BlackBerry Cuts Down U.S. Sales Staff

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How to fix poor sales 101: Layoff thousands of workers, fire your sales team, make sure you keep all your company executives. Got it! :rolleyes:

The company laid off more than half its sales force on Monday, a source described as close to the matter told Canadian technology blog Cantech Letter, describing the company's consumer sales force as "gone" and the enterprise as "gutted."
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Sounds like Blackberry isn't still kicking as much as they are twitching dead on the floor.
 
Saw this coming a mile away. Pretty much the release of yet another BB handset that just didn't "Get it" guaranteed the end of that company.
 
They needed to get out of the hardware market 3-4 years ago and move to a application running on other OS's. They have dabbled in the email as an application, but have never seriously persued it because, it seems, they thought their entire platform was better than anyone else's. Oh well, we will see them in many a list of forgotten technologies down the road.
 
Dan_D said:
Sounds like Blackberry isn't still kicking as much as they are twitching dead on the floor.
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Steve said:
They are for sale too, what a bargain! :D
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Want to know what is funny...I've been abroad on business in the EU for the last little while...and easily half the smartphones I see in the subway in the EU are Crackberries. I haven't seen so many blackberry devices in user hands on the street, in the US, for well over 10 years.
 
Well to be fair they didn't seem to be doing much, in an era when Blackberry's technical aspects seem to have caught up

But they may have had one hand tied behind their back, depending on what corporate was doing
 
Steve said:
How to fix poor sales 101: Layoff thousands of workers, make sure you keep all your company executives. Got it! :rolleyes:
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I've seen this so many times before (including companies I've worked for), it's just part of the death spiral of a company going under.
 
Sales reps are just as worthless as top level execs at a certain point. They get paid the most for the least amount of "work". I see cutting their sales staff in half increasing sales if anything, it'll get more of them up off their asses pushing agreements instead of the veteran reps just sitting fat on their "one call a year" customers.
 
It's not like anyone is surprised the execs canned everybody but kept themselves going. If they were honest, they'd have realized years ago that iOS and Android were kicking their butt, and fired themselves for not having done anything about it.

1% parasites.
 
They needed to be, they were half-assing a lot of things. For instance, they had a van that went around Atlanta this summer to show off the new phones, every time I saw it it was basically empty because they almost never stopped in places that were popular. HTC did similar but at least they were smart enough to setup at malls and major events., Blackberry's setup just looked sad.
 
nutzo said:
I've seen this so many times before (including companies I've worked for), it's just part of the death spiral of a company going under.
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Just a step to make themselves marketable. A new hardware company won't need the sales force. Gutting them now make that less of an issue for the new owner. My 2 cents.
 
Only thing left of value at Blackberry are the patents.

:( sad
 
Blackberry should turn into the enterprise/business side of Windows Phone and Nokia the consumer side. Blackberry should have picked up Windows Phone.
 
They let go of their US sales reps that were headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and are moving those positions to the US. Source: Crackberry. Don't know why this wasn't done sooner. ...They should have gone Android or partner with Microsoft or follow the IBM business model. Jobs even said that. Too bad though, Android/iOS are not as secure as BB OS/ BB OS10/BES for the corporate/government world. Microsoft could stand to win if they bought them and successfully integrated Blackberry's assets into the next version of Windows Phone and designed it for corporate use (something better than Metro). I'm sure some corporate types would like a Nokia designed phone with a decent keyboard running a secure OS as an extension of their Windows desktop/tablet... It might actually bring WP above 4% market share!
 
Sounds like they are trying to retain some value for their shareholders in the even that the company is sold. A buyer is unlikely to want their sales force.

Or perhaps they aren't intending to need a large retail sales force after selling off parts of the business.

In any case, while it probably isn't the fault of the sales force, Blackberry isn't getting a very good return on the money they are investing in that sales force right now, and apparently doesn't see that changing in the near term.
 
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