What do companies and dairy farmers have in common?
Consider this for a moment.
Consider a farmer back in the day (lets call him Joe) with a few farm hands, over 1000 cows and needs to produce a certain amount of milk each day to meet his quota.
Which cows should he milk and why? Usually his instincts will tell him but sometimes Joe wasn’t always right (much to his wife’s frustration).
If Joe only had a system telling them which cows to milk first, he could focus his efforts and meet or exceed his quota.
In this case, each morning the system tells the farm hands which cows that day are producing the most milk, therefore where they should focus their efforts.
The following day, the system re-forecasted based on the previous day’s milking performance.
We know this might be udderly ridiculous… but consider for a moment that cows were your customers, milk was profitability and Joe and his farm hands were your sales team.
Rephrasing the question, which customers should you target that will produce the highest level of net profit and why? Do you rely on your instincts or do you have a system telling you who to target?
So we will leave you with one final question…..Is your organization milking the right cows?
Written By Lance Tylor
Lance is a business finance professional with a passion for helping businesses grow. He is a Charted Management Accountant (CMA) within Canada and in the UK and has had several roles within the Office of Finance. His experience has always been focused on business strategy, performance management and business process improvement (leveraging the latest technologies).