna take a closer look at the things behind the scenes and question why we haven't pumped anything major out of our pipeline in several years, while Zoetis et al. keep kicking our asses. I mean they've got now a 5 year head-start on triple combos and derm, just to name a few, and are dominating in the genomics area, where we literally have no footprint (unless something is coming out of the very mysterious MAHI group). Meanwhile, have you been to the 3rd floor of Madison lately? It's empty desk after empty desk. There's no body left to do this shit!!!

Anyone who thinks we're competing in any real sense is deluded.
 






anonymous said:
I work for one of the big 3 distributors, and if you’re saying the morale at Merck is low, by all means try the dist side. Crap margins, dwindling account opportunities due to taking account away and putting them on telemarketing, tech sales focus that has no real incentive tied to it (except sell them or get fired), continual commission cuts, I can go on… for me this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have the same elephant in our room.

If you happen to be one of the chosen, you’ll receive a guarantee, with accounts gifted to you from other territories. We have people leaving for Merck seemingly every week, and they end up making $40000+ more than they do here. I’m thankful I have a job, but the fun and sense of accomplishment has disappeared. Sad.
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.

I relate a lot to this post because I made the jump to Merck from a distribution job. This post above would have mirrored my "anything is better than this" mentality when I left and joined Merck 5 years ago. Back then everything got better, because in relationship to what I left, this was fantastic. Fastforward a few years, and thought I admit me "selling out for industry money" has made me softer than i used to be, I am feeling as though my job is just as bad as when i worked in distribution. I'm getting squeezed just as much, making me overwork, stress to levels I haven't gotten to before, all of it. It reminds me so much of my previous toxic life. I thought when I moved over that I would be shedding the toxic work while making more money. 5 years later the toxicity has returned and the pay really hasn't gotten much better, and may infact be worse with today's inflation. My days are numbered honestly, theres not much more I can take. I want to work anywhere else, but after 5 years working at a company I thought would look great on a resume, it's turning out to be worth absolutely nothing.
 






anonymous said:
I work for one of the big 3 distributors, and if you’re saying the morale at Merck is low, by all means try the dist side. Crap margins, dwindling account opportunities due to taking account away and putting them on telemarketing, tech sales focus that has no real incentive tied to it (except sell them or get fired), continual commission cuts, I can go on… for me this is just the tip of the iceberg. We have the same elephant in our room.

If you happen to be one of the chosen, you’ll receive a guarantee, with accounts gifted to you from other territories. We have people leaving for Merck seemingly every week, and they end up making $40000+ more than they do here. I’m thankful I have a job, but the fun and sense of accomplishment has disappeared. Sad.
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Of course your Merck margins are crap, you sell Elanco, Zoetis, and Merial. They aren’t going to give you good margins if you aren’t pushing their line. You want the easy street. Don’t expect to be rewarded.
 






Morale is down everywhere, every year you're required to grow but make the same the amount of money. Manufactures continue to benefit from online retailers cutting the reps out of the deal...many throw ethics and compliance out the window to achieve "success"..play the game or let the game play you!
 






I think morale for me personally was the lowest the first day they made us come back into the office and they set up that dinky little table right next to the security gates with free water bottles to "welcome" people back. Most pathetic thing I'd ever seen.
 






Yeah, that’s beyond a weak reopening gesture.

When we went back to the field, after a full 1-1/2 years, we went back with all of the overhyped tech offerings, that we had minimal shit training on, and had to find our way past the all new gatekeepers, due to the horrible turnover from Covid.

Here it is - Distributors have now been relegated to throw shit at the wall in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other distributors and see what sticks, then take what kinda sticks and make it mandatory for reps to sell them. From that point (which is now) when the reps really aren’t on board and the sales aren’t there, the pressure is ratcheted up. All the reps are feeling it and something had to give. So, you get the steady exodus of reps that is happening now. Could have been a much smoother way of rolling all this out. I’ll give it a year or two before most of the salesforce are 20 somethings with no sales experience, and think that selling tech is the future. And it may be.
 






anonymous said:
Yeah, that’s beyond a weak reopening gesture.

When we went back to the field, after a full 1-1/2 years, we went back with all of the overhyped tech offerings, that we had minimal shit training on, and had to find our way past the all new gatekeepers, due to the horrible turnover from Covid.

Here it is - Distributors have now been relegated to throw shit at the wall in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other distributors and see what sticks, then take what kinda sticks and make it mandatory for reps to sell them. From that point (which is now) when the reps really aren’t on board and the sales aren’t there, the pressure is ratcheted up. All the reps are feeling it and something had to give. So, you get the steady exodus of reps that is happening now. Could have been a much smoother way of rolling all this out. I’ll give it a year or two before most of the salesforce are 20 somethings with no sales experience, and think that selling tech is the future. And it may be.
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Bingo.
 






anonymous said:
Of course your Merck margins are crap, you sell Elanco, Zoetis, and Merial. They aren’t going to give you good margins if you aren’t pushing their line. You want the easy street. Don’t expect to be rewarded.
Click to expand...

What alternate reality are you living in where distribution is pushing Elanco and BI? Distribution is so far up Merck’s butt, they’re getting light through the mouth.
 






anonymous said:
What alternate reality are you living in where distribution is pushing Elanco and BI? Distribution is so far up Merck’s butt, they’re getting light through the mouth.
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Distributors will push whatever gets them the business and has the better margin. Back in the day distributors got creative. If a clinic switches vaccines, distributors would give them a box of free 3cc syringes for every tray they buy. Margins were higher then so you could do that. Distributors don’t want to rock the boat. As long as they get the business, they don’t care and thus the margins aren’t that good. Clinics don’t use all vaccine lines and they don’t use every flea and tick product out there. When you prioritize one manufacturer over another, you get better margin.
 






I am honestly still pretty surprised they didn't spin the whole division off in 2018/2019 a la Zoetis. Would have been a hell of a deal for Merck, the Street would eat up the newco, and given how MAH has been doing, I bet that stock price would be riding pretty high. Can't think of any reason Merck would hold on to the division other than to hedge against (at the time, and still somewhat today) growth concerns over basically being reliant on Keytruda as key revenue generator for the company.
 












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