Will someone pay for Intangible Value?

In a recent blog post, Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed the book Uncommon Service. Next weeks Business901 podcast guest co-author Anne Morriss discusses the four universal truths outlined in the book for delivering uncommon service:

1. You can’t be good at everything.
2. Someone has to pay for it.
3. It’s not your employees’ fault.
4. You must manage your customers.

This is an excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  The next service truth is that "Someone has to pay for it." We talk in the Service Dominant Logic^TM Thinking (Vargo and Lusch,2006) world where the value is in the use of the product. That is what attracted me to your book, the service side of everything. One of the things that is happening, we are making a transition from a product to a service focus; we're switching from a tangible to an intangible world. The things that we are giving away free to sell our product now, are actually the things that have value because our product has been commoditized. I thought your number two service truth, "Someone has to pay for it," addressed that. Does that really address moving from that tangible to an intangible world?

Anne:  It's such a wrenching process and an important journey for some many companies. So many companies are going through it right now ‑‑ some of the most competitive companies in the world. GE used to sell light bulbs. Now, they're providing energy solution, if you look at the profit‑drivers in that company. The same is true for IBM. Those companies are on a big learning curve, right now, in terms of figuring out, what does it mean? We would argue it changes everything! It changes every part of your model. You have to think about the four pieces of a service model. We're talking about in our world view, it's very different depending on services whether you're selling products or selling services.

The importance of culture, it matters more in services. The funding is harder in services. To your question, Steve Jobs can go into his secret phone lab and come up with the perfect phone. Most of the value of that phone is embedded in the product itself. But, when you're selling services you have to involve customers. You have to involve employees in a very intimate way in the value creation process. All the rules are new and different.

Now the funding mechanism is a lot harder. It's easier for us as consumers to pay more for something tangible that we can touch and feel. That's why Starbucks charges you a lot for that drink that's sitting on the counter even though a big part of the experience is the beautiful space, and the comfy chairs, and this third space that Howard Schultz envisioned that was just as nice if not nicer than your living room, and filled with beautiful people, and inspiring in terms of your productivity.

It would be absurd to put meters next to those chairs. It's a lot easier to charge five dollars for a cup of coffee. That's one of the challenges that service companies have to wrestle with when you're talking about this kind of intangible value that you can't drop on your foot. How do you get people to pay for it?

Our basic message is you need pricing that's simple, transparent, and fair. The other piece of it is that the answer might not be to charge your customers more. You may have to figure out other ways to fund it.

The book’s website is an excellent resource and I encourage you to take the survey and utilize the Service Design Tool located there. This is a very challenging perspective for most of us. However, I think you will find the information to be well researched and presented in a compelling fashion.

Related Information:
Does Lean create Innovative Companies?
The End of Best in Market
Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!

An Appreciative look at the Seven Signs of Value (Waste)

In addition to my Tuesday Podcast this week with Paul Myerson, author of Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, I will host a Thursday podcast with David Shaked of Almond-Insight.  David is a leading proponent of Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. This is an excerpt of the podcast where we discussed this article, The Seven Signs of Value.

Joe:  David, could you expand on the Seven Signs of Value and what you were trying to accomplish with it?

David:  This is one of the things that I learned from AI. AI really emphasizes that what you ask, you get more of. If you start asking questions about wastes and trying to look for wastes in your system, you will find more waste and you will possibly even create new waste. I've used the seven wastes, or eight wastes, or there are so many versions of the tool, seven wastes so many different situations in the past. Once I embarked on the journey of AI I actually realized, wait a minute, am I actually setting myself up for failure? Am I creating more waste by asking about the waste and trying to look for it?

That led me to this train of thought which led to why don't we actually look for where is the value? In all of the Kaizen events and everything that I have done in Lean, we very rarely looked at the value. Even when we identify where value is created we actually never even inquired how come we do it or what enables all that.

I started thinking about where is value created and how would I know that I'm creating value and that's what led me to these seven signs of value. Which in a way it's the flipside of the seven wastes but because you started asking about them, you're generating more value. In a way, the opposite of defects which is one of the wastes, would be perfect outcomes.

Where in my process am I actually creating perfect outcomes? If you're talking about excessive movement, where in my process are things placed in a way that don't require that movement, that they are so close to each other that you don't need to move things around.

