After purging 3 Sales middle management and one key sales engineer in Boston, Perkin Elmer in its infinite wisdom is going to reorganize the sales force again and hire about 7 new (cheaper I am sure) Sales Engineers.
Expanding the Food Sales Team which took over all can–bis opportunities as well as going from a straight generalist model to a more technology driven team, possibly Inorganic/Chromatography/Materials Characterization.
All the layoffs this year was straight cost cutting as sales are down by more than 2M after 6mo.
The change in compensation plan has chased away a number of Sales folks with many just begging to get out - 80% of the 60K in commissions is realized after you are at 80% of your inflated plan. It was so bad, they actually reduced a large number of plans down by at least 200K in March! 3 months into the year