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:
#510 How to Work with Your Spouse
#509 Blogging Checklist
#508 Become an Expert | Mark Dunsmore
#507 Natural Language
506 Customer Experience
#505 Why You Need An SSL
#504 Judgement vs Curiosity
#503 Meme This
#502 Productively Working Remotely
#501 Advertising for Repeat Business
#500 - Throwback Thursday with Allison Carter
#499 Welcome Visitors to Your Website
#498 Why Web Copy Matters
#497 The Gain Headline
#496 No Daddy!
#495 The Pain Headline
#494 Five Most Common Web Design Mistakes
#493 Healthy Conflict
#492 Visual Communications
#491 Web Performance Review
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson
The Influence Factor by The Influencer Marketing Factory
Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson l Presented By Marigold
Insider Secrets to a Top 100 Podcast | Podcasting, Marketing, Psychology
The Goal Digger Podcast