All of these seven wastes can be translated. I actually wrote an article about it, which is available to anyone who wants it, which specifies these seven signs of value. How to look for value and how to find it? The conversations you're having as you discovered more and more value, it's a great conversation, it's motivating, its engaging, and it gives people more idea on where else can they create value. Which is really what we're after when we're talking about Lean?

Joe:  That's so well said. We don't go after what value we're creating so often. We're always looking for the non‑value instead of promoting the value and that is the strength‑based approach isn't it?…..

David is holding a workshop in Toronto the week of June 18th.

Related Information: 
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT
The Uniqueness of Hoshin Kanri
Mastering Positive Change eBook

Applying Cellular Concepts to Marketing Segments

Cellular manufacturing is one of the most powerful Lean tools. It will allow for smaller lot production, quality improvements, and shorter lead times and simplifies the implementation of pull. Typical manufacturing systems had the same machines all grouped together and as a result batch type manufacturing was developed. As manufacturers developed cellular systems, they found quality improved and smaller lot quantities could be efficiently handled. Many of the work cells were rearranged into U-shaped or L-shaped patterns. This allowed one worker to operate several machines, which improved productivity. The benefits have been very well documented and applied to many industries.

Has quality suffered in sales and marketing? Many times, the customer seems to be more of an expert than the salesperson calling on them. Other times experts have to be brought in and duplication of manpower takes place. Many companies have a sales closer; sometimes a sales manager that comes in and has the power to close a prospect when ready.

In most sales and marketing applications, you have marketing assigned by their duties they do and salespeople assigned to certain accounts. Instead of this typical arrangement, what would prevent an organization from assigning personnel and cross-training them within one of the marketing stages? This way your team would become experts within the stage and be able to respond to the needs of a prospect better and more efficiently. Since they are handling the processes of the stage, that particular area would have a better chance of improving the methods utilized within it.

Take each individual stage and think about creating a work cell by defining the operations that take place within that stage. The number of resources within that stage will have to correlate to the number of prospects within the stage. It must be recognized that numbers don't always work out perfectly or that certain talents may still have to be utilized in several different stages. But the quality of the interaction may increase with this type of system.

We have moved into a more collaborative cycle of business and many of us are considering that traditional marketing segmentation is not working. What would be the premise for segmentation by how a customer/prospect uses a product? I started this discussion in a blog post; Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?. If you have customers/prospects segmented by use, you may want to consider developing that stage as a community. Envision your own Ning Community site or Facebook page and build relationships versus a defined process to move prospects from one stage to the next. Many organizations do this in the after sale process utilizing clubs for example. But what if you had a community of early adaptors at the beginning of your funnel? Or a community of heavy users in the middle of the funnel? Would more community-like atmosphere exist? Would more innovation take place?  

Related Information:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Profound knowledge for Lean Marketing
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota

The Future of Lean with Dan Jones

I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the noted experts in the Lean Community, Dan Jones.  Dan is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation.

Daniel Jones is the co-author, with James P Womack, of the influential, best-selling management books:
The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Seeing the Whole Value Stream.

Dan will not disappoint you in this podcast. Though he is firmly rooted in the principles of Lean, you may be surprised by his forward-thinking and interpretation.  An excerpt can be read in this blog post, The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

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Related Information:
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Defining the Roles of Lean IT

When Standard Work and Customer Focus comes Together

In next week’s podcast with Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC, we discuss more than just Lean IT. We ended up talking (see the excerpt below) through much of the podcast on the context Lean seems to have; the ability to adapt while staying firmly rooted in its principles.

Joe:  Does it help to be practicing Lean in other areas to start practicing lean IT?

Steve Bell:  That's an interesting question. I have a new book coming out here in just a few months. Dan Jones who was co‑author with Jim Womack of Lean Thinking and a couple of other books really has helped define the practice of Lean. He's the forward author for this new book of mine. Dan and I spent quite a bit of time talking about Lean in the context not just of IT but in the context of other industries. What Dan had to say about this was fascinating. He said he's seen, over the last 20 years or so, Lean has moved well beyond manufacturing. It's moved into healthcare and financial services and transportation and retail and distribution. And every time Lean moves into a new area, a new domain, a new industry sector, it manifests slightly differently. The Lean you would see in a hospital looks different in many ways than the Lean you would see in a manufacturing floor or a retail environment.

