Winning with Customers: A Playbook for B2B

Chapter 8. The Scoreboard

There was a young business man who bought a farm that came with a trusty horse. After one long weekend their conversation went like this: Well, I've observed some very effective features of you being a horse," said the businessman/part-time farmer. "You work diligently and faithfully and with good-humor and, if I may ask ... can you think of any ways of pulling the plow a little faster?"

"No!" said the horse. "I said give me the 'feedbag' not 'feedback.'"

Sorry to say there is no feedbag that goes along with this chapter. It is, however, a chapter about feedback, measurement, and continuous improvement. The Big 6—Playbook Map tells us this has something to do with predicting profit growth. A crystal ball on future profits! That might be overselling the case just a tad but it is the path we are heading down.

If you are a student of decision making, you already know the importance of this section. In order to improve a process, you need to have a feedback loop. At first, the feedback tends to create course process adjustment. Over time, and as you become expert, the adjustments become more like fine-tuning. The beauty of what we have done so far is to create a system that is measureable and capable of receiving feedback.

"This really becomes a part of how we look as this data, how do we at Owens Corning look at what we've done for our customer regards building value for them and how do we get into action around trying to capture some of that value. This leads ...