Lapses in Leadership

A friend was doing some “spring cleaning” on his hard drive and came across a file related to an event that we had in common.

The event occurred when our SVP of Sales hired an outside marketing firm to run our lead generation, marketing, and PR campaigns. While I am sure the firm had it’s strengths, it lacked any talent or skill in the areas of lead generation, marketing, and PR.

Coincidently, the principles in the firm just happened to be neighbors and close personal friends of our SVP’s.

You know something is wrong when your marketing firm delivers you a press release that has to be re-written by your staff due to a significant lack of accuracy, relevance, and basic grammatical structure.

For lead generation, they had contracted with a telemarketing firm to execute a cold calling campaign across 5,000 prospects. Based on the quantity and quality of the leads we received, the qualification criteria they outlined for determining who was deemed a lead had to be something close to “must have a pulse”.

During our annual sales meeting, the marketing firm was invited to speak on their past accomplishments and future projects. However, our team took the opportunity to express our dissatisfaction in clear, unarguable terms by challenging every point. For example:

“We delivered 1,000 leads to you”

was met with the response

“No, you provided us with 50 leads, and 950 wasted meetings. Thanks.”

We’re we wrong to deliver our message in such a brute force manner? Having studied Jack Welch for years, I think not. However, our passionate view point may have inspired some of our team to move past the professional realm in communicating their dissatisfaction. “My retarded cousin writes better press releases” should have not been shared in this forum.

The pdf I received this week was a letter to our SVP penned by the President of the marketing firm, in which he expressed his shock and frustration at our response to their work. He explained that for our team to criticize his firm showed our ignorance for good marketing and that we should be replaced immediately. The letter continues with an explanation of why the only chance our company had to make the annual sales goal was to fire everyone and start over.

Then at the conclusion, there’s the obligatory “Here’s to a great year (after you fire everyone who knows my work is crap) and lets hope we get our golf handicaps down to 10.”

This letter was written on 1/1/97 (that’s 11 years for those too lazy for math). Through numerous job changes and PC upgrades, my former teammate has held on to to this as a momento of the time.

So why do I call this post “Lapses in Leadership”?

• Our SVP entrusted a personal friend to take over mission critical functions with no thought to the actual quality of the work delivered.

• When we spoke on an individual basis in expressing our concerns over the quality of the deliverables, we were ignored.

• Finally, our SVP shared the letter with us, thinking it would inspire and motivate. Yep, that didn’t work. While our SVP taught me, and a good many others, a great deal about being a sales professional, his legacy is closely aligned with this event.

Effective leadership occurs when your people want to follow you.

Want to share a lapse in leadership? Email us at sales.wars@gmail.com. No real names please.