While the department that I work in is profitable, overall our organisation is set to lose money this year.
Bad decisions made by the “manager” have been a contributing factor.
But.
The “manager” has gotten it in his head that if only our organisation can send an email to everyone on a partner organisation’s mailing list, sales will boom.
A couple of months back, he convinced the partner organisation to send a small segment of its list an email offering them one of our organisation’s products for free.
And to be fair, a reasonable number took up the free product.
This has convinced “manager” that if the partner organisation sends an email to its entire mailing list offering them a discount for buying our org’s products, thousands of them will take it up. Even though many (most?) of their customers have never heard of us before.
The “manager’s” boss is new in her role (she moved into it after a restructure earlier this year), and trusts what he says.
Here’s where it becomes a trainwreck.
The past two years, our org has run an end of financial year sale aimed at consumers. Both times, it has increased sales a bit, but nowhere near enough to meet targets.
Marketing have tried different promotions and shown they work better. They want to run a marketing campaign to business customers for the end of financial year, and use a different approach with consumers in the new financial year.
They did a whole preso to “manager” showing that a different approach will generate more sales overall — but a lot of that revenue will fall in the new financial year.
Manager overruled them. His official reason is that he doesn’t want to try anything different to last year, because that’s risky.
(The real reason is he wants as many sales as possible this financial year, so that the losses from his bad decisions are as small as possible.)
So marketing are stuck with a campaign they know won’t work.
“Manager’s” brilliant plan is to use that campaign strategy that hasn’t worked, but then to get the partner organisation to email everyone on their mailing list, which he thinks will mean thousands of people will buy products and that will make it work.
(And yes, partner org mailing everyone on their mailing list is something out org hasn’t done before. But this isn’t seen as “risky” by “manager” because it’s his idea.)
Of course, this pissed off the business salespeople.
So to keep them on-side, he’s also making marketing run the business promotion as well, even though they don’t have the staff or the budget to do both.
He’s only just approved all of this now, and both promotions need to start on 1 June, so the graphic designers basically have two weeks to get everything ready.
It gets worse.
The partner organisation has already explicitly told us that e-mailing everyone on their contact list during June is a hard no.
But “manager” has sold his boss on the idea, and she’s said that she expects partner org to email everyone on their contact list.
Following a string of meetings, my boss is now stuck with making that happen. Even though it’s a hard no from the partner org.
So I was stuck in a string of meetings today where my boss was desperately trying to find a reason to tell her contact at the partner org why they should change their policy other than “Manager” thinks it’s a good idea (there isn’t one). Or some fact or piece of information will persuade “manager” to see reason (I’m honestly not hopeful).
If it’s a one-on-one conversation, I tend to ask questions about whatever it is.
Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to them thinking I’m actually far more interested in learning about their GX-Holden-whatever than I really am, and they decide to tell me all about it next time we meet as well… 🙂
I’m atrocious at sports and physical activities. I’m not handy at all. There’s a lot of stuff, particularly in more advanced math and science, that I don’t know much about. I don’t watch much TV or many movies compared to most people, and end up with little to say when the topic comes up. I know nothing about cars.