NotCreativeEnough

Professional Day Ruiner

What's the dumbest thing your company's marketing team has done recently?

in January our marketing team decided sales shouldn't own leads anymore and switched them all into their name. Then put them all on a drip campaign and wouldn't send them to sales until they scored up as an MQL. And they didn't talk to any sales leadership about how it would impact us before doing this... Now, 6 months later, we finally have that idiotic decision reversed.

Let's hear some stories. What dumb shit has your companies marketing department done recently? Well..besides just existing...

✌️ Growing Pains

📨 Marketing

💩 Shitpost

25 comments

Sort by:

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Marketo.

That's it. That's the tweet.

SaaSam

Politicker

Account Executive

We don't have a marketing team. I know, sounds like the land of milk and honey over here. My CEO is big into relationship based business and in our industry if you're in with one or two big players, eventually everyone will know about you.

It's a pretty sweet gig. We are also bootstrapped so not beholden to any venture capitalists. Been making money hand over fist this year basically doubling revenue month over month.

Sorry for the braggadocious comment, felt good though.

My last company though, spent nearly the entire marketing budget focused on a podcast that got maybe 5 views a week and I'm sure all of them were our own employees.

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

no marketing team sounds like a dream come true. Give that budget to sales to market and prospect themselves instead.

fuzzy

Notable Contributor

CMO (Chief Meme Officer)

I had to sit through the most insufferable infomercial-esque pitch deck commercial. 70s porno background music and “call now” bullshit and everything. Narrated by our equally bullshit CEO who’s always “too busy” 🤡👞

LordOfWar

Tycoon

Blow it up

Put me in charge of it - HEYOOOOO

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

I must admit that I was in charge of marketing at my last role, in addition to sales.

Biggest mistake was nickel and diming me on the Google Ads budget.

AutoSmiler

Arsonist

Account Executive

Removed all product content from docsend, then proceeded to log off for the night...meanwhile, the rest of the org needed to share files and content for the remainder of the workday

P.S. Marketing controls and owns our docsend platform. The real response: "we'll fix it tomorrow".

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

we just got a marketing resource and that person came to the sales team and said the first thing they are going to do is do market research to learn more about the buyer and market.....for 5 months.

Like dude, i could tell you all you need to know in one afternoon lets goooo. how about focus on something productive.

Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

Should have put that person on the SDR phones for a week if that's what they wanted to know.

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

I have yet to meet a marketing person worth their pay

Sunbunny31

Arsonist

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Not talking to sales leadership was a huge mistake there. What did they think was going to happen?

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

I have no clue. According to them something that get a once a month email drip that eventually scored up to an MQL because they were getting the emails was a "warm lead" and way better than just sending everything to sales to prospect into. It was impressively dumb.

JohnnyDamone

Opinionated

AE Inside Sales

I have heard a company mandating “weekly meetings” with clients as a pre requisite. If you don’t hit your weekly meetings #, you get put on pip.

Mind you, you can be at 200% or quota and be the #1 salesperson, but you still need to hit these meetings numbers. Dumb af

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

that's incredibly dumb....

Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

My Marketing spent ~$1m total on a trade show and completely f'd it up. Too long of a story to tell here, but leave it to Marketing to screw things up.

ChetManley

Opinionated

Sales Representative

At a past company of mine the marketing team got the bright idea to send out a mass email to our customers that our entire program was changing and at no point was anyone is sales ever notified. I started getting frantic calls and texts from my accounts and they were freaking out and I had no idea what they were talking about and had one forward me the email and they basically ruined the lives of 50 or so reps over a week or two as we had to scramble to salvage relationships and talk people off the ledge and to not dump us. Fuck marketing and I quit a few months later

Blackwargreymon

Politicker

MDR

SaulBadman

Big Shot

Senior Account Executive

Went all in on "AI" being our selling point

Angusmacg

Valued Contributor

Territory Account Mgr.

My previous company would introduce new products. The product would arrive into the Distribution Centers about 3 months later and samples would arrive within 6-9 months after launch…All controlled by marketing…

We would have product sitting in the Distribution Centers for months and our customers would want to see the product but all we could show them was online photos.

ThatNewAE

Big Shot

Account Executive - Mid enterprise

They sent out 50% off coupons to all active opportunities without consulting the AEs, active customers without consulting the CSMs.
it was an error, mind you. They just mass blasted out emails.
Now we as AEs are struggling to cater to the requests who are now asking for the coupons.

IYNFYL

Politicker

Enterprise SaaS AE

Gave all the inbound leads to a team of new SDRs who barely know how to make calls and ask for the CEO when they do cold call

NotCreativeEnough

Big Shot

Professional Day Ruiner

a lot of companies give inbound to new SDR's and consider outbound to be a "promotion". it makes no sense to me. They're basically waisting their ad money on people who won't convert those inbounds to meetings. Let them practice on outbound and prove they can actually set someone

Gasty

Notable Contributor

War Room Community Manager

registered for a conference that wasn't even about what we do / who we are. then, they were surprised on the "roi" of the event. jesus

Error32

Politicker

ISR

Some reps get excited and feature dump instead of actually listening and solving problems. Well said.

QueenKimberly

Executive

Board Member

Not having a marketing team