Been an interesting week

My company has a president that has no sales experience and is relatively young (33). While very smart technically, however his sales, marketing and people skills are lacking. He tries to delegate, then before the task can be completed, tries to do the task himself because nobody can do it better than him.

This is said because my company is struggling to meet the target sales and profits. The forecast was done last year and was a top down statement of you will do $X amount of sales, not a "where are we headed". The profits are down because the exchange rate estimation was way off actual rates.

So sales and profits are off, so what does he do? He raises prices. He announces this not directly, but through an email blast not from his email account but that of a clerk. Management needs to learn some Dale Carnegie.

While I agree that profits are good, they pay me, in times of struggling sales it is best to make it easier to sell things not harder. I am quoting from him:

"As has been our position all year, we will not let pricing come between us and a customer considering the competition. Be sure you are using our aggressive never-lose-an-order pricing strategy and contacting your DSM to strategize on how to take outstanding orders off the street or win new business. To compensate for our rising costs due to the adverse currency effect, we are pulling forward our January price increase to October 1, 2006 reflecting a 5% increase on Watson-Marlow pumps and a 3.5% increase on Bredel. Despite our need to increase base pricing to offset our rising costs, rest assured that your DSM will continue to be as aggressive as ever to gain market share and beat back our competitors."

Most of our agents went HUH????

In the words of one of my sisters, my head exploded,
KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAM!!