A regular customer comes into their favorite business and wants to special order some items for a home project they are going to be doing. They know the sales clerks quite well as well as knowing the new manager of that business. They worked with a couple of the sales clerks gathering some product information about the project they are getting ready to do. It will be a rather expensive project so this customer has shopped around for the best pricing. Unfortunately, the store they like the most did not offer the lowest prices for the items they need to purchase to do this project. So they decide to go in and see if their favorite business can match the lowest prices they have been offered from one of the competitors.
This is a familiar process in business. In my 40 years of retail operations, this process is quite common. Hundreds of customers shop for the best price on the street for items they want to buy and go back to their favorite retailer and ask for a matching offer. This is very normal stuff.
This is where the manager comes in. The customer is turned over to the manager for the special pricing request. The manager gets involved with the customer and works up a special deal to meet the competitors pricing. Rather than turn the detail work over to one of the sales clerks, the manager feels special and decides to handle the sale requirements and paperwork without turning it over to one of the sales clerks. In my world of business, this is where organizations breakdown. This manager is moving away from the organized pattern for handling customer sales. The customer sales transaction is now at risk for having something go terribly wrong.
Managers are designed to do certain functions in their business organizations. They hire sales clerks to do the customer sales kinds of things. When the manager crosses over to the sales side of the transaction and begins taking care of the paperwork, the ordering and the follow-up...errors and omissions are at risk to occur. These new 'sales' functions are not part of the organized pattern the manager is familiar with doing. They are not part of the managers organized routine of work performed. This 'special' sales transaction is not a routine part of the managers organized work duties. It is destined for failure. Something will be forgotten, omitted and unfortunately, become undone. The transaction is following a high risk path.
Two days ago, I was doing some banking in a local bank. In the lobby of that bank was a previous customer from one of the business models I once managed. She was very verbal and glad to see me. She asked where I had been. We had a nice long chat. She wondered if I had been doing well. She described why she and her husband no longer shop in that business anymore. It was an all too familiar reason.
She explained how she and her husband gave the new manager a special order for several items they needed to purchase. She said the new manager met the pricing they found elsewhere and they worked with the new manager to order the items. After a few weeks they went in to see how the items were doing on the special order. The manager told them it would be about four more weeks. She said they were puzzled since that was the original time frame the new manager offered during the original transaction. Sound familiar? I hear this kind of stuff more than I should hear in my leadership career. Unfortunately, is happens well too often.
She continued with her saga. Her husband called a couple of days later to check the manager again on the follow-up of the items they special ordered. This time her husband got one of the sales clerks because the manager was away at some corporate meetings. That sales clerk offered to follow-up and get back to the customer to let them know how their order was coming along. That sales clerk discovered that the original order had not been ordered at the first time the transaction was conceived. It was, instead, ordered when they came back in to check on how it was doing the second time. She said her husband was disappointed with that news but since it was on order this time, they decided to wait and let it ride.
Five weeks later, the items on special order arrived. Some of the exterior items were missing. A different sales clerk checked it out and discovered those missing items were never ordered with the original transaction. They were forgotten on the order. That sales clerk found the original paperwork on the managers desk and discovered it had a side-written note on it to add these items. Unfortunately, that note of importance was not attached to the original purchase order where the rest of the items were ordered. It was stapled to the hand written note on the managers desk, away from where the special orders are filed. Sound familiar? Disorganized patterns.
When she completed her sad story about this errant transaction I asked her how much that transaction was worth? She said, "Over $6,000." She also said her husband cancelled the order and went somewhere else to get it done. She went on to describe how they never go back to do business there anymore. Here is the kicker...I bumped into that new manager about two weeks ago and I asked how business was doing? Here was the answer. "The recession is killing us. Our sales have been slowly going down too much so we had to lat off one of our sales clerks." Yadda, yadda, yadda.
I have watched many business leaders function in this kind of disorganized state of existence. They get so busy chasing down the stuff that is disorganized that they never seem to find the time to get organized. They miss doing what should be done. It happens a lot.
Why get organized?
Business leaders, it matters a whole lot to be better organized. It saves errors. It saves time. It saves resources. It helps to secure sales. It helps to increase sales. It helps to improve customer service.
Why get organized? That's why.
The story about the lady in the bank lobby is real. Many business models have a long line of dissatisfied customers just like her. Many business models are so disorganized that they actually create their own wind of recession. They work extra hard every day to chase down the things that are so badly disorganized. It costs them in the lack of 'good will' to their needed consumer base. Consumers are fickle to begin with. Why jeopardize their loyalty with dysfunctional patterns of poor organizational methods? Get better organized. Your customers deserve it and they expect it. Meet that need.
Sometimes the things business leaders do to remain disorganized are time consuming things. The extra work and motion to track down what should be already done takes up valuable time to complete. The valuable time taken to track down disorganized stuff can be used in a more productive area of the business model. Unfortunately, it is being used inefficiently and cannot be used to help do the more productive things. This is an area of business management that often times gets ignored. Stop putting it off. It is costing you way too much to remain disorganized. You are losing valuable consumer support.
Did you know it takes a lot of time to get organized? It does. That is usually why many business leaders do not get organized. It takes too much time. Disorganized leaders do not have any time. They do not have time to get organized, so they don't. They remain disorganized. They also remain limited in what they can produce. They are not organized enough to do more. They produce their own wind of recession. Of course, they blame the economy, however. It is an easy villain to blame.
My wife just decided to 're-file' her business documents. She wanted to improve her organizational ways in her business. She sat down at the computer one day and began her trek to get better organized. I like where she described how she wanted to function. I could see what she was wanting to do. It would easily help her to save a lot of time in the future with her sales order work. Unfortunately, getting organized in that new fashion of process she was describing she wanted to make happen would take a lot of time. It made a lot of sense but would take a lot of time to complete.
Since her decision to get better organized, I have watched her sit down at her computer and squeeze out the time needed to make these new organizational filing changes. We have talked about the process. We both came to the conclusion that organizing takes time. It is tedious work. Getting better organized is a time consuming process. It must have a good function that it will provide once it is done, otherwise, the time spent will be lost and non-recoverable. In her business case, the time spent will save her so much time in the future with her sales process that it is well spent to do this kind of tedious work. Her future cost of labor will easily return what she puts in today. The high level of work put in today will become lower work demands for the future follow-up on her business sales. She will win later.
Do the tedious stuff to get better organized. Make sure you are getting organized in the right way. Make sure your organizational efforts can offer you a nice return in increasing or preserved sales. Once you get properly organized, learn how to protect it. Make certain you use the organized designs that your business model has arranged to be performed. Quit taking short cuts to save time. Short cuts tend to circumvent the good patterns your organizational ways are designed to perform. Spare your customers from the disorganized displeasure's they often times discover when the patterns go sour. Kill the wind you make on your own recession. Get better organized. Do the tedious stuff that it requires. Take the extra steps that your organization has been designed to respect. It will help you to prevent what they lady in the bank lobby unfortunately discovered. I think your competitors do not need her business as bad as you do.
Why get organized? Because it matters. Now that you have read this post, it doe snot give you the right to put off getting better organized right now. We will never have the right kind of time to do it. Go get started and forge ahead to get it done.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment