I’ve been talking a lot about problem solving lately, so I thought it would be fun to dive into a couple real-life cases where things didn’t go as planned and how we fixed it.

The Situation

A new location opened and after an initial launch event, a beautiful new landing page with video and photos was built to schedule appointments. At the time of launch the project was handed over from the brand/strategy team to the digital team for execution. However, traffic was much lower than expected and form fills had dropped dramatically. Sales and leadership were extremely disappointed, as it was an expensive endeavor and the marketing plan they’d seen wasn’t performing as promised.

The Investigation

The first step was to look at the marketing plan and understand what had been projected and how it had been executed. That yielded almost immediate results as a number of promotion plans geared toward an already engaged audience (current customers and subscribers), such as email communications and organic social media posts, had been abandoned in favor of paid social ads. Looking at the landing page itself and investigating how it appeared on search also showed that the new page had been built on the CRM platform and wasn’t searchable on the website or the internet at large — search traffic was going to the old pre-launch landing page and leads from that page were no longer being collected by the system.

The Solution

This was a delicate situation where a new team was trying prove their methods worked to a new set of leaders and disregarded the expertise of the brand team. There were also some strong feeling about the project being “taken away” from the launch team. In order to preserve the working relationship between the teams, there needed to be some balance in how the issues were confronted and how it was presented to Sales and Leadership. One root of the problem was the misunderstanding of the term landing page — while the brand team had used it to simply describe a page where visitors would “land” from a click from social or the newsletter, but also wanted it to be searchable on the website and part of the site architecture, the digital team understood it to be a standalone form fill page purely based on the name. The digital team had to rebuild the landing page so it would show up in search and could be included in the site’s navigation, and the brand team took back responsibility for executing the promotional plan. With those two corrections in place, traffic to the new page improved dramatically.

Lessons Learned

Working with new teams can be rough, especially in situations like reorganization and mergers. It’s easy to hand a project off and start on the next big thing — especially if project ownership has been clearly reassigned. That’s why it’s critical to make sure the “why” behind choices is understood by the whole team. And it’s equally important to make sure that approvals and post-mortem meetings are a documented part of the project plan and that they include the right people. Taking a launch and move on approach gets things done quickly, but following up with the right people can ensure mistakes like this don’t happen.

For this case, the importance of building trust between the teams can’t be understated. The entire situation happened because one team didn’t explain themselves clearly and washed their hands of the project when it was transferred, and another team thought they knew best and didn’t follow the plan. It would be easy to let the situation breed animosity and spoil the working relationship. Both teams had to make an effort to build trust and respect with each other and across the organization so they could both succeed.