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:
#550 Let Sales and Marketing Work Together
#549 Who is your Business Plan for?
#548 Simple Stress Relief
#547 Asymmetrical Web Design
#546 Look Before you Leap
#545 Company Values
#544 Bring a Little Personality
#543 Mobile First
#542 Story Pad With Geoffrey Klein
#541 Where Do Content Ideas Com From
#540 Relationship Centric Marketing
#539 Traffic Sources
#538 Doing LinkedIn Right
#537 You Can't Buy Permission Based Lists
#536 PR Tips
#535 Position Statement
#534 SEO For Everyone
#533 Customers Don't Watch Ads
#532 Absolute Marketing
#531 - Customers are Ready to Buy From You
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