Your Marketing Machine: 2010

Friday, December 31, 2010

Achieve the Life of your Dreams says..

Tom MacKay of MacKay NLP Solutions believes we can and that’s what we discussed during this Business901 podcast. Neuro Linguistic Programming (usually called NLP) helps you improve your business, relationships, sporting or artistic performance by teaching you proven strategies that work. People waste a lot of time doing things that don't get them the results that they want and deserve. NLP consists of techniques and principles modeled from outstanding experts throughout the world - so you can learn what really works right from the start!

Tom MacKay is the founder of MacKay Solutions. Tom first trained as a psychologist and in NLP in 1990 and since then has become one of the most respected NLP trainers in the UK. Tom is a Master Trainer of NLP, the highest level that can be attained, and is the only INLPTA Master Coach Trainer in the UK. He has appeared on television on the BBC show “Pay Off Your Mortgage” and recently filmed a pilot show on family dynamics.

For more than 15 years, Tom has worked with individuals and organizations to help them achieve incredible results through Neuro Linguistic Programming . He has worked in therapeutic settings ranging from pain management to helping individuals create deep, lasting change. He has also trained and consulted with a large range of companies including Whitbread, Reuters, VISA, Royal Mail, and many other organizations. Tom is committed to helping his students create the results that they want.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Can MRP be a Demand - Driven Tool?

Chad Smith of the Constraints Management Group was the guest on the Business901 Podcast, Bringing New Thoughts to the Supply Chain thru MRP. This is a transcription of the podcast. Chad is currently writing the third revised edition of Orlickys Materials Requirements Planning with Carol Ptak (a former B901 Podcast Guest).

An excerpt from the eBook:

MRP is not just a push based tool. It can be a demand driven or pull based tool as well.

The problem is, that in order, when you move from a push based to a pull based mode of operation, whether it's planning, scheduling, or execution, you are going to need some supplementary tools or functionalities in your MRP system that don't really exist very well today. Certainly they are not well understood. They are not in a lot of MRP products. But MRP can be a demand driven system. It just needs to change a little bit.

Bringing New Thoughts to the Supply Chain -

Since the late 1990’s Chad and his partners at CMG have been at the forefront of developing and articulating the concepts behind Actively Synchronized Replenishment as well as building ASR compliant technology (Replenishment+®). Additionally, Chad is an internationally recognized expert in the application and development of the Theory of Constraints (TOC).

Linking to Customer Value

Customer Value seems old hat and so un-marketing like in this day of Social Media, Analytics, Inbound-Outbound, Trending and Buzz. However, the successful companies that are not necessarily writing about marketing, they are doing it and relying on a simple term, Customer Value.

As Christine says,

These are not flash-in-the-pan companies. They are the likes of Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Fidelity, Cisco, Walmart, Amazon, Apple, IKEA, Philips, Texas Instruments, Becton Dickinson, and Tesco. These companies approach strategy from the outside in. They begin with the market, not their own capabilities. While that may sound easy, it is incredibly difficult. In the vast majority of companies inside-out thinking dominates practice and inevitably leads to eroding customer value and company profits. * These companies invest in generating and deploying unique market insights to inform and guide their outside-in view. They don't guess or fly blind. * These companies focus every part of the organization on achieving, sustaining and profiting from customer value.

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor and founder of The CMO Survey at The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. Professor Moorman is the author of over 60 journal articles, reports, and conference proceedings. She has co-edited the book Assessing Marketing Strategy Performance (with Don Lehmann) and has made over 100 presentations of her work at companies and universities all over the world. Her primary areas of activity are marketing strategy and customer-focused innovation

About the Book: How do these firms bring the outside in and profit from it? In Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value , the authors unveil four guiding principles—the customer value imperatives—that distinguish market leaders from other companies just muddling through. They argue through hundreds of examples that without constant attention to these four imperatives from the very top of the organization, any firm will quickly succumb to the centripetal forces pulling it toward an inside-out approach, and its position in the market will soon erode.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Lessons from Escaping the Improvement Trap

Fact: Within any industry – be it hospitals, public accounting firms, manufacturing, governmental organizations or law firms -- 20% of the organizations will be dramatically improving much more effectively than 80% of their competitors.

What does the top 20% do differently than the rest in their respective industries? In The Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes , the authors reveal the five most important ingredients that the top 20% exploit, but the remaining 80% do in a mediocre fashion:

Create value for customers.
Create an environment in which employees excel to their fullest potential.
Measure performance in a more meaningful fashion – Use the “right” metrics not all the metrics!
Apply process thinking to all areas of work.
Use an “executive mindset” to improve the way the organization goes about the business of improvement.

