I guess in every dynamic/growing business, there'll always be new surprises/shocks,changes which keeps you on the hook......without change we/business may die and I believe change is a way of life ! It's more so in a business like ours !
As I told you in my earlier blog that a new sales/marketing head (Regional Manager) joined during the last week of Nov and I've been making all the daily calls and planning and preparations and thought he's going to be the one I will be most dependent on.....guess what ? Day before yesterday was his last day.....!!!
I never worked with this guy but from his talk in the interview earlier he seemed to be very sincere,hardworking and go-getter but didn't show any of that while actually started working, which I was able to guess working with him remotely....and our MD was totally uptset with his work performance since almost 45 days he worked with him. He couldn't get a simple thing done on time (that's true as he never submitted any reports that I've been asking either !!) but I thought he will continue till I join in Feb...but somethings happen so fast....that fellow asked our MD that he can't perform, if his reporting can't cooperate with him and our MD took that chance and asked him to leave !!
So, I'm back to sqaure one with sales/marketing ! ! Not really, but lot of time wasted talking with this guy and making plans etc...!
I guess everything happens for good...and we just need to move on !
The current strategy is not to recruit any new person in his place and myself and our MD will directly coordinate with the 3 AMs and work with them direectly ....the good thing is, we saved one senior person salary , in this financial crisis !!
And since last 2 days, I've been constantly on the phone with all our 3 RMs and our MD and the Nellore and VJA center-in-charges , revewing last months performance and plans and targets for this month....
With all my own analysis since all these days and my experience in sales/marketing dealing with all these people, we (my self and our MD) are all in a confused state to focus on our sales/marketing working..most of the people are getting escaped with the current 'revenue' based target system.....I've been very confused all the time, how to make accountable each of the sales person by giving 'revenue' as sales target.....we've been arbitrarly giving 'revenue' figures as their monthly targets....
With revenue as target, we don't know where we should stress on them each day and how we can guide them every day
Finally after much deliberations, I came to a conclusion that instead of 'monthly revenue' , we should start 'number of patient registrations per each doctor/rmp/lab' as our monthly targets, with basic target of 1. Never lose any existing doctors/rmps/labs 2. Add certain number of doctors/rmps/labs each month 3. Add few % of new patient registrations from each doctor.
With this new target strategy I believe, it's very easy to keep track of the number of cases each doctor/rmp/lab sends us and we will know how many number of new doctors are coming on board and how many are getting dropped and which doctor is sending what and which area we need to put special emphasis and on which doctor......
Though I came up with this idea earlier, I don't know why I delayed implementing this idea from so long ! Now, I'm taking all my time, explaining this new strategy to each of the marketing people (remotely !!) and make sure they understand this new process and get into their minds...
I guess, we're learning very hard lessons experimenting with each idea /strategy in every area of the business...(sales/marketing/hr/production/process/finance etc ) and educating all the staff and abandoning when it doesn't work....looks too expensive on the time and resources....but I don't see any other way.....I don't know if every CEO goes through the same painful process in every company.......I wish I had a simple formula of having one sure successfull strategy/plan/idea....
All this is consuming my mind and energy....thinking through each simple item... and the fear of failure of each new idea... each new hire ,who may turn to be good/bad/lazy/hardworking/useful/notuseful.....
I still can clearly see lot of holes that we need to fill in each depatment and each area of the business process......once I'm through with all these operational probelms (until the financial burden is over...) , I need to focus my energy on how to get more money and build new centers and keep the expansion humming !!!
There's looks no time, not having anything on my ever growing to-do list !!
It's my dream to hire more hard-working, more intelligent, more dedicated people than me into this business, when I can delegate some of my work...hopefully during the next phase of expansion, when we get more money from outside, until then, I need to continue doing what I'm doing now !
Looks, it's only me and our MD (though he can be more dedicated and hard-working than me...he's still able to put only part-time efforts because of his other commitments ) .
Good night !
Mohan Raju
No comments:
Post a Comment