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:
#881 Hop Into the Mailbox
#880 Stop Spiraling Toward Burnout
#879 Make Chat GPT Work For You
#878 Go Where Your Customers Are
#877 Be a Great Podcast Guest
#876 The Marketing Path
#875 Common Startup Mistakes
#874It is ok to change direction
#873 Become a Better Public Speaker
#872 The Reason for Being
#871 The Complete Offer
#870 Things go Wrong
#869 Stop and Read This
#868 To Reply or Not to Reply
#867 Home Court Advantage
#866 On the Road to Mastering Your Marketing Message
#865 Affordable Research Tactics
#864 Podcast Tips, Tools and Tricks
#863 Measurement vs Attribution
#862 Stand, Stagger, Fall
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