This podcast I had with co-author Michael Bremer was exhilarating for me as a host. By the end of the podcast, you will look at your continuous improvement efforts from a totally different perspective. Mike does a great job summarizing the five steps and you will be surprised and maybe how simple it is. He simply nails it!

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Can Control Points add Value in Lean?

Can you really add value or are you just creating another tool to fill out some more paperwork? On the Business901 podcast. Jamie Flinchbaugh the co-author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road answered this and a few more questions such as:

What is a control point?
What is control point standardization?
How does standard work apply in an environment as dynamic as managing?
How does the automation and systems environment change the idea of control points and managing your environment?
How should this change? What should drive changes?

When we decided to discuss this subject, I have to admit there was a few reservations on my part. I considered a control point very much like a tollgate in Six Sigma. There are similarities but I received another learning experience from one of the leading lean thought leaders.

Jamie Flinchbaugh is co-founder and partner of the Lean Learning Center, and bring successful and varied experiences of lean transformation as both a practitioner and facilitator. Under the leadership of Jamie and the Center’s senior managers, the Lean Learning Center has become one of the most recognized and premier lean providers in the world. The Lean Learning Center’s clients include Harley-Davidson, Land O Lakes, Intel, Simmons Foods, ZF and Guidant including their Industry Week’s Best Plant winner among many other world-class companies. The JamieFlinchbaugh.com blog is a frequent stop of mine and many other lean practitioners.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Six Sigma Marketing Institute releases Audio Program

This is the audio section of the program I use to provide the basis for Customer Value in my Lean Marketing programs. The series serves as a template for organizations needing to change from a customer satisfaction focus to a customer value focus. It has been deployed in a number of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies and has produced positive market share growth.

Author Dr. R. Eric Reidenbach says, "For organizations that have deployed Six Sigma or other quality initiatives, the 5 Cs approach provides a user friendly bridge for moving the quality focus from the manufacturing floor to the marketplace. Those seeking to become best in market must shift their focus from a product orientation to a market orientation, from an internal efficiency focus to an external focus. Best in market companies will be those that can make this transformation and make it soon."

The Five Cs gives you excellent background knowledge on how to build an effective and efficient marketing data set based on customer value. Customer Value is the only true measure for Driving Market Share. Learn the process of transitioning to using Value as a basis for Driving Marketing Share. 5 CD program or instant download that includes the titles:

1. Customer Identification
2. Customer Value
3. Customer Acquisition
4. Customer Retention
5. Customer Monitoring

Digital MP3 Download…$49.99

Audio CD Package……$79.99

Six Sigma Marketing is a fact-based, disciplined approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. The Six Sigma Marketing Institute is dedicated to the advancement and deployment of Six Sigma Marketing. At the heart of SSM is a modified DMAIC process that provides the architecture for growing top line revenues and market share.

More about the rest of program can be found at DrivingMarketShare.com.t.

Disclosure: I participated in the creation of this program and have a vested interest in the success of i

Lean Marketing House & Marketing with A3, LTD Time offer

The Lean Marketing House is the big picture book, an overview of applying Lean to marketing where Marketing with A3 is more tactical. If you have interest in starting to look at your sales and marketing in a different way consider my offer: purchase the Lean Marketing House and you will receive Marketing with A3 free till the remainder of the 2010 year. This offer only applies if items are purchased from the Business901 website.

Lean Marketing House Overview:

When you first hear the terms Lean and Value Stream most of our minds think about
manufacturing processes and waste. Putting the words marketing behind both of them is neither creative nor effective. But the future of marketing may be closely related more to these terms than you may first think. Whether Marketing meets Lean under this name or another it will be very close to the Lean methodologies develop in software primarily under the Agile connotation.

This book is about bridging that gap. It may not bring all the pieces in place, but it is a starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on Lean principles and more importantly Customer Value. It scares many. It is not about being in a cozy facility or going to Gemba on the factory floor. It is about starting with collaboration with your customer and not ending there. It is about creating Sales Teams that are made up of different departments, not other sales people. It is about using PDCA and A3s. It is about simply being Lean!

Marketing with A3 Overview:

Marketing with A3 starts you down a path of logical thinking and demonstrating results within the internal confines of your marketing. It forces you to Gemba to see the plans in action and as a result start identifying the external problems that you’re trying to solve for customers. It stops short in defining the solution for you. You have to take it to the next level. It is only made to create thought for you to solve your own problems, for you to create your own A3s.

