Today marked the 3rd in a series of layoff waves at Harte Hanks to cut $25MM in expenses and overhead. This round was the decimation of their pro services sales folks. The remaining sales talent is largely made up of digital printing sales guys, mostly old timers from the company's storied printing past and a few Call Center sales reps masquerading as customer database marketing gurus. Customer database marketing is also called marketing automation at Harte Hanks and consists of email design and production for IBM Unica and a few other email blast software tools like exact target and pardot.
Two weeks ago was a called a reorg layoff which decimated the sales support teams from lead Gen to Salesforce Mgmt and sales reporting.
The first wave was smaller and included a few oddball positions that are arguably part of Harte Hanks recent efforts to reinvent themselves as a strategic consultancy & digital creative and execution agency from a job shop. The reinvention started last May and has already come to an end after the Century Link telecom executives hired in at the c-suite came in and took over as agency gurus. None in the new HH c-suite have professional services or agency backgrounds. But they do have grand aspirations, minimally in trying to look the part.
Chris Harte will take his usual $12MM off the top of the company's gross this year, as every year, and the company will shrink further next year.
An executive advising an employee of their firing today was said to have stated that they felt terrible about it, but that they are having a problem with delivering what has been sold in order to recognize the revenue.
After today they can focus on delivering what's been sold and not worry about the selling of more other than what the old guard sales boys sell in printing and call Center services.