The December Effect

With only two weeks left in the year, many organizations are experiencing what I like to refer to as the “December Effect”. Regardless of your employer’s fiscal calendar, this is something I’ve witnessed in nearly every industry, geography and position.  So if you are struggling this time of year and think you’re alone…believe me…you are not!The effect on:

• Sales: It’s Q4, and you’ve trained all of your customers and vendors to expect to buy from you at the best prices of the year.  Budgets are being flushed, ‘use it or lose it’ still exists, and you need to crush your December numbers to not only keep your job, but to earn your highly leveraged commission and perhaps even make President’s Club.  Time to get creative and forget what marketing and product management said the product can do; sell the future!
• Marketing: You think you’re coasting until the January launch of new products and services, but bottom line is that sales needs a new and innovative hook, pitch, white paper, piece of collateral and success story.  Sales is complaining that you didn’t generate enough qualified leads for the year and it looks like a bad December push is going to be blamed on you.
• Product Management:  ”The features aren’t selling”, says Sales leadership, and it’s all your fault (or so they’d have you believe).  Your specs were solid and you’re knee deep into the next major and minor release schedule, but the bottom line is that sales thinks you missed what the market truly wanted, so marketing can’t put a story together.  You need to be on every sales call and you begin to wonder why you’re not getting commission.  
• Finance: It’s calendar Q4, you worry what sales is promising the customers and vendors, and how in the hell can you possible recognize some of the revenue that’s been pushed through the funnel.  Global exchange rates are killing you and, on top of that, everyone wants to give a discount.  You documented the approval chain of command for anything beyond 15%, but no one’s paying attention to that now.  You better have your New Year’s Eve toast now because it’s 7×24 until January 2nd.
• IT: Systems are getting overloaded with spiky volumes of activity, and the online site isn’t exactly living up to expectations.  Customers are having trouble placing orders, customer service can’t seem to use the most basic technology, and with so many people in the field requiring remote support, you’re trying to pick your battles without losing control.  How come the hackers don’t take vacation?  You’re thinking that this really isn’t worth all the effort and you’d rather be working at a startup where you can control the environment.
• Customer Service: Today a customer was ‘accidentally disconnected’ because the yelling just got to be too much.  The odds of them being routed back to you are pretty slim so you don’t feel too bad.  Why are people so angry?  Don’t they understand that you can only do what the system allows you to do?  And boy are the systems slow this time of year.  You secretly hope for an escalation since the manager has cookies at her desk.
• Fulfillment: Does no one own a calendar?  The FedEx, UPS and USPS guys are nearly in tears and some client paid a lot of extra cash to get this thing in time for Christmas.  Finance is breathing down your neck about ‘Freight on Board’ for revenue recognition, sales promised to fill a huge order on backlogged items and you’re starting to forget what your kids look like.  
• HR: Benefits enrollment is wrapping up and no one read the instructions (or so it seems).  You’re supposed to be doing ‘workforce planning’ for 2008 but you barely have the data necessary to fill open positions.  And yes, the vacation policy is documented on the employee portal so please stop calling the HR help desk.  And no, we do not rollover unused vacation hours, so managers continue to promise undocumented vacation days so we don’t have a mass exodus on December 31st.  Why did we serve alcohol at the holiday party?
• Legal: Great holiday party, but what idiot approved the open bar (and worse, the open mic)!  Hopefully you can settle some of these out of court.  And didn’t you spend time at the last sales meeting training the reps on the terms and conditions in our standard contract?  Ha – standard contract – nice try.  But seriously, can’t reps look up what ‘indemnification’ means instead of putting you on the phone every two seconds?  It’s costing a fortune on external counsel.  Your mom was right; you should have been a doctor.

Let’s keep the conversation (and sanity) going.