It is a problem solving process that enables you to apply a systematic method to your marketing and sales. You will define your problems clearly; bring meaning to your data, to your actions and to your implementation. Though it seems simple, it forces you to ask tough questions. It forces you to condense your thoughts on to a single page – which is a focusing method in itself.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Marketing with A3 Introduction

Most of our marketing centers on providing a solution for our customers. Everyone has a solution and just about all of them can be made to work for you, sound familiar! But is there anybody out there that can adequately define the problem? The definition of the problem is more important than the solution. We have always heard and most of us believe, “A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.” - Charles Kettering. It really is that simple. We must move our marketing and sales efforts from a solution-centric culture to a problem-centric culture. Sales and Marketing ultimate goal must be to become part of the problem defining culture of a customer or prospect.

Many organizations define their sales and marketing goals as a way of getting people to take actions to purchase their product or service. They are focused on selling the benefits of their product. Elaborate plans are designed to guide their action for today, tomorrow and in the future. This serves as a platform for their marketing goals. They might even send the goals through the SMART procedure to make sure that they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-specific. The problem with this is that it is mostly internally focused.

At the present time supply exceeds demand in most markets. Many companies are seeking new markets and extending their reach with a hope of more business. They focus on innovation in their own markets and/or adapting existing products to the new markets. These efforts seldom prove effective for the majority of us. Most of the time someone is already entrenched serving that need, new entrants just seems to drive prices down and reduce market share for all the players.

Marketing needs to be part of the problem solving process of their customers. What if your marketing processes seek to identify problems versus solution? What if you were seen as a diagnostic expert than a solution provider? What if you guaranteed to find the problem and collaborate on the solution? Would you build a more trusting and stronger relationship?

Marketing with A3 is my attempt to improve the problem solving process of Sales and Marketing. Using A3 in the marketing process will provide you a standard method of developing and creating your marketing programs. It will recap the thoughts, efforts, and actions that take place for a particular campaign, such as advertising or public relations or even a launch. An A3 can highlight the value that marketing supplies. You will learn how to format your A3 report in a way that most effectively communicates your story to your team and others.

The A3 tool provides a structure and a template for achieving this. A3 is a one- page document used to capture the dialogue in a problem solving process. Sending your marketing through such a process will enable you to create the clarity to areas such as CRM, Social Media, Joint Ventures, Client Retention, Client Acquisition, and more. It is a tool that can be used both strategically and tactically. It has developed in its own right to become a thinking process.

Stretch your thinking of using an A3. It stimulates thought creativity and when stretched allows many other interactions from others. Marketing with A3 is a new way of thinking; a whole new philosophy. To become truly proficient, you must go through a paradigm shift. You must build a Lean Problem Solving Culture into the way you create your marketing and think of your marketing. You have to move from solution centric to problem centric. You must develop strategies to focus on the right customer conversation – their problem?

P.S. The ebook, Marketing with A3 releases next week! If you purchase the Lean Marketing House eBook above, I will send you a copy of this book on the release date.

Couple of excellent Books on the subject of A3:
Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota’s PDCA Management System
Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process

Friday, December 17, 2010

Better Communications take the focus off yourself

Drew Kugler is now in his fourth decade of helping people and organizations around the world make sustainable progress in developing their willingness to work together more productively. As Founder of the Kugler Company, he works with executives and professionals on the never-ending issues of communication, leadership, and collaboration. Clients from all walks of industry and non profit fields review and refer to his work as discomforting and, at the same time, refreshing, practical, and inspiring.

The conversations you make is what is important. It’s not about the mechanics, it is about the belief and connections. Drew says the path to better communication is based on two principles, which are:

Find your place (belief) and passion to speak.
Curiosity of what others think and take the focus off yourself.

He makes a great case for the The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Rightand how it directly relates to better communication.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Value Stream Mapping your Sales Team

In my Microsoft Newsletter, I received the following enticement:

Find, Keep, and Grow Customer Relationships with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Start Your 30-Day Free Trial Today!

Today, businesses are asked to do more with less. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online delivers exceptional value because it combines your everyday Microsoft Office applications with powerful CRM software accessed over the Internet to rapidly improve marketing, boost sales, and enrich customer service interactions. Try it now for 30 days!

I am trying it this week but what I wanted to share is a piece of the collateral information, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Power Couple. In this PDF, MSN highlighted the Customer Decision Making Process aka Mirror Marketing( Your Marketing Funnel from your Customer’s Perspective.) but extended the concept to show the process from several other points of view.

I have always been an advocate of seeking Sales and Marketing’s response to each of the customer’s decision steps but MSN (they are selling software), highlighted the technology enabler and a team response to the Customer Value Stream process. This simple exercise utilizing a high level Value Stream Map can really get your individual departments on the same page!

