IBM is dying - for many good reasons
It is actually a really GOOD idea to force marketing to work together cause they certainly don't work well from home. The inside joke was "marketing? what marketing?! We don't HAVE any marketing".
I'm one of the many who "got a package" last March. In my case, it's was "great! thanks!" I'd only been there for nearly 3 years - in sales - and knew it would be no big to deal to get a new job, especially coming off a year where I did nearly 300% of quota.
Yep read that right - a TOP performer but they decide to cut me? LOL. Idiots. There are SO MANY THINGS they do badly that you simply would not believe it. IBM is the worst run company, of any size, I have worked for in over 20 years. I won't miss it and expect that we'll see a massive decline in stock price in the next 1-2 years. Upper management is totally incompetent and has no idea how to re-invent or run IBM.
You want to know HOW stupid and badly mananaged IBM is? Here's a perfect example. Twice a year they re-assign territories and accounts (Feb and August) - between 6-8 WEEKS after the start of each Half Year (Jan-June, July-Dec - the commission-able structure). So ... for 6-8 weeks at the start of each half year cycle, most people in sales have little or no idea what accounts they will actually get to KEEP! So, they'll ONLY work on stuff that they THINK they'll keep and ignore all the rest. On top of that, they'll generally work ONLY on accounts that they think they can close a deal before the next 6 month cutoff. Otherwise, they're just working on something that "the next guy gets paid on".
On top of that, most people in sales have BIG portfolios of products to sell to a set territory or account list. So, again, they'll ONLY work on deals that they strongly believe they can conclude within 6-12 months and ignore ALL other deals and all other products.
Management somehow thinks that "coin operated" people in sales will "do the right thing" and work on all the accounts, and when things get traded off people will "win some / lose some" and be fine with that. Oh? Really? Nope! It's totally against human nature, especially for those making 50% of their money on COMMISSION.
It gets better! The Sales Engineers are compensated on lines of products, rather than linked fully to the sales people they support. Yet the SE sales quota is "adding up the quotas of their sales people". So, most sales engineers won't hit their quota since one or more of their sales people won't either. Or worse yet, their sales people will hit their #s but with products that particular SE isn't actually compensated for! Lunacy!
But that same policy applied to anyone in Sales is a total Cluster disaster. Good people won't do it and those people are the one's who DRIVE REVENUE and have RELATIONSHIPS. Without sales, the company goes under. It doesn't matter what you make or how good the stuff MIGHT be if you don't have a really good team selling it.