Quarreled with my boss yesterday.
Throughout the whole thing, I get this message from him : "If the sales person(s) is not capable of ensuring that customers order enough for a product launch, it is the marketing dept's duty to be the check-and-balance... To check on the sales person(s)'s action to ensure marketing campaign is a success."
An entirely right "assumption", except for the facts that :
(a) Some sales people can do this "part" of their job automatically (also a logical thing to do), while others can't get it into their heads. I wonder why...
(b) My boss has shifted the entire "blame" to (i) me, for not "reporting" these lapses in the sales people to him and (ii) another sales person (and pretending to scold her in front of me) for failing to do her part, thereby diverting attention from what his 'favourite subordinate' has done (or in this case, has not done).
(c) My boss is passing sarcastic comments at me when trying to shift the blame to the marketing for not having enough stocks for a particular model.
What I am pissed at :
(1) The primary person who was supposed to do it didn't do it well, so the fault is with the "backup" for not (i) ensuring that the primary person did it and (ii) for not reporting it up to higher authorities.
[I mean, why wasn't the primary person reprimanded for not doing her job in the first place ? And passing comments like "I tried my best to train her, but she just can't be trained anymore. So I have to rely on you guys to monitor" is just passing the buck to me. Yet when one of my subordinate made a mistake that caused him to lose face in front of management, he wanted me to fire that guy by asking the "Do you think he is 'trainable' ?" question.
Still dare to end that comment with a "Do you want to try to train her?".
In case you are confused, the "her" I am referring to is the other poor unfortunate scapegoat sales girl that had her mistake discovered by my boss. Not my boss's favourite "her", who was never mentioned during the entire arguement.]
(2) Management by Sarcasm is a new management technique that I am sure my boss can be the authority to write a book on.
[And yet question why I am so defensive. If he can be passing sarcastic remarks to his subordinate (me), I think my basic entitlement/right is to defend my entire dept, who also happens to be HIS subordinates.]
(3) The sales people are supposed to be "Country Managers" and good business people, makes business decisions, who are highly-paid. (There are no "sales executives" types in our company.) My marketing dept people are just a bunch of back-end support staff who are not even paid commission.
If we screwed up, we have to be blamed. But if the sales people screw up, we STILL have to pick up the blame for not monitoring them ?
(4) When none of the sales people dared to forecast/commit to the qty of stocks they needed, we took the risk and the initiative to order more, based on our gut feel. And this is the thanks we get at the end of the day...
(5) His ability to pass comments that we came up with a campaign, spent money advertising, and not have enough stocks to get the revenue. (And if we had based on the oh-so-capable sales people's forecast, there would have been ZERO revenue.)
While he , just few weeks ago, wanted us to book 2 x half-page ad per month, on a major local newspaper, for a whole year (amounting to at least 2 times what I spent on the entire campaign). When asked why, he just wanted to "increase exposure" and "raise our image", and told us to come up with sometimes to put on the ad.
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And oh yes, is this the right way to promote team-work between sales and marketing ? (That we inform higher authorities that the sales are not doing their part ? We just try to trash things out and if we work it out between us, why is there a need to complain ?)
Marketing is just a team of cheap labour to push every job and blame to ? And only keep the "high-class job" of entertaining, getting PO from customers, etc, as a sales' job ?
(And before you even dare to comment about me not knowing how hard it is to do sales, let me just state that I have been doing the same sales job-scope for more than 2 years, out of which 1.5 years has been with this current company. So I can safely say "Been there, done that ! I know what are my responsibilities.")
Oh wait. This episode just told me that even if the sales didn't get enough PO from the customers for a particular campaign that we planned, its our fault too !
Throughout all these years, The sales decides WHAT gets launched, WHEN it gets launched, and HOW MUCH MONEY to spend for the launch, for their countries. Not the marketing ! So isn't it a logical progression that they have been making such decisions therefore they should KNOW what needs to be done ? (And shall I say again, if they didn't do what needs to be done, it still is our fault for not checking on them?)
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Time to start looking for another job... My peaceful times never lasts more than a month.
I can't do my job. Let see HIM find a "check-and-balance" backup for my job. Who can it be... the Logistic people ?
