Too many interruptions? Schedule them

Dear Bob …

I’m the CIO for a smallish product brokerage. By that I mean we act as the intermediary between a few dozen suppliers and a few hundred customers.

[ Also on InfoWorld: How can an executive keep a reasonable schedule? | Get sage IT career advice from Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ]

The other day over a beer (don’t worry, it was after hours), I was speaking with the manager responsible for managing supplier relationships. He’d had a bad day — his phone never stopped ringing, and every call was pretty much the same as every other call: a manufacturer whose sales were disappointing and wanted us to do something about it.

Mostly, the nature of these calls is, “I’m in pain, and that means someone else is going to suffer with me.” We aren’t in a business where we have much opportunity to push product. Our customers know what they need, know when they need it, and count on us to make sure they get it without much delay.

So my supplier-relationship friend wasted the better part of his day placating people — not the best use of his time. Even worse, many of the calls required calls to the sales force to find out what’s going on with the manufacturer’s products. So in addition to wasting his time, it wasted a lot of sales-representative time as well.

Apparently, while today was extreme, the underlying problem is quite common. A lot of this manager’s time, as well as sales rep time, is wasted handling calls like these.

I view my job as helping the rest of the business find creative solutions to problems. I’d like to help this guy, both because he’s my friend and because it’s always useful for someone in my position to be a hero, even if it’s only until the next server crash.

Any ideas?

– Hero in Waiting

Dear Waiting …

I’m going to make a guess, and I hope you don’t take offense at the guess. Industries that have dozens of suppliers who sell through brokers tend to be, comparatively speaking, unsophisticated. Different participants in the same industry handle very similar processes differently, so one of your company’s core capabilities is knowing how to work with each of the suppliers so that your customers don’t have to.

Another characteristic of an unsophisticated industry is that few of its suppliers are very good at analytics, strategic planning, or any of the other disciplines that make the difference between operating on gut feel and making evidence-driven, organized decisions.

Hold that thought, and add to it a general principle: An excellent way to cut down a high volume of interruptions is to aggregate them into scheduled planning sessions. This doesn’t eliminate the interruptions. That’s OK; moving even half of them into a scheduled event offers huge benefits.

One more not-all-that-new concept and we’re ready to suggest a solution: Among the ways for any company to become more of a value-adding partner is to help its business partners improve their games, instead of limiting its role to handling transactions as they come up and fighting fires as they ignite.

Put these ideas together, and here’s what you get: Work with your manager friend to organize quarterly planning meetings with each manufacturer. These meetings will have a fixed agenda that includes both statistical information about how its products are faring among your customers and subjective judgments from the sales force on how the manufacturer is regarded.

Your role in all of this is to turn the information that already exists in your databases into analytics that will help each manufacturer find ways to plan its product lines to encourage higher sales, and possibly to add an automated channel for the sales force to provide the additional information in a low-impact, labor-unintensive way.

I’d also suggest that each meeting include one or two sales reps. This will help improve the supplier relationship further, by making it clear your sales force wants them to be successful — important because a supplier in pain will want to blame someone, and the easiest target is your sales force, which in the manufacturer’s mind must not care at all. The burden of proof is on your company to demonstrate that this isn’t the case.

Best guess: It’s going to take about three of these meetings before the manufacturers get the hang of it — before they stop calling because they’re in pain both because they discussed their pain with you in the last meeting, and because they’re feeling less pain.

Which means the planning meetings had better help their sales. They should. After all, your sales reps talk to their customers much more than they can, and knowing what your customers are thinking can’t fail to help a company do a better job of offering products they’ll want to buy.

– Bob