[Rick Lee]

I want to be a team player and work within the chain of command. This German company created a position for me to do outbound sales in the US because their current US-based sales guy is inbound-only and really only handles renewals. They made him my immediate boss. His boss is the big boss in Germany, whom I met at a trade show and somehow convinced him that I had the go-getter instinct they need here. My German being almost as good as my English helped too.

Since the first interview by Skype back in March, I have never heard from the German boss again, but my US-based boss reports to and speaks with him daily. My boss has absolutely zero sense of urgency and often takes a day or two to respond to my simple requests for "who takes this lead?" or "can you please schedule this GoToMeeting for this demo?" (I don't have access to the account and can't conduct my own demos yet).

Every Friday my boss copies me on a report to his boss showing $0 new sales, 0% of goal for the quarter and a few more goose eggs. At the moment my only job is to find and follow up on leads and get people interested, forward to him and get demos scheduled. I think I've gotten more of them in six weeks than they've had in the last year or longer, though none have closed yet. Every week my boss tells me we're gonna sit down next week and discuss my goals/targets for getting the quarterly bonus. Now we're almost two months into Q3 and this conversation keeps getting kicked down the road.

In a few weeks we're all convening at HQ in Germany. I suspect the German bosses are going to pull me aside for a private chat (in German) about what's going on. My boss doesn't speak a word of German. I am racking my brain on how I can spin anything to not throw my boss under the bus.

I told myself I'd give it one quarter without a commission check or goals before I put my foot down and started making noise. Problem is that I really like this company and job and want to make a career out of it. I've had more than one demo fall through because the prospect's calendar filled up between the time he agreed to the time slot and the two days it took my boss to get around to sending the invites out. I have asked for a paid version of LinkedIn because the 200 free searches I get are used up within the first week of the month. "Yeah, we're looking into that." Right now I use trade show attendee lists, Google, LinkedIn (as much as I can) and my rolodex for prospecting. I'm not getting the tools I need. And I'm starting to wonder if it's intentional. The big boss in Germany wouldn't have created this job for me just to give me a job. But at some point they're going to want to see some ROI and I don't even have access to the paperwork, if a prospect said he was ready to sign today. I think my boss is holding me back. How to address?