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:
#901 The Key to Success is in the Implementation
#900 Go to The Gym
#899 Managing Good and Bad Stress
#898 Discover Productivity Hacks
#897 I Wrote a Book
#896 Build Trust by Letting People See the Real You
#895 Don’t Write Bad Blog Posts
#894The Strategy of Good Web Design
#893 The Human Factor
#892 Convey Meaning with an Image
#891 What to Do With Your Book After It is Published.
#890 What Type of Networking Animal Are You?
#889 Do you Know What a Customer is Really Worth?
#888 The Future of Content Marketing
#887 Improve Your Closing Rate
#886 I am my Brand
#885 Simple Tricks to Improve Your Public Speaking
#884 Google Can’t Read
#883 Maybe You Should Buy a Business
#882 Improve Your Listening Skills
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