In my recent work, I have been advocating breaking down the Sales Silo and making Sales a team effort. In most organizations, I have been met with strong resistance to this concept. Most sales people look at as another silly initiative and most internal people see sales as a vehicle to customer data. As a result, sales resist and rightfully so preventing themselves from becoming an extended clerk. However, the approach really should be about how to increase face time with the customer. The #1 enabler of increased sales.

Create your own sales team by reviewing who responds to your Customer’s Value Stream Map. Start having a few meetings, similar to a daily standup meeting which may not be feasible. I would recommend at first error in having the meeting to often, just cut them short. In a spirit of true collaboration, don’t automatically exclude your customer from the team. This concept really could increase face time!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Applying the OODA Loop to Lean

Dr. Terry Barnhart, the Senior Director Strategy and Continuous Improvement at Pfizer Global R&D discusses the OODA Loop in this Business901 Podcast. We expand this theory into some practical applications and using the OODA Loop in and outside of rapid deployment. Dr. Barnhart has an upcoming book due out at the end of the year on using Lean in Product Development. It will be published by Productivity Press.

For more information on the OODA Loop there is a a Boyd symposium coming up on October 15 and 16 at the Marine base at Quantico, VA. You may contact Stanton Coerr Stanton.coerr@usmc.mil. Dr. Barnhart will also presenting a short course for Management Round Table on Lean in R&D, which will include a lot of Boyd theory, including the OODA loop and beyond, in Cambridge MA on November 3&4. Go to www.roundtable.com. The promo code FOT (friends of Terry) will give you $300 off.

This is a podcast you do not want to miss. At the end of the podcast the music starts and stops again to include an extra 10 minutes on the discussion of implementing a Lean Culture utilizing OODA Loop principles. A takeaway from our conversation:

If you can find the cultural levers that are aligned with Lean that absorb ideas into your company, you won't need to go force anything. It'll pull it in whether you want it too or not. You won't even be able to stop it.

That's the kind of thing that we've been thinking about. How can we do this with people? How can we do this with divisions? How can we do this with entire companies? It's fascinating because I think there are ways consistent with what Boyd taught. It's not the same but, I think there are ways that companies can boot‑strap the stuff. I don't mean to say it's a grass‑roots or bottom‑up, it's a whatever it is that gets into their cultural system. It'll absorb it very quickly and spread. How can we do that with Lean?

Monday, December 13, 2010

Storyboards give Insights to Space and Time

Would like to have additional insights to your customers’ ACTIONS? Maybe, even additional insight to your organizations RE-ACTIONS? The benefits to visualizing your processes have been proven over and over again with the practices of Mindmaps, Value Stream Mapping, Process Charts, Charts, and other visual tools to include Powerpoint! Through the use of Storymapping, you can extend these tools and create a more graphical description. I believe this adds more insight to the process through a better understanding of space and time.

In the book, Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity, author David Sibbet points out to some of the successful companies that utilize the Storymapping Process. We are not talking Disney or Pixlar but maybe less creative types.

Examples of organizations that have achieved great results this way include:

National Semiconductor shared its turnaround vision worldwide in the early 1990s, and in tour years achieved 95% vision recognition throughout the company.
Hewlett Packard Labs shared potential new business ideas to top management using plotter-generated murals instead or slides.
Ralcy's top management shared its history, vision of the future, and strategy of their grocery store chain store with managers.
Save the Redwoods League shared its vision, strategies, and goals with all its stakeholders in three different 5 year planning processes.
VISA corporation orients all new employees with a large graphic history (updated three times so far).
Adobe Systems created a graphic history of Adobe and Macromedia when the two organizations merged.
The RE-AMP collaborative illustrated bow its system works to the 120 environmentally oriented non-govcrnmciit organizations and I5 foundations at its annual meeting in the upper midwest. They also used large charts to map progress toward their goal of cleaning up
global warming pollutants in the energy industry.
Nike communicated its visions for its Treasury function, and then later for its IT function using large Storymaps.
National Academy Foundation designed large Storymaps to illustrate its process of establishing high school learning academies.
The San Francisco Film Society used a large Storymap as a centerfold for its five-year business plan focused on growing this very successful, full-service film arts organization.

They went on to further explain the results of the National Semiconductor Vision Map in more detail stating:

Every top executive could tell this story, using this mural as a backdrop. It shows the overall vision to the far right, the history to the left, leading to the unassembled spaceship represented current realities. Critical business issues lie in front of the ship. Key values are the windows. Marketing messages are in the talk balloons. The top of the spaceship illustrates the new organization. The way forward has question marks intentionally; because Amelio wanted to enroll the rest of the organization in redesign. This vision got 95% recognition in employee surveys by 1994.

