It seemed like a great idea at the time. Your new business marketing strategy was sure to attract many new customers. You worked hard to fine tune the campaign and then to develop a plan that considered all contingencies. After months of hard work and late hours it was ready. You tested it with a small group of loyal customers. Then came the big day. You rolled it out to your customers. And....NOTHING.
For whatever reason, the advertising campaign just didn't connect with your customers. What little response you got was mostly negative. Your first instinct is to find a way to tweak it a little to make it work. "It's such a great plan. They just don't quite 'get it'. Let's see how we can adjust." That's appropriate. It's a good thing to do and it might work. However it also might not work.
OK. It bombed.
Face it. Sometimes even the best ideas don't work. What is important now is how you deal with it. You can continue to "pour good money after bad" and keep trying to fix the program. That's the most common reaction. Or you can bite the bullet and acknowledge that it didn't work. That's the smart thing to do.
There is such a pressure in business today for moving "up and to the right" on charts of key metrics that it is hard to admit something isn't working. It's also a blow to your ego to admit that one of your ideas wasn't the best. But in a case like this, that's what you need to do. It's like alcoholism or smoking, until you admit you've got a problem, you won't be able to fix the problem.
Pull it back
If the new plan isn't working, kill it. Pull back whatever you rolled out. End the promotion. Cancel that script in the telesales center. Stop.
You don't want to have to spend resources dealing with the failed approach. Or trying to make it better. Or dealing with the calls from the few customers that liked it. You want to be able to focus on creating the next program.
Be big about it
When one of the customers who liked the program calls to ask why it was cancelled, be honest. Say "we made a mistake. The program didn't meet the needs of all our customers as well as we had hoped." There is nothing wrong in admitting a mistake. We all have made them, including that customer. They will understand.
It's not just marketing and sales
The same courage it takes to admit a marketing plan bombed needs to be applied to other areas, both customer-facing and internal:
- The new knowledge base software installed for the tech support staff isn't right. It's taking longer to find the answer.
- The new shrink-wrap packaging system is partially crushing one edge of the product.
- The new intranet is too hard to navigate and tech support is being swamped with "where is the x" calls.
- The new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool isn't working. Account executives are spending more time inputting data into the CRM than they are spending with the customers.
- The new brand name you spent millions developing is taken wrong by your customers.
- The new travel policy you laid out for your employees is killing morale and isn't saving any money anyway.
In each of these cases, it is better to admit the failure and kill the program than it is to keep pushing it. It's cheaper, in the long run, too.
Manage This Issue
So admit the problem. Kill the program so you don't waste any additional resources on something that just isn't going to work. Then you can go about creating a new solution that will work. Remember the goal is to fix the problem not to fix the blame. Don't waste time trying to decide who screwed up. Focus instead on finding out what went wrong and how you can address that issue better in the next attempt.
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John Reh
Management Guide
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