But when you get right down to it the principles of Lean are the same. It's about collaborative learning. It's about speed. It's about quality. It's about waste reduction. Those basic principles are the same.

What he has concluded and what I have concluded is you need to create a framework for the people who are actually doing the work to come together, figure out what the work is to be done. Where's the value? Where's the waste? And iteratively, through experiments, find ways to do it better and better. Each time you learn. You go through a cycle of learning. You improve the process and at the same time you understand more about the subtleties about the process and that's where the paradox of Lean emerges. As you're standardizing something you're also gaining insights into it which leads to creativity and innovation.

Many people react to standard work thinking that you're just turning people into robots. What you're actually doing is you're helping people, removing the drudgery and the repetitiveness from the work, making the work flow more smoothly and quickly, which frees up peoples valuable time and energy to figure out ways to do the work better and to do new kinds of work.

I think that's the real magic of Lean whether it's in IT or any other industry. When you see a team really get it and start to think and act like a team with a focus on the customer and they own the product, they own the process, they own their relationship with the customer, then the role of management isn't so much a directive role or a controlling role but the role of management is to help remove the obstacles in the teams way. That's when you have high performance, self directing teams that really start to energize the company. When that happens that's where the momentum comes from.

I think Steve nails it in his answer. His reference to when Standard Work and Customer Focus comes together for a team and allows management to work on enabling work for the team versus managing the team is incredibly insightful. This upcoming podcast is one that you do not want to miss.

About Steve: For more than twenty five years, Steve Bell has delivered a balance of Lean, business process improvement, and management consulting services. Steve published Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement helping to introduce the emerging discipline of Lean IT. Steve and his partner Mike Orzen later published Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.

Related Information:
Traditional vs. Emerging Thoughts on Pricing
Does Lean Marketing deliver what the customer wants?
Do you understand where demand comes from?
Using Agile in Management

Smarter than a Monkey with your Money

A surprising outcome when moneys are giving the same choices as humans. Find out how risk adverse you are…

About: Dr. Laurie Santos, who has been called "the Monkey Whisperer," studies the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. She'll discuss her recent work on "monkey economics" and will show that some of the silly financial choices seen in humans can be observed in monkeys too. Come hear the intriguing thoughts of the woman recently voted one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" Young Minds.

Related Information:
Traditional vs. Emerging Thoughts on Pricing
Find the Right Customer at the Right time
The Death of List Price
How Lucky are you with Pricing?

Is forecasting the pull for a Lean Supply Chain?

Paul Myerson, author of Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management is my guest enxt week on the Business901 podcast. Paul claimed to have written a practical guide hand from this excerpt I think you can tell. He takes the most complex subjects and makes them simple. I re-read many parts of the book not because I did not understand but because I wanted to understand more.

Joe:  When we think about lean, we always think about pull. Is forecasting the pull for a supply chain?

Paul:  Customer demand is the pull. That's another thing you talk about. What's the supply chain? It's really, to me, more like a supply web. Also, some people break it out ‑ there's really a demand chain, which is really part of the supply chain, but at the front end between you and the customer. It is pull, but a lot of these days, and I got involved in this in the early '90's, with what they call "quick response." Now, they refer to it as CPFR, collaborative planning forecasting replenishment ‑‑ basically, working with your customers to develop accurate forecasts by getting to actual point‑of‑sales, and using that information to have a much improved forecast. My thinking is, if you can get your top 20 customers going through some kind of quick response CPFR programming, you're at least collaborating on the forecast, if not managing your inventory for them and placing orders for them.

That top 20 customers could be 80 percent of your forecast. You could then minimize what they call the "bullwhip effect," where things get magnified along the supply chain disruption. You can help to get closer to actual demand and build that into your forecast and have a much more accurate forecast. That's one major step to becoming leaner because we know inventory is used to cover a lot of things, one of them being variability and demand and lead time.

Joe: You're saying the secret to good supply chain is getting deeper with your customers?

