Time to Improve

Things are tough all over, in fact if you think things are tough for you try checking out the Printing Industry, talk about a challenging environment.  So we have a couple of choices; one choice is to cry in our beer or curl up in the fetal position and hope that everything goes back to “normal”.  Not a choice that I am considering or that is productive, in fact the “hope” that everything goes back to normal is in itself the definition of hopelessness.  So like always I am looking at the glass half full and so are many of our customers. 

It is interesting to me the customers that decide to capitalize on every situation no matter if it is positive or negative.  We have several innovative and dynamic companies that have made the strategic (and tactical) decision that it is “Time to Improve” .  Yes, some of them have had to make hard decisions, downsizing, layoffs, budget cuts, however they are investing in improving their foundation, the remaining staff that will need to get the job done with less resources and manpower.   

One great example is a customer that has studied the number of product demonstrations they would typically perform and how many they would have to win in order to hit their revenue targets.  As they studied the numbers they quickly discovered that the win ratio they have been traditionally maintaining (which was pretty good) isn’t going to cut it going forward.  Why?  There are less deals in the pipeline, less demos being delivered and therefore the number of wins no longer can produce close to what it used to.  The answer; IMPROVE!  Using professional development programs (like ours for example) they have been able to sharpen the skills of their team, make less mistakes, use fundamentals and techniques and significantly increase their win ratio.  Food for thought.