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:
#630 Convert Prospects with Video
#629 You are Doing SEO Wrong
#628 Time to Go Global
#627 What Story Does Your Company Tell?
#626 Don't Overwhelm Your Website
#625 Innovative PR Ideas
624 Why Blog?
#623 CopywritingTips
#622 Get Rid of Limiting Beliefs
#621 Crisis Management Plan
#620 Take the Fear Out of Networking
#619 Accountability Tips
#618 Why Should I Buy From You?
#617 Do It Yourself SEO
#616 The Button
#615 Take the Overwhelm Out of Social Media
#614 Win the Hour, Win the Day
#613 The Submission Form
#612 Money Matters
#611 Social Media in Five Minutes a Day
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