Avoid A Promo Hangover

This week I got to see a common situation from a different perspective than I usually do. My wife is a top salesperson for a company that sells an expensive product to consumers. And, since we’re both working from home together, I have a front-row view of what’s going on with her at work. For the month of April her company, to spur sales amidst the coronavirus quarantine, offered an exceptional promotion: a really great price and a couple additional perks for anyone who bought in April. In a good month my wife makes ten sales. When the clock struck midnight on Thursday, April 30th (and she was on the phone making sales up until that moment), she had made thirty-eight sales.

As we were going to bed that night, she remarked that another dozen or so prospects were probably going to be calling her over the next couple days wanting to take advantage of the promotion and she would be unable to give it to them -- her company had made it clear to the salespeople that the promotion would not be extended, no exceptions.

And, sure enough, as she predicted, Friday was filled with calls from prospects that wanted to buy but let the end of the month come before doing so. Over and over again I heard her on the phone explaining that the promotion had ended and reminding the prospects of all the calls, texts, and emails she had sent over the past couple weeks telling them about the April 30th deadline.

As a senior executive with responsibility for Sales and Marketing for many years, I have overseen hundreds of promotions. For many logical and psychological reasons promotions need an end date. First of all, if a promotional price doesn’t end, it’s just the new price. Secondly, prospects need a reason to buy now rather than wait. And, thirdly, Finance and others inside the company need clarity and consistency around pricing and billing. For these reasons and others the convention that a promotion must end on a certain date always made sense to me. Sure a few prospects will miss out, but that’s the deal -- if exceptions are made then the company's credibility would suffer (or something like that).

Watching what happened with my wife this week made me second-guess much of this. She’s selling an expensive product that generally involves several conversations with a prospect -- a relationship is developed. We’re not talking about a simple product that someone orders on a website with a promo code that expires on a certain date. The ten to fifteen prospects that called her on Friday hoping to take advantage of the promotion were ready to buy. They were frustrated with themselves and disappointed that they had missed the promotion. Some were even angry when my wife had to tell them firmly that the promotion had really ended and no exceptions would be made. Getting them to buy on Friday at the regular price was impossible. Getting them to ever buy at the regular price is probably impossible. No one likes to make an expensive purchase while knowing that they are paying more than they should.

As the day wore on, I overheard numerous similar discussions my wife was having, discussions that could be ended to everyone’s satisfaction with, “If you are really ready to buy right now, I think I can get the promotion extended for you”, were ending instead with, “I’m sorry you missed out; if we have another promotion like this in the future, I’ll let you know.” What a shame I kept thinking. Valuable relationships were being ended with dissatisfaction. Tens of thousands of dollars in sales were being dismissed. Thousands of dollars of marketing to bring in those prospects was being squandered. And, of course, serious additional commissions for my wife were evaporating.

For a moment I really wanted to pick up the phone and call her company’s head of sales or CEO and tell them, “Listen, I get it about promotions needing to end but if these deals were good business yesterday, they’re good business today -- honor the promo for a couple more days for prospects that call and ask for it, you’ll be glad you did -- stuff happens and you’re potentially turning prospects that are ready to buy into detractors.” Of course I didn’t do that. It’s not my place and they probably wouldn’t have listened to me anyhow. But I wanted to. I was wrong that promotions should rigidly end on a certain date in all cases and so were they. Avoid a “Promo Hangover” in certain situations by leaving the door open to make exceptions for a few more days. You’ll be glad you did. Godspeed.