When I was Vice President of Creative Services at Conseco, we were always out of literature for key products. In the insurance business literature is all you have to sell, so these outages would cripple our sales team. Our out of stock list was routinely close to 300 different items and climbing. While we had numerous meetings on the subject nothing ever changed.
So I stopped talking about procedures and policy and asked a simple question "If our goal was a back order level of 100 what would we do?"
Defining a specific target, instead of vague "get better" gave a focus to our discussions. Every day we knew exactly how far we were from our target.
As an added incentive, I offered to take the print team to any restaurant in town if we reduced our back orders to 100 by September. 1. The date gave us the sense of urgency we needed to keep this in the forefront of our discussions.
We kicked off every production meeting with a brief conversation about the back-order list and the ideas started flowing. We instituted a "red flag" for any project associated with back order items. Every team, editors, designers, writers and account executives agreed if a red tag landed on their desk it was their first priority.
Slowly the numbers started to improve; We posted the daily results on the way so we could see our progress in real time. On September 1, we went to lunch at Cafe Nora.
There are several important lessons for small business owners in this story:
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#1036 Activity vs Productivty
#1035 The Art of Asking for a Testimonial
#1034 Marketing Automation Basics
#1033 What's In a Name?
#1032 Build Trust with Virtual Events | Michael Tucker
#1031 Be a Much Better Public Speaker | Brenden Kumarasamy
#1030 Social Media is Like a Singles Bar
#1029 Display Advertising | Debra Bowers
#1028 Avoid the Social Media Overwhelm | Andrea Jones
#1027 Free Kittens
#1026 Take a Closer Look at Your Website | Monica Pitts
#1025 Simple SEO Tips | Meg Casebolt
#1024 Prince Charming - And the Search for the Perfect Marketing Solution
#1023 Be a Podcast Guest | Jamie Atkinson
#1022 Build Trust with Email
#1021 Let AI Summarize
#1020 Stop Wasting Money on Marketing | Sara Nay | Duct Tape Marketing
#1019 The Marketing Flywheel | Josh Ramsey
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