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:
#794 A Little Cappuccino Goes a Long Way
#793 Finding Your Ideal Client
#792 The Long Game
#791 Life Cycle Marketing
#790 Invite me In
#789 Empathy and Action
#788 The Follow Up Process
#787 MEGA Position
#786 Lessons from Improv
#785 Copywriting Style Guide
#784 New Tech - Finding What is Right for You
#783 Measure Your Email Results
#782 Google Wants You to Do Better
#781 Time to Pivot
#780 Protect Your Assets
#779 It Is All About The Cash
#778 Cost Plus Pricing
#777 Get To Yes Faster
#776 Turn Your Sales Funnel Upside Down
#775 Testimonials are Marketing Gold
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