Warning: Sales Promotion Can Kill Your Business

Sales Promotion, a common marketing practice employed by business owners, managers with an aim to improve sales, clear out inventories, launch new product, tackle competitors, attract retailers or middlemen so to expand and develop business further etc.

Now one may wonder, "How on earth can it kill your business when what it does is, completely the opposite ?!!!" Well being a franchise manager, I came to know about a situation faced by another franchise manager, what transpired in that manager situation is a lesson that every marketing manager should remember.

Sales Promotion Launched

That franchise manager tactfully launched sales promotion campaign which involved couple of cars, motorbikes and several smart phones as incentives or rewards, given that the promo targets are achieved by the middleman.

That franchise has over 300 middlemen, in the beginning sale team of that franchise communicated well with all the middlemen about the sales promo and what they can achieve (cars, motorbikes, smart phones) and how they can achieve all of that.

Sales Promotion Disaster In Making

Sales promo was effective for two months, in first month franchise sale team, marketing manager of franchise received little to no response from the middlemen regarding the promo.

Consequently the franchisee and its team took the middlemen response as sign of sales promotion failure thus they put the whole thing on back burner.

Business Disaster

After two months duration, over fifteen middlemen showed up at franchise, claiming (objectively + evidentially) that they have achieved the given sales promotion goals and so now they should be given the incentives that were part of the promo.

The whole franchise was in shock, some middlemen withheld payments, others went for lawsuits, while the rest went on bad word of mouth campaign that went on until permanent closure of the whole franchise.

Moral: Sales Promotion Can Kill Your Business!

They could avoid this disaster if they wanted, by taking the following simple measures.

Simple Measures for Effective Sales Promo

1. Making strict sales promotion rules, conditions like clearly pointing out what will make the promo void and what will make it effective.

2. Taking continuous followup on promo, motivating the promo target market 24/7 to take part in the promo.

3. Taking timely and due measures in case of promo becoming invalid.

Clearly, we can see in the above case study that the manager and his sales team didn't take the above simple but effective measures!

Over to you guys!

And yeah don't forget to subscribe!