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:
#818 Business Personalities
#817 Storming the Castle
#816 Match Your Products to Customer Needs
#815 Building Relationships on LinkedIn
#814 Your Customer is More than Numbers
#813 Simple Video Tips
#812 Help Your Competitors
#811 Give Google Information About Your Business
#810 Match Your Marketing To Your Goals
#809 Three Types of Competitors
#808 Brand Elements
#807 Sales Starts with a Real Conversation
#806 Do The Research
#805 Start Up Technology
#804 Secure Your Business
#803 Business Plan Myths
#802 Mentorship
#801Favorites of 2022
#800 Happy Anniversary More than a Few Words
#799 Generate New Sales From Old Clients
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Power of Storytelling
The Marketing Secrets Show
Marketing Trends
iDigress with Troy Sandidge
The Goal Digger Podcast