World class

Recently I was asked to run a session for a smallish sales team of mostly older representatives that was experiencing some morale issues. The root cause of these issues was historical and mostly external but they were issues nonetheless so Marketing brought me in do my shtick, which went pretty well.

I had the group for an afternoon and by the time we finished at 5pm it had been a long day, especially for those who’d been up before dawn to catch flights from Belfast or Edinburgh. There was a clear sense that I was the last speaker of the day and after my thank-you-and-good-luck speech everyone got up to leave.

Not so fast.

The product manager hurriedly announced that there was one final item of business: the agency wanted to make a presentation. That this was greeted with no more than the usual level of passive contempt that salespeople have for advertising agencies was a gesture of remarkable restraint given the fatigue level.

The guy in the nicest suit in the room took the stage and announced that he was excited. Furthermore, in a moment absolutely everyone else in the room was going to be excited too: -

Okay, so who here's on Facebook? Or Twitter? Or maybe MySpace?

Misreading silent disdain for embarrassed ignorance he broke it down: -

What we're talking about is something called 'online networking'. It's the fun and cool way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues.

In a display of spurious ‘adding value’ that rendered me awestruck, the agency had convinced the brand team to invest in their own exclusive version of Facebook. Leaving aside the conceptual flaw in constructing a closed social network in the first place, the dumbness of the idea was apparent even before he’d started taking questions from the floor: -

The use of the site would be 100% voluntary...

You wouldn’t have to go on it at all if you didn’t want to!

Except that information vital to everyone’s job would be posted there...

Marketing can update you without all those boring teleconferences!

It would be a problem-solving forum that would be ‘reps only'...

A great way for you to highlight any problems you’re having so that the rest of the team can weigh in!

Apart from the fact that pretty much anyone in Head Office can log in...

So we can get an up-to-date temperature check of the mood of the team!

And watch you admit that you're no good at your job in real time. As a way of hoovering some extra cash out of a client it was a work of genius. As a way of annoying a sales team of forty- and fifty-somethings it was truly world class.