So how can you use Storymaps in your business? Use it as a communication tool. People learn through pictures and it directly engages people if designed correctly. A Storymap won’t do it all. You still have to show up and tell the story. However, having all the information visible allows a person to leave the story unfold as they tell it. I like the big visuals where everyone can soak in the entire picture as you are talking.

After the presentation, leave the Storyboard up or have small handouts. I thought the added question marks in Amelio’s Vision were an excellent way to stimulate additional thoughts. Welcoming and having additional post-it-notes lying around so that ideas can easily be added is the best form of suggestion box that you can have. They can be anonymous or not and I would encourage a different color so that you can tell that they were added at a glance.

The authors went on to suggest a few ideas that Storyboards could be used for…

Orienting to histories and culture of an organization.
Communicating the need for change.
Understanding driving forces in an industry.
Understanding customer needs.
Sharing new visions and strategies.
Sharing implementation plans.
Communicating new process designs

The above picture may represent a persons experience in purchasing a car. What they consider: price, payments, usability, function, gas mileage, looks. Storyboarding the process out tells me a little more on how they look at it, what is important to them.and what the choice says about them. It is not much easier to develop your sales and marketing process from this description?

Lean has always relied on Value Stream Mapping as one of its core tools. Six Sigma Storyboards have also been popularized to document the project results. In my opinion, both of these seem to follow to rigorous of a process and don’t include some of the great visualizations tools that exist. The Agile, Kanban and Scrum contingencies have introduced a much more visual aspect to their boards. Even assigning cartoon characters to people to designate who is responsible for the task. The point is allowing a little fun in the process not only creates a better environment but also enhances and extends the learning experience.

Picture Credit: http://www.sketchartist.tv

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Value Stream Mapping for Marketing

I advocate the use of the value stream map to outline your customer's buying process and to vividly demonstrate how your marketing efforts mimic that process. Consider the map as a tool designed to highlight activities.

The current state serves as a guideline to communicate the opportunities so they may be prioritized and then acted upon. It helps build a shared and consistent understanding of the customer's experience of your process and of your business as a whole. Value stream mapping can enable your entire organization to understand what the customer experiences in order to purchase from you.

It is difficult many times to stop organizations from playing what if games when we are just trying to determine the current state. I usually just take a sticky note and stick it out to the side for future reference. When we do start playing the “What if” games: What if we eliminate this step? What if we had different information at this point in the process? You are in essence identifying ways in which the quality of your marketing process can be improved.

During this process you should also be able to identify critical control points or interfaces with the customer. These critical points deserve special consideration as they typically will be the deciding factor for your customers. You may ask what they will look like. I typically find two obvious areas are the cause of most concern. First is the area of flow. If your marketing process does not flow well in its delivery to the customer, it seldom flows well for the customer. Your marketing must be in sync with the customer's buying process. A Crystal Ball would be great but if your typical customer takes three months to make a decision about your product trying to accelerate or stretch that process out will seldom prove successful.

Secondly, a clear-cut understanding of how that product meets your customers’ needs is imperative. A strong value proposition is the first step in building a successful value stream. Many organizations struggle with this concept and do not utilize the tools available to understand their position in the marketplace. Understanding how your customer perceives your position in the marketplace relative to your competition may be the single most important issue you face.

Many organizations try to build their first marketing value streams from an organizational perspective. I encourage breaking down your value stream into product/market. Seldom will your organizations products or the markets they compete in the so clear-cut that you can have one simple value stream. Do you have a clear-cut value stream for a product/market that you can map from inquiry to purchase?

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Your Value Network Participants Who are they?

There was an interesting post on the Noop.NL blog the other day, The Customer Value Problem: Ditch the Value Stream! He stated:

The value stream is a potentially harmful metaphor. I think we should replace value streams with value networks, and customer value with stakeholder value.

Again and again I hear people referring to “value streams.” The value stream is a metaphor suggesting that “value flows” through an organization (possibly with hand-offs across several teams) in the direction of the customer. The value stream metaphor is a somewhat less rigid version of the value chain metaphor, as popularized by management guru Michael Porter.

He makes some excellent points. I use the Value Stream Mapping process for clarification and to build structure. I usually end most learning sessions with an influence map emphasizing the structure is the beginning not the end. The blog did add some good points and one of them is just who you are working with during the Value Stream or the Value Creation process. It led me to think about who is involved in the Value Network.