Paul:  Right. One of the secrets and with technology today, it's a lot easier. These days, you hear a lot of the terms, "visibility," "collaboration." It's critical to have visibility downstream in your supply chain towards the customer. Maybe it's not a secret anymore because a lot of people are doing it, but I think some people look at it as more of a, "Well, our customer wants us to collaborate or work with them on forecasts or manage or place their orders for them." You have to look at it as a competitive advantage, a strategic choice to go that route to improve not just your process with your customer and make them happy, but to improve your process and also your suppliers' processes.

About: Paul Myerson has been a successful change catalyst for clients and organizations of all sizes. He has more than 25 years of experience in supply chain strategies, systems, and operations that have resulted in bottom-line improvements for companies such as General Electric, Unilever, and Church and Dwight. He is currently Managing Partner at Logistics Planning Associates, LLC, a supply chain planning software and consulting business (www.psjplanner.com).

Related Information:
Why won’t Lean commit to the Demand Chain the way it committed to the Supply chain?
A Collaborative approach to Value Stream Mapping
Customer Experience more powerful than the Supply Chain?
Summary of the 6-part blog Series using DDMRP

Does Lean create Innovative Companies?

Many people only view Lean as a methodology to reduce waste and improve flow.  It has been a driver of internal processes. Many of us have even hijacked the term customer and created “internal customers” and lose sight of the true customer and the marketplace. These companies do not recognize Lean as a business process that strengthens and grows a company through collaborative learning. It is this model in conjunction with the concept of “Pull” that are the fundamental concepts of Lean that provides so much value to Innovation . 

The ever increasing platforms of co-producing, open-innovation, co-creation is moving innovation from an exclusive internal platform to a more external platform. As our Voice of Customer tools get more sophisticated we are not reacting and thinking of the next step needed to delight our customers, we are allowing them to show us the way. True innovation is not happening inside the 4 walls of an organization but out in the customers’ playground. Organizations may lead in "design" but in use it is the customer and in use is where the value is derived (Service Dominant Logic Thinking Vargo and Lusch,2006).

Many would argue the Lean is about incremental improvement. It does not allow for breakthrough thinking. I agree that SDCA and PDCA with a continuous mindset may not deliver breakthrough thinking. However, like most things you start one step at a time. The culture of Innovation starts with culture of continuous improvement. To start with breakthrough thinking is very difficult and typically not successful. So starting with PDCA and a continuous improvement is the only successful way, to create this "i (little i) culture. Now, to ramp it up and truly do breakthrough thinking, the big 'I" is when you must engage and understand your customer/market extremely well.

This could be a description of the culture a Lean company from a Scott Anthony FastCompany Post on innovation:

A classic example of this is how a calligraphy class inspired Apple legend Steve Jobs’s emphasis on typography on early computers. The professors then detail what they call the "Innovator’s DNA," four time-tested approaches successful innovators follow to gather stimuli that spur these connections:

• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycles with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

Design and Innovation takes place outside the four walls and Lean is the methodology of choice. It is the driver of both the Little i and the Big I. Why Lean? The first and foremost reason is that it allows the 1st step for innovation. Without it, you never start!

My upcoming Podcast with Dan Jones dives into this type of Lean Thinking. Review these past post to provide some additional background, Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011 and The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

Related Information:
Applying Cellular Concepts to Marketing Segments
The End of Best in Market
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

How Zing Training Started! -

Next week’s Business901 Podcast features Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Mich. The Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) has annual sales approaching $40 million. ZingTrain, a consulting and training company that shares Zingerman’s approach to business with like-minded organizations from around the world, and offers a variety of management training seminars in Ann Arbor, as well as customized workshops and presentations at client sites. An excerpt from the podcast: 

Joe:  A big part of your organization has become Zing Training. What started that? Did you just wake up one day and say, "Gee, we need to bottle this up?"

Ari:  ‘Well, we opened in '82, and then in '93, Paul and I spent about a year writing a new vision for the business. When we opened, we were very clear about our vision. And actually the first natural law of business, I think, is organizations that have a clear vision of greatness are going to have a better shot at succeeding. So when we opened in '82, we were very clear in our minds and what we wrote down that we only wanted one deli. We didn't want a chain or replicas. We knew that we wanted something that was unique to us and not a copy of something from New York, or Chicago, or LA.

We knew that we wanted really great food and service but in a very accessible setting, and that we wanted a really great place for people to work, and to be bonded into the community. By '93, so 10, 11 years in, I mean, we kind of had done that. In that, we had filled in, expanded twice on the site that we're on.

