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:
#610 The Landing Page
#609 Which Social Media Platform Is Right For You?
#608 A Podcast about Podcasts
#607 What Can You Offer
#606 Get More Done By Noon
#605 What to Write About
#604 Get Noticed by the Media
#603 Social Relationships
#602 - Explore, Evaluate and Embrace
#601 Local Business Buckets
#600 Teach Your Way to Success
#599 Invite Me In
#598 Take the Quiz
#597 Social Media is About Ego
#596 Go Local with Google My Business
#595 Privacy vs Convenience
#594 The Are of the Hashtag
#593 The Digital Economy
#592 Yes, And
#591 Content Calendar
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