Your success has a lot to do with not only marketing to the right companies but marketing to the right internal champions. This can raise an interesting issue in terms of who is the right internal champion for your efforts or initiative. Consider the fact that in most cases, your product/service is not the best overall choice for the entire organization. Few times are there a clear-cut, hands-down winner. There can be a very tricky political landscape to navigate that will result in someone winning and someone losing. One of the reasons many marketing driven companies still fail is that they forget about the people skills needed to manage this transformation or change in a positive way. The people skills are what makers your marketing work and the reason your top sales performers get to go to club while the marketers share pizza in the back room! The fact is that the sales people have already navigated the political landscape of your organization much better than you have (Said tongue in cheek to get a point across).

At the present time, we are going in a structural change within the sales and marketing arena. It has moved into a world of shared experiences with the essence of teamwork and collaboration at the forefront. Building these teams from the silos that exist in your organization (no matter what size) is an extraordinary task. It will take special skills to meld these components together. One such organization created their Value Network that consisted of Sales, Marketing, IT, Engineering and Accounting. An overview of that team:

Sales was an above average performer that was extremely well-connected with his customer based but lacked technical and social media skills.
Marketing was well connected in social media, graphic design but had little customer or analytically experience.
IT was very competent in troubleshooting and installation and application but had little interest in discussing benefits and spent more time downplaying the features.
Engineering was very technical and well-schooled and was very upbeat about the features and benefits offered on the product. Saw ways the product could fix a lot of things that the Customer was having problems with.
Accounting’s initial role in the team was for the customer financing.

Here was the customer’s buying team:

The purchasing consisted of two people, one for fact finding, narrowing down the selection but was not authorized to spend the amount of dollars for the purchase. The final purchase had to be signed off by a senior buyer.
User Group: This product was to be used by 2-shifts with multiple operators. Supervisors and users were involved in the trial process.
IT department was involved to determine level of support and compatibility.
Accounting was involved to determine evaluate finance and purchase terms.
VP of Operations ultimately had to approve purchase.

The purpose of this blog is not to go into the team dynamics but to bring awareness to the different perspectives that exist inside the organization let alone when you bring the team of decision makers from the customer’s side of the equation into play. Your customer’s team may very much look like yours or have many of the same dynamics. The power within the team to make the decision may vary widely but most anyone can be a deal killer.

So how do you go about bringing unity to this mix of players? I believe the only unifying agreement is in defining the Value Proposition you offer the customer. Without this clarification, mixed and inconsistent signals will be sent throughout both organizations. As you have heard me elaborate many times the lack of clarity not only prohibits flow within your organization but it is also will prevent your customer from making a decision. If your value proposition is well stated and understood the chances are that the internal champion within your customers four walls will be able to well, Champion your cause much better.

P.S. The other item to note is that many times people like to talk to people in other organizations at the same level that they are, example: VP of Operations may want to talk to VP of Sales.

Related Posts: 5 Cs of Driving Market Share

Value Stream Mapping your Sales Team

Is your Value Stream Mapping backwards?

Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?

The Pull in Lean Marketing

Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept

Mirror Marketing eBook

Faster, Better, Cheaper is the Norm. What are you doing different!

That’s right the old Mantra; Faster, Better, Cheaper is the norm nowadays. It really is not separating you from the crowd, it is only the average. How are you going to build Market Share? How are you going to be increase revenue? When you are only average?

People start utilizing methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma and start showing remarkable improvements. However, the market is a living thing and most companies have a tendency towards improvement which means that the bar is being continuously raised. As a result the "average" continuous improvement project gets you absolutely nowhere. Unless you can make significant improvements there is only one way to make those improvements effective.

In any given product/market there are Critical to Quality components that are important to the customer that makes them buy your product over another. You may have the WOW, availability, price, etc. The market may define those CTQ's or other CTQ's differently and that is why they buy another product. The acronym may make it sound complicated but it really is not most of the time. I mean really does anyone buy an iPad for reliability or price. No, they buy it because it is cool and seemingly will make their life easier. You still have to be competent in other areas but they are not the driver of sales.

That dirty little secret is that most companies take an inside out approach to improvement and really don't concentrate on the CTQ's of the customer for retention and the CTQ's of the market for acquisition. So if you take an outside in approach in improving quality you will improve more than the average guy and as a result improve market share and/or profits. It really is that simple.

I had three recent discussions on this very subject and they all took a slightly different approach but all had a central theme of Customer Value.

Dr. Eric Reiedenbach when we discussed Best in Market on the podcast Applying Six Sigma Marketing to become Best In Market. Eric discussed finding the Critical to Quality Issues that determined how a Customer defined Value in your Product(Service)/Markets.
Mike Bremer co-author of Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes. Mike discussed tying all improvement efforts to the CTQ’s components and more specifically to your Value Proposition.
Christine Moorman co-author of Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value. Christine discussed developing your strategies and the deployment of those strategies through an Outside in approach.

