BurnedOutSalesman

Co-Founder

Describe the most useless marketing person you've worked with

I have had the displeasure of working alongside marketing as a BDR & AE... but, GODDAM there is one person that comes to mind when I think of a "useless marketer".

This person was a marketing manager at one of the startups I worked at in the past. I still do not know what she did for the company. They would come into work at 10am (this is before work from home due to COVID). They would proceed to lecture the BDRs on how they ought to communicate to inbound leads (except we didn't get inbounds EVER). From about 11-2, they would disappear into a WeWork personal meeting room to brainstorm social media & email marketing campaign ideas. I know this because their calendar was available to the whole company. Then they would take an hour long coffee break @ Blue Bottle & finish up some "work" & leave the office at 4pm.

The BDR team never saw an uptick in inbound leads & the BDR manager eventually quit because they CMO made this marketing manager the BDR manager's equivalent. The outbound BDR team were savages & sourced millions of dollars of revenue with no inbound help.

That was my first company and experience with how useless marketing can be.

What is your worst experience with marketing?

🏰 War Stories

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Rallier

Politicker

4

SDR Manager and Consultant

The guy at my last company would make all of these elaborate presentations. They all looked good. Although when it came time to execute it, he would do nothing and blame on it someone else. Designers are taking too long, they didn't give me enough budget, copy wasn't good enough, etc.

funcoupons

WR Officer

1

👑

Ooh I've got one. At my last job there was this pretty girl who was originally hired as an Executive Asst to the old ass (talking 80 years old) CEO. She somehow talked him in to allowing her to join the marketing team and although she wasn't a boss over there she definitely had influence...

Holy crap was she useless. The only campaigns she did involved giving worthless swag out to prospects...they'd mail our branch boxes of useless shit (talking foam puzzles with our company name on it, crappy stress balls...) and insist we go out and "campaign" with it. The worst one was when she decided a Valentine's Day campaign would be cool, and she mailed out little pink and red cards that looked like love notes and told us it was mandatory to go hand these out along with candy to prospects. Keep in mind we worked mainly in blue collar industries, and our sales manager was a man...he said "fuck no" to the thought of him walking into the office of some manufacturing company and handing the boss a little pink box with cinnamon hearts and saying "Happy Valentine's" LOL.

Everyone hated it and the materials/swag usually went to waste. Of course Miss Marketing would follow up constantly asking how the campaign was going....and then invent fake numbers at the end of it to show how successful we were.

GDO

Politicker

0

BDM

This happens at so many places.

GDO

Politicker

0

BDM

I saw one marketing guy studying for an exam to be a basketball referee. After he finished he started photoshopping wedding photos at work because it was his side gig. Then he played some indie games and called it a day.

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