Marking this year's 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain by creating its own version of the iconic operations room at Fighter Command HQ, JARA's mission was to make contact with a target of 500 new business prospects during the show. JARA says that not only did it exceed this target, but it secured four times more post-show meetings than expected.
JARA says its success at Farnborough was achieved by creating clear performance measures and identifying and fixing problems as they arose. Using a giant printout of the show floor plan, the progress of JARA's contacting ‘squadrons' was plotted in real time via text reports back to ‘fighter command'. The squadrons then convened three times each day to review progress and agree the improvement actions for the next ‘sortie'.
The battle plan was designed as a visual way to demonstrate JARA's Structured Leadership approach to managing the detail of day-to-day tasks better.
Explained JARA's sales director Paul Leppard: “The main problem on day one was that there were too many stands that we failed to visit because we simply ran out of time. Our reviews showed this was because the teams were slow to start, were taking too long on each stand and finding it difficult to find their way around the halls. We fixed this by making sure that contacting ‘sorties' and review meetings always started on time and by pacing ourselves to achieve milestones throughout each day. We also produced better maps of the halls with target stands clearly highlighted and we condensed our contacting script.
“The other difficulty we encountered at the start was making contact with sufficiently senior people, so again, we adjusted our script accordingly. These actions improved our hit rate on day two from 35% to 55% and, by day three, we were hitting 70% of our target stands, and over half of the contacts we secured were designated ‘high quality' in terms of seniority and size of organisation.”
JARA's managing director Jamil Rashid concluded: “Our success at Farnborough has proved that it's not the size of your stand that counts, it is how you network. By concentrating on the core elements of our management approach – clear objectives understood by everyone, detailed planning to achieve them, data gathering to understand real problems and disciplined team behaviour to fix them – we've punched way above our weight in terms of results. I'd challenge any exhibitor at Farnborough to have networked like JARA did and we're absolutely delighted with what we achieved.”
www.jara-management.com
