Quarterly or Annual Planning Campaign Themes

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

In our most recent blog post, I talked about strate­gic plan­ning and the annu­al, quar­ter­ly dis­ci­plines to get and keep peo­ple on the same page. If you haven’t read it, please check it out.

Once you have a good rhythm of set­ting clear goals, the best way to cas­cade them to every­one in the com­pa­ny is to do quar­ter­ly or annu­al cam­paigns with a theme — to ral­ly the entire com­pa­ny behind achiev­ing one goal. Obvi­ous­ly, one goal that is part of your strate­gic plan, and inter­est­ing and engag­ing for people.

You define a clear goal and time frame and how the team will cel­e­brate dif­fer­ent lev­els of achieve­ment. A week­ly score­board is use­ful to know exact­ly where you stand, and to prompt ideas of how to reach the goal.

Exam­ple: High 5

We rolled out this theme with a retail orga­ni­za­tion with many stores, all with­in a one-hour flight of head office. Our goal was to achieve five items per cus­tomer transaction.

They were get­ting two to three items per trans­ac­tion, in their stores, com­pa­ra­ble to sim­i­lar busi­ness­es, around the world.

We knew we couldn’t achieve five for every trans­ac­tion, but peo­ple could aspire to five, cel­e­brate spec­tac­u­lar trans­ac­tions and shift their mind­set to bring up their aver­age score. Every store had a dif­fer­ent spe­cif­ic tar­get, depend­ing on their base num­ber but, on aver­age, we want­ed peo­ple to increase about 15% from wher­ev­er they started.

First, we iden­ti­fied the key vari­ables we could con­trol to increase times per trans­ac­tion, which would lead to high­er sales:

• Have the right stock on the floor
• Get all staff on the floor dur­ing peak hours (not in the back or in meet­ings offsite)
• Sug­gest oth­er items the cus­tomer might like, when they are in the fit­ting room.

The team cre­at­ed posters, a launch event to get peo­ple engaged, a score­board in every stock room and edu­ca­tion by store man­agers about what could improve items per trans­ac­tion, with­out neg­a­tive­ly affect­ing the cus­tomer experience.

As the cam­paign rolled out, the oper­a­tions team sent week­ly reminders, updat­ed score­boards to show who improved the most, and high­light­ed the most amaz­ing trans­ac­tions with com­men­tary from the per­son to say how they did it.

The store with the great­est improve­ment, every week, won a free lunch (not a lot of cost) to cel­e­brate, build cama­raderie and the desire to do it again.

Thir­teen weeks lat­er, at the end of quar­ter, the High 5 cam­paign was incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful. Staff got well over three items per trans­ac­tion — which had nev­er been achieved by the team or any oth­er relat­ed stores around the world — and built a new habit to improve and mas­ter the vari­ables they could control.

As a bonus, cus­tomers were bet­ter off, too, because most peo­ple appre­ci­at­ed the sug­ges­tions from atten­tive staff, espe­cial­ly when they were already in the fit­ting room.

Some Win­ning Campaigns

We’ve done hun­dreds of these over the years, and, while they do take a fair amount of ener­gy, the results in improved busi­ness per­for­mance, and cre­at­ing a cul­ture of com­pe­ti­tion, win­ning and cel­e­brat­ing are absolute­ly amaz­ing when you do it right.

We’ve done cam­paigns to recruit new team mem­bers and cus­tomers, dri­ve sales, improve cash flow and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion lev­els and almost any­thing else you can think of that improves the per­for­mance of a business.

Here’s a list of some of the plan­ning cam­paign themes we’ve been a part of. These were cre­at­ed in many sec­tors includ­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing, busi­ness and pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices, and real estate:

• Club 35 – Reduce Extra Inventory
• Route 66 – Decrease CCC by 30 Days
• All for 1 – Increase IPT (items per trans­ac­tion) by One Unit & Inte­grate Two Teams
• 1,000 Lit­tle Pieces – Units Sold, Built and Shipped
• 57 New Friends – New Customers
• R.A.V.E. – Ratio of Tick­ets to Oth­er Ser­vices Sold
• 500 Club – Achieve $500k GP/​Employee
• I Luv the 90’s – Mys­tery Shop­ping Scores of 90%+
• Above the Line — Team Mem­bers Achiev­ing Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Goals
• 2750 Lives – Employ 600 Addi­tion­al People
• Crazy 8’s – Dri­ving NPS to a Score of 80%
• Rapid Response – Call­ing NPS (net pro­mot­er score/​system) Detrac­tors with­in 24 Hours
• Gone in 30 min­utes – Make Meet­ings under 30 minutes
• 50 Days of Grey – 50 Projects that are Late
• A Team – Get to 60% A Players
• 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Elim­i­nate 30,000 hours of waste
• Bin-It – Elim­i­nate 845 waste­ful actions
• 600 — 600 referrals.

The Chal­lenge

• What one num­ber would you want most peo­ple in your orga­ni­za­tion to focus?
• How could you pull off your own theme? 

If you want guid­ance to put your own theme togeth­er, please reach out. We’d be hap­py to help.