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:
#958 Start with Original Content
#957 Time to Train Your Team
#956 Simple Video Tips for Small Business Owners
#955 Customer Focused Copy
#954 Listen toThis
#953 Create Human Centered Content
#952 What Will Your Offer Web Visitors?
#951 Strategic Marketing
#950 -Sales Stories
#949 Write Yourself a Letter
948 A New Take on PPC
#947 Selling the Dream
#946 Burn the Boat
#945 Why Do Storytellers Have More Fun?
#944 - Absolute Marketing
#943 - A Good CTA Drives Action
#942 Leverage Other People’s Platforms
#941 Lessons from a Lifelong Networker
#940 - The Conversion Form - Where the Magic Happens
#939 Build Your LinkedIn Brand
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