We're in the historic district, so it's not easy to do that. We kind of had, I guess in hindsight what would be the equivalent of an organizational "midlife struggle."

I don't think it was a crisis, because we weren't crashing, but we weren't really clear on where we were going. We had achieved what we had set out to do despite going against the odds. So we spent about a year coming up with our next vision, which we wrote out.

It was called Zingerman's 2009, so it was for 15 years into the future. That vision outlined that we would have a community of businesses all here in the Ann Arbor area, because we like to be connected to what we're doing.

Each building should be a Zingerman's business, but each would have its own unique specialty. So that way, we could grow but keep the deli unique, and do other things. And we would only do a business when we had a managing partner or partners in it that would own part of that business and have a passion for whatever that business did, and be connected to it every day going for greatness.

And after we wrote that vision and rolled it out, then Maggie Bayless‑‑who we had known at the restaurant‑‑ she had been, I mentioned a waitress there. But she had gone back to school and gotten her MBA at Michigan, and wasn't that thrilled with the corporate world, but loved training.

She read that vision. She came to us and said, "Well, what about doing a Zingerman's training business?" That's how it started, then we worked on it for a while and opened it up in 1994.”

I have written about Zingerman’s many timese and in fact, Ari’s book,Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, provided the service outline for a retail operation that I was part of for several years.  Several mindmaps and more details are in this blog post,  PDCA Cycle of Zingerman’s Deli.

Related Information:
Can the customer be front stage in your organization?
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing
Continuous Improvement Sales and Marketing Toolset
The New Names of Marketing are still PDCA

Continuous Improvement Program for Sales and Marketing

The Lean Marketing Lab opened several months ago, an online community created to further the cause of bringing continuous improvement to the sales and marketing. The foundational work is in Lean but you will find a flavor of Service Design and Design Thinking intertwined. Recently, I have moved the Marketing with Lean Series of books to this site and when you purchase the books you will receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.

Marketing with Lean Book Series:

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

When joining, you will receive immediate access to all four books, additional Learning A3s, 130 eBooks, numerous downloads, and forms all centered on Lean Sales and Marketing. If you are interested in beginning a journey to bring Lean to your Sales and Marketing this is the next step. In addition, I am presently creating learning tracks that will be shared only in the community for developing Lean Sales and Marketing from three different views: An Internal Lean Champion, Sales and Marketing Manager and as an outside Consultant. An additional fee may apply to these programs but there will be a substantial discount offered to the initial group.

Purchase the Marketing with Lean Book Series  and receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.

I look forward to your participation – Joe

Lean Sales and Marketing

You can't write and teach Lean Sales and Marketing. It is a Learn by doing approach. It is choose one problem and solve one problem. What we can do is provide you a platform through the recommended books and tools, teach them and incorporate feedback as you put them into practice.

Limited Time Offer: Receive Access to all 4 Books after joining the Lean Marketing Lab and receive free membership to community till the end of the year.

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

Limited Time Offer: Purchase all 4 Books and receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.

Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT

How many resources do you have? Should you be using them on your weaknesses or your strength? In a recent post Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed not looking for areas of deficiencies and improvement but to expand on the areas we do well in. You cannot be everything to everyone and so you have to limit your resources. So why not use them on what you do well?

In the typical SWOT Analysis (SWOT analysis examines the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of different strategies), I believe most of us have a tendency to focus on our weaknesses and threats more than our strengths. Just doing the math SWOT/WT, we spend 50% of out time doing just that.  

In the Appreciative Inquiry  field, there has been a movement to use a SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) analysis in lieu of SWOT. SOAR is a great method to use for expanding on the positive areas of an organization. It normally is much easier to gain buy-in from stakeholders with this approach versus others.

In the book The Thin Book of SOAR; Building Strengths-Based Strategy, the authors state:

People tend to look for problems and focus on weaknesses and threats before searching for possibilities. For example, one participant of a SWOT process described this tendency as follows: "Having used SWOT analysis for the previous fifteen years, I had experienced that it could be draining as people often got stuck in the weaknesses and threats conversations. The analysis became a descending spiral of energy." Or, as another described his experience of a planning process deeply rooted in a SWOT analysis, "[the SWOT approach] gave us a plan, but took our spirit. From our experience, drained energy and loss of spirit can negatively impact momentum and achieving results.