These are three very unique perspectives that really approach the issue of customer value totally different. They all take a different path, disdain average but arrive at the same place. They even agreed on the same metrics: Market Share and Profitability. I wonder if all three of them have found the Holy Grail?

Monday, December 6, 2010

Helping Customers to Excellence eBook

This is a transcription of a Business901 podcast, Xerox Operational Excellence Program that I had with Tricia Bhattacharya. She is currently a Worldwide Segment Marketing Manager for the Xerox Graphic Communications Business Group. In this role, she is responsible for developing marketing programs focused on in-plant environments. She also holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Her 19-year career at Xerox has spanned roles from product development to marketing and she holds several patents for technologies developed while working on high-speed color product innovations.

Helping Customers achieve Operational Excellence -

She authored the Guide to Operational Excellence that Xerox makes available to their print customers. It introduces a five-step plan to help in-plants remove waste like overproduction and idle time.

When I asked what I left out of the podcast Tricia stated: “Well, I think one thing I'd like to mention is, this is just part of a whole host of tools that are available for our Xerox customers that help them with their operations. So, this is the Operational Excellence Guide. We have over 100 business development tools as part of our profit accelerator program. They're all free of charge and part of the value of being a Xerox customer.”

Friday, December 3, 2010

Crafting your Storyboard

A plug for the Business901 Podcast this week: My guest will be Claudio Perrone aka the AgileSensei. He is a great story-boarder in his own right and author of The Rise of the Lean Machine Storybook. Claudio has also developed a technique that we discussed in the podcast on how he crafts his presentations. He has a 7-step process that he follows:

Research (Data Dump)
Prepare
Fill and Cluster Content
Identify Story Ideas - Reverse Benefits
Create a dramatic outline
Launch Powerpoint
Refine

Crafting Outstanding Presentations - Storytelling Techniques

View more presentations from Claudio Perrone.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Who has Influenced My Thinking on Flow

Who are your most influential people on a particular subject? I started thinking of this after interviewing Don Reinertsen Tuesday’s Podcast, on the subject of Flow.

In my mind, the founding father on this subject was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (notice in the middle of his last name the word ZEN). I can remember first reading his book and later buying the tape series. I dangerously listened to it on a late night drive home. At one in the morning after driving 400 miles it was tough. That heavy Eastern European accent building a case for FLOW even though an eye opening subject it was not made to keep your eyes open. The secret of course was purchasing ice cream bars along the way!

This is not a resounding introduction to the video below but you may be quite surprised by the video it gives a good over view and if filled with background music from David Brubeck.

The subject of Flow is important to the marketing process. Understanding how your Customer flows through the decision making process in buying, becoming a loyal customer and recommending your product is essential. In fact, you lose the most customers when the flow stops or in between stages (Queue) of your marketing process. Understanding your Customer’s Flow should be at the root of all your marketing processes.

When I think of Flow, these our the people/books that have had the most influence on my thinking. Do you have any to add?

Amazon Links:

Blog Posts:
Constant Feedback makes for Continuous Work Flow
Marketing Kanban Cadence
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Value Stream Mapping your Marketing
Flow

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Create a Great Workplace

Ed Muzio, president and CEO of Group Harmonics was my guest on the Business901 Podcast and we had a great discussion on how to make Make Work Great: Super Charge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence One Person at a Time. He is a leader in the application of analytical models to group effectiveness and individual enjoyment. This is a must listen for Kaizen Leaders and participants. Great tips and tools that can be instantly implemented. I was very impressed on his ease of explanation and mastery of the subject.

Ed is also the author of the award-winning book Four Secrets to Liking Your Work: You May Not Need to Quit to Get the Job You Want (FT Press, 2008).

Originally trained as an engineer, Ed has started organizations large and small, led global initiatives in technology development and employee recruitment, and published articles and refereed papers ranging from manufacturing strategy to the relationships between individual skills and output.

Ed's analytical approach to human productivity has been featured in national and international media, including CBS, Fox Business News and The New York Post; he is a regular guest on CBS Interactive. With clients ranging from individual life coaches to the Fortune 500, he serves as an advisor and educator to professionals at all levels, all over the world. Prior to founding Group Harmonics, Ed was President and Executive Director of a human services organization, and a leader, mentor, and technologist within Intel Corporation and the Sematech consortium.

