Have you trained your customers in “the hockey stick”? Probably.
Do they beat you with it each and every quarter? Almost certainly.
In our quarter-driven world, with its emphasis on quarterly sales targets and reporting – designed primarily to feed stock analysts, we have created a monster. The desperate measures that many companies undertake in the last few days of each quarter in order to ‘make their numbers’ have trained the customer to ‘expect a big discount’ – with the predictable result that customers now wait until that time to place their orders so as to take that discount.
So, not only have we trained customers to expect a discount – i.e. to reduce our margin; we’ve also trained them: to expose us to massive personal stress; to place unduly heavy cyclical stress on our supply chain, and for that matter on their own organisation as they try to work their procurement processes into this unnatural cycle.
Curiously, some sales managers are actually OK with this state of affairs – they see the hockey stick as an ‘incentive’ to their sales staff – and they see the ‘certainty’ of (heavily) discounted business in the last 24 hours as a compensation for the beating they took!
Whilst a utopian view might be that we should just get rid of quarterly reporting (a top idea in my opinion, but one which is unlikely to gain any traction with the majority of people – what would the analysts do?) it is clear that we should strive to decouple customer purchasing from this cycle by other means.