With Love and Quiches by Susan Axelrod

Author:Susan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781626340725
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Prioritizing Pipeline

The purpose of any business, first and foremost, is the pursuit of profit, and all the changes we made after 9/11 going forward would assure that we stayed on that path. We are survivors, and each change to the company strengthened us.

Our first round of post-9/11 consulting also taught us the importance of pipeline. At the end of the day, everything depends upon the orders in hand. Everybody waits for the phone to ring, the faxes to come over, the electronic orders to be emailed because no matter how carefully and detailed the sales budgeting process may be, no one has a crystal ball. Unexpected changes—from a hurricane down south to a change in management or ownership of a very large account—can affect gross sales. Adjustments can be made to produce goods more efficiently and with less waste, and equipment can be kept running smoothly with less downtime. Yet the sales numbers inform it all.

So many things compete for your attention when you’re running a business, but it’s imperative that you not lose track of your pipeline. We now keep our pipeline filled, making sure enough new prospects are waiting in the wings while we work on closing current new customers and bids. A robust pipeline doesn’t mean everything is going to fall in your lap, so we track our potentials, our in-process, our decision pending, our closed, our lost opportunities, and why the opportunities were lost. We have gotten rather good at it, and each salesperson is required to update a Pipeline Report weekly.

So, even though it’s the bottom line that counts, the top line has to be healthy too. No matter how efficient the operation is with all its parts, if the phone doesn’t ring, you have nothing. With few exceptions, after 9/11 we managed to hold on to all of our customers, and we rebuilt together.

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By 2003 we knew that although there was a lot of work ahead, we would be okay. Thanks to the improvements we had made on efficiency and pipeline, we were going to make it through. In September of that year, we were invited to a franchisee conference by our big Middle East customer—the one who’d just happened by our NRA booth in Chicago about ten years before—and Andrew and I flew to Dubai to attend. The temperature in Dubai at that time of year never falls below 100 degrees—even at night; it’s a fabulous city, but hot! Our hosts did everything just right, top drawer. Attendees were assigned places for all of the meetings, and all of the vendors were rotated to assure that they got to interact and sit with all of the franchisees at least once. There I was, a Jewish female business owner from New York among a sea of Middle Eastern men, quite a few of them dressed in flowing robes and headdresses, but I was treated as if I were one of them. Andrew blended in much better than I did! At the closing banquet, much to our amazement, Love and Quiches was honored as Vendor of the Year for the region.

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