A Cornell University graduate, Ed's accomplishments include the creation and stewardship of a worldwide manufacturing infrastructure program, a nationally-recognized engineering development organization, and a non-profit organization providing residential services to at-risk youth in his home town of Albuquerque, NM.

Monday, November 29, 2010

World of Work Will be Witnessing 10 Changes

Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years

The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner, Inc. predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.

“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”

De-routinization of Work
Work Swarms
Weak Links
Working With the Collective
Work Sketch-Ups
Spontaneous Work
Simulation and Experimentation
Pattern Sensitivity
Hyper connected
My Place

I think Austin makes some excellent points in the article and I encourage you to read it in its entirety. When, I sit back an observe this structure it is very similar to many of the agile practices that have been developed in the Lean Software Development field. Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Though these practices were a result of improvement in a knowledge based field that are starting to be applied in other areas such as Marketing, Supply Chain and even Hardware Development. One of the difficulties people have in grasping this concept is that it is more about flow and speed of the overall process versus efficiencies.

The article is a definite read and raises some interesting concepts for all of us to consider.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Lean Marketing shortens Marketing Cycle and increases Life Cycle

The Value Stream Map is a lean tool to analyze the value stream. Value Stream Mapping techniques involves mapping each step of a process looking for waste and on improving the total time from the beginning to the end of the entire stream. One of the powers of the mapping process is that it enables the team to see the entire picture. This coincides with the fundamental Lean thinking of optimizing the entire process versus the individual stages.

Waste in marketing is not as readily identified as in other areas. One example of marketing waste is time. When I present this, there is typically agreement that the longer a customer/prospect stays in one of the process stages of the Value Stream or in the Queue waiting to go from one stage to the next the great chance of losing the customer. However there is also a strong argument presented that the customer controls this time and just trying to hurry them through the cycle may be just as detrimental as the wait time.

Remembering that we want to first look at how to optimize the entire process instead of a particular stage, our first step would be evaluate the total time spent, not resources allocated or used. Moving through the value stream is many times just a matter of evaluating the internal delays that occur in the process. By removing them we enable the customer to make faster and better decisions. We also create more credibility for ourselves as the ‘go to guy” and the organization that has done this before. The question is how do we get there? You first must look internally at eliminating delays.

Lack of resources:

Analyze your team’s resources:

Are you always looking for engineering help?
Do you need IT to set up a trial?
Is a sales call needed?
Are you always waiting on a proposal?

I like to start by suggesting we have unlimited resources then ask what the structure would look like. Many times with a simple reallocation of priorities such as Software Trial being the first priority of IT there is a tremendous improvement. Other times there is simply a lack of personal. This reminds me of a warehouse being more important than a machine. You can increase flow with the machine though you may decrease efficiencies within the department. In the marketing cycle, can you afford having leads sitting going stale? Shifting of duties and resources can very often create extra bodies.

One trick is to reduce the size of a process step. This sometimes enables more activities for an underutilized resource. Seldom do I see the combination of stages as a method of decreasing cycle time.

Improve your response time by getting closer to the customer-literally!

Look at the process that may be hindering your team. Location has always been one of the main reasons that you locate sales people in territories. You customer/prospect is in a different business. His desires and needs will require more adaptability on your part. Why not locate your sales teams in strategic locations. It sets a priority with the team on what is important and improves communication between them and your customer/prospect. Customer support located geographically will reduce travel and being in the same time zone an increase in response time. Most of all what message does it send to your customer? This detached team can usually function well within a company structure as this structure is well known and has more flexibility for your team.

Build quality in to your process:

Respect your people. The sales/marketing team knows how to improve their process more than anyone else. They can tell you if the paperwork, request for proposals, and specifications are flowing. They know the degree of misunderstandings that are occurring internally and with the customers. Allowing local control will invariable decrease cycle time but may increase for an organization as a whole. It is important when local optimization occurs (within specific Value streams) that this [process is well documented and the knowledge created passed on to other teams/

Most sales teams initially spend much of their time discovering how to create more material for the last response. The lack of a well-defined value stream lets errors creep in. Poor value stream quality and customer requests that are hard to understand contribute to wasted time. Properly defining your value streams or in simpler terms understanding your customer needs better can facilitate much of the running around like a “chicken with their head cutoff syndrome” or confusion that may occur.

Focusing on delays is an important part of Lean Marketing. It is one of the first things to be considered in the Value Stream and should be a primary focus. It is extremely important to sustain this effort by getting closer and closer to the customer buying process. The more you engrain yourself in that structure will significantly improve your probabilities of success. It will decrease your marketing cycle and in the long run increase your customer’s life cycle. Not a bad alternative.