Business Maturity: What Can You Learn from Domino’s?

What can Domino’s Pizza teach us about our marketing processes and sales enablement techniques? 

Consider for a moment, if you will, a Domino’s pizza. Those who know them, know that they are continually striving for taste perfection. Domino’s, like many global, franchise-based brand, work hard for a consistently great quality product.

Now, consider your marketing routines. I know what you’re probably thinking; what does pizza have to do with marketing?

We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Your company spends a lot of time organizing information and creating sales content (sales guides, battle cards, silver bullet lists). It’s many variations of the same information.

Just about every company works this way. If you are in marketing, you probably create this type of content because you followed the status quo; “this is the template we use for sales material.” It’s like a traditional art form that is handed down to every new generation of marketing person.

But it’s never quite just right. Every day someone is either putting together a new sales deck or a slideshow about a product or competitor because the template material you created was made to apply to several sales deals, not just one.

Truth be told, there’s really no way around having to custom tailor information before it can be used efficiently.

If you are doing things like this, once you’re done organizing and framing what you know, sales teams are going to have to shuffle through those battle cards or skip around a Powerpoint slideshow to update, customise and tailor it for his or her particular deal. There’s a lot of time and money wasted by everyone involved in this process that you’re only doing “because it’s the way things have always been done.”

What you might have already noticed is that all of this time spent creating and reading through marketing and sales materials is a huge, unnecessary waste of resources.

There is a better way.

Customized sales guidance

What if you had a system that could automatically create customized sales guidance for you? Instead of spending time building a slide deck every time there’s a new potential customer, you could be utilizing a system to unify all of your resources and to free yourself from creating or modifying new sales decks, battle cards, and slide decks forever.

Sound good? Let’s keep going.

Competitively mature companies don’t rely on manually reapplying information; they enter information into a database once and then automate the time and resource intensive processes. This allows for streamlined communication between content creators and the people actually using the content.

For a company to mature, they must find better solutions to all their needs. This is an opportunity to build real efficiency and effective best practices in your company.

Now back to Domino’s Pizza.

You might remember that Domino’s Pizza used to offer a deal that if you didn’t receive your pizza within 30 minutes, your pizza would be free. For a long time, this was the modus operandi and a core element of their brand image. As they continued to invest in that brand, though, they didn’t see a correlation in growing sales.

After their stock hit an all-time low in 2008, Domino’s finally came to terms with the reality that their continued focus on quick delivery had blinded them to the fact that their pizza was about as tasty as the box it came in.

They could very well have poured more advertising money into their existing advertising and brand image, but instead, they decided to try to do something new, different, and better. They even did something pretty radical: they admitted publicly that their pizza was no good and that they were going to fix it.

They abandoned the focus on hurrying pizzas out the door as fast as possible, and instead turned their attention to improving the product.

Their bold move paid off, and Domino’s is still going strong. Within only two years after their stock prices hit that all-time low of $4.00, they had bounced back up to $32.50 per share.

Focus on delivering what sales need

So perhaps it’s time for you to take some bold new steps toward corporate maturity as well.

Maybe your focus on delivering all those silver bullet lists, sales guides, and slide decks is a lot like delivering bad pizza as efficiently as possible.

Maybe there’s a better way to deliver sales guidance and to win more deals.