Get everyone talking
You want front-line employees engaged in a dialogue with you but just as important is your ability to facilitate lateral communication between departments and geographies. Lateral communication is the primary avenue for a good idea to become a best practice throughout your entire company footprint.
Building a collaborative mindset that endures the distance between stores and cities is especially critical to Cape and the other leaders of Quick Lane, who bring together 570 store-level managers to find who has been succeeding the most in their marketing approaches.
Sometimes, a basic, no-frills idea gains the most traction, becoming a best practice because of its simplicity and effectiveness.
“There is an area in the Boston region where a Quick Lane operator actually approached a pizza delivery place,” Cape says. “What does pizza delivery have in common with our kind of business? We both serve the customers in our own backyard. What we do, in that sense, is exactly the same thing the pizza business does. So that operator actually went to a pizza delivery store and approached them about utilizing advertising coupons. One side was pizza coupons and the other side was Quick Lane advertising.
“That is what went on every pizza box that went out for delivery, and all you’re really doing is printing these fliers. It’s very cheap, but you’re still serving the local area, and we found that we got a lot of traction with that. As a result, now we have hundreds of Quick Lanes around the country doing that.”
To help facilitate the communication between store operators, Q
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ck Lane maintains a business-to-business website. Store operators can access the site, interface with each other and use a set of marketing tools to help craft a focused message, in addition to other tips on selling, managing inventory and training modules.
“We’ve found that the forum gets used a lot and is an effective method for sharing best practices,” Cape says. “We help reinforce that with some other incentives and recognition for them.”
Quick Lane also makes use of field teams that monitor stores in a specific region, analyzing marketing data to find out what is and isn’t working well. The teams feed their data findings back to the corporate level.
If you consistently ask for new ideas, and set an expectation that your customer-level people will share ideas, you will build a culture of collaboration and accountability.
“I truly believe in a collaborative approach,” Cape says. “I’ve always said that 10 minds are better than one mind communicating to 10. In the past six-plus years I’ve been on the job, that has really been part of the key to success. It hasn’t been Ford telling us what to do. It hasn’t been a particular dealership that has it all figured out. It’s all about these Quick Lane operators doing business every day, about us providing forums and mechanisms to them, working with them to achieve their goals and do it in a quality way, a growth way.”