In SOAR, we focus on our strengths and opportunities, so that we can align and expand them until they lessen or manage our weaknesses and threats. Weaknesses and threats are not ignored. They are refrained and given the appropriate focus within the Opportunities and Results conversation. Ultimately, it becomes a question of balance. Why not spend as much time or more on what you do well and how7 you can do more of that? What gives you more energy to take action? What gives you confidence to set a stretch goal?

When I engage with a customer, I find the initial sequence of steps used to create a Lean Marketing System must ensure we carefully think through what outcomes we want to create, what supports and barriers we need to plan for, and who we have to involve within your organization to guarantee success. Our starting point looks like this:

1. (Definition) What are you presently doing and how do your clients and organization feel about them?
2. (Discovery) What is your present value proposition for retaining customers? What is your present value proposition for acquiring customers?
3. (Dream)What are your targets? How will we measure success?
4. (Design) Do you understand your customer’s decision making process? For each product/market segment?
5. (Destiny) What’s your investment strategy – not only in media, but in time and events?

The SOAR framework is the beginning step in the Defining stage and is a natural lead in to the others.

• Strengths: Internal to organization; What is our core
• Opportunities: External to organization; What might be
• Aspirations: Internal to organization; What should be
• Results : External to organization; What will be

The first steps of any Lean process is identify value and create a current state. When working on the demand side of the equation, why should we identify the process through Non-Value Activities defined as waste (Weaknesses and Threats) versus the Value Added activities of SOAR?

Related Information:
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

Path to Participation

In Lean Marketing, Service Design and Design Thinking, we typically use the Customer Journey Map to describe the journey of a user through a series of touchpoints. Mapping this in detail and defining the resources, people, budget and marketing collateral to match each of these steps is imperative. After an organization does this and is ready to take a deeper dive one of the tools I like to utilize is what I call the Path to Participation.

I have seen others use the term but I use it in the context of the customer (prospect) engagement and re-engagement process. Rather, than selling features and benefits of your product and hoping to attract prospects, we try to find a path to participate with customers in our product/market segment. The simple fact is the further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects.

You hear a lot of talk about touch points and increased efforts within an organization that I elaborated on in the blog post, If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework? These increased touch-points are very relevant in today’s marketing but you need to stop looking at them from your perspective. Have you spent the time investigating your customers’ touch-points? Look at where and how they distribute their knowledge. When you think from the SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch) perspective of value in use, use the touch-points created by the use of your product, you will extend your conversation and add insights about not only your customer but your product/service.

The Path to Participation starts in one place in a sales and marketing environment and that is in the customers’ playground. If you want to be visible, if you want the opportunity for participation, you literally need to work where the customer works. Find out if you need to interact with them in Social Media, Community Functions, Bid Lettings, etc.? Where are the places that they demonstrate or express a use for your product? These are the places will build relationships and community versus the more traditional methods of cold-calling and advertising

Taking this information and spreading it within your organization will make it easier for customers to go deeper into your organization for knowledge sharing. As a result, it may provide a flood of new ideas for innovation and co-creation opportunities. Even more importantly, it secures a vendor-customer relationship or partnership that is difficult for others to replicate.

This cannot be done unless we take on the role of pupil. Which I have discussed in a few blog posts:

But before you begin teaching the customer what they need to know, start thinking of this process a little differently. Think of it as you being the pupil rather than the teacher. Think about you having that “aha” moment or that moment when you “get it” versus when your customer gets it.

I went on to say:

Instead participate in communities and discussions that highlight your knowledge, developing an ever expanding network of touch points that allow prospects to self-serve information and to locate you. Think of ways for trials or templates of your organizations best practices to be used that will allow prospects to move into a more collaborative arrangement. As this happens, greater human interaction occurs but typically as a result of the customer qualifying themselves.

If you view your sales and marketing from this position it will create vast opportunities not only in sales but throughout the rest of the organization. There is not a stronger differentiator for your company to acquire. A Lean Marketing measurement is how deep and widespread can a customer penetrate your organization.

Related Information:
Can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?
Changing the shape of your marketing funnel!
Does the Juran Trilogy = PDCA?
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer