Over the last 2 years, it’s been so sad to see this company’s once exceptionally strong culture dissolve.
Marketing is absolutely dysfunctional and working out of sync with product development. They made the decision to begin marketing Sprout as a “social intelligence platform” under the assumption that this would be creating a brand new SaaS product category. However, there was a lack of research into this category and the associated risks/challenges. A main competitor had already been marketing under that label for almost a year, but now leadership thinks anytime they mention “social intelligence,” it’s a response to us or a sign that they’re worried. Not true. They beat us with that label.
This is the sort of rose-colored glasses opinion that causes blind spots in our strategy. Leadership only wants to hear good things about how their strategy is going and anyone who points to data that says otherwise gets ignored or silenced.
Senior Marketing Leadership is not aligned on anything except for the fact that they work at a company named Sprout Social. Each individual VP only cares about their own focus areas and impact rather than the big picture (of driving awareness and adoption of the product), and this leads to multiple ICs working in conflict on the same projects who are aligned to their VP’s desired outcome, but the VPs are not aligned on what the outcomes should be.
The morale on Marketing is in the gutter following the pivot to social intelligence. People who were once highly passionate and energized about making a difference are exhausted from the whiplash created by senior leadership. Several team members have just left with no job lined up because they couldn’t take the dysfunctional environment anymore. Our prospects and customers can also see this in the output of disjointed messaging and priorities.
