Stop Looking for Mister Right

They simply don’t exist. I see people building Persona after Persona targeting that Ideal Customer. The problem that exists is that ideal customers are few and far between. In a recent blog post, A Persona Board deserves a Place at the Table, I described creating User Personas from your existing customers and then grouping them into quadrants based on product/market fit or relationships. The purpose of this is not so much to learn about customers as it is to learn about yourself and your core capabilities.

A fun exercise once you have created customer (user) personas, you can segment them according to how they fit in the quadrants mentioned in the above post. Then start asking these questions and others you may think of.. 

Relationship Customers:

1. Which customers buy from you because they dislike the relationship they have with your competitor?
2. Which customers buy from you because they like the relationship they have with you?

Product/Service (I will only use Product going forward) Customers:

1. Which customers buy from you because you have a better value proposition (price/function) than your competitor?

Relationship Prospects:

1. Which prospects buy from your competitor because they like the relationship they have with your competitor?
2. Which prospects buy from your competitor because they dislike the relationship they have with you?

Product Prospects:

1. Which prospects buy from your competitor because your competitor has a better value proposition (price/function) than you?

Marketing is in the business of creating customers. If we want to create a customer, we must take a divergent view versus a convergent view. Most marketing schemes, funnels and all that stuff are great at telling you how to manipulate a customer through the process to create a buyer, but few of them tell you how to create targeted prospects. A simple process is to use existing Customer Personas and create Prospect/Competitor Personas based on Relationship or Product groups.

When we look at the existing differences, we start identifying key points that we can address to gain access to others. In the Lean world, we call these opportunities gaps. We identify these gaps, and create different scenarios on how to close the existing gaps. We seek to understand why prospects may or may not move towards a target.

When viewing this from a structural tension metaphor, we will notice resistance as we try to coerce the customer towards the new target or condition. See my blog post, A New Approach to Lean with Robert Fritz.. We will oscillate between these two positions unless we can find common agreement of purpose. I like using the Theory of Constraints Evaporating Cloud (How to See the Other Side of a Conversation) as the way to resolve the difference. If we can find an overall purpose that will become a shared understanding – it resolves the conflict, it creates an opportunity for us to give an opportunity for prospects to move from one particular state to a different (closer to our thinking) state. It is the shared understanding that must exist to create the change in state.

Lean Service Design Slidedeck

At the ASQ 2013 Service Conference, this week, I had the honor of giving a sixty-minute presentation on Lean Service Design. All the participants of my presentation received a CD that contained my Lean Service Design Program. This is the slidedeck from the presentation.

Lean Service Design Presentation at ASQ Service Quality Conference from Business901

I also introduced CAP-Do (More Info) to the audience. CAP-Do is a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.

Purchase the Lean Service Design Program!

Or, purchase the 130 page PDF for download, Lean Service Design

Boundaries of Kanban

Markus Andrezak is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013) about Boundaries of Kanban - Disruptive Innovation. An overview of Markus’s talk sums up our conversation in the podcast quite well.

Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference: Kanban is fantastic in the support the flow of product development and self improvement of teams in that area. However, at each time the process defined through Kanban poses an impediment to work in the creative field. While Kanban may very well fit to work in the domains of product maintenance and iterative, feature by feature innovation, it does not support evolutionary or disruptive innovation. These types of innovation dip slightly or even more into chaos and are completely non linear processes which simply do not fit the Kanban board and process. The talk will show how to protect innovation from delivery and how to create the necessary level of communication between these areas w/o creating silos.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: I've struggled when I’ve applied Kanban to sales and marketing because it is similar thinking, it is very non-linear. The way I view it is that it's not this linear progression as much as it’s an iterative circle within a certain column. That group could be always there until they come out of the loop somewhere. They could either go backwards or forward. Is that similar type thinking to what you have done or do you have a better way?

Markus: I think it's very interesting what you said because I had this discussion last week with the great guys of TLC Lab in New York, Jabe and Simon Marcus. They came up with the similar idea because they tried to use Kanban in the way that you described it.

What I said to them is that you can put that work on the Kanban board and put a container around it and just ignore that it’s on the Kanban board. What will still happen is that people will look at the container that’s protecting this design work from the production constraints so to speak and somehow feel like it has been a stranger on the board. Now you could have a very great company culture and everybody will tolerate that stuff on the Kanban board. On the other hand, if it's on the Kanban board the Kanban system should be helpful of this work otherwise you would not put it on the Kanban board.

Again, this process is completely non-linear and going on and on as you say, my question would be of what help word Kanban be for the designers and I think of no help. If you look at what's going on in the gaming industry, how they’re coming up with new ideas for the games is in very small prototyping teams which are not working in any method. Maybe Design Thinking or maybe Design Studios, but they’re not working on any development-like or production-like methodologies. Rather what they do is something which Toyota might call set base design, so highly parallel work in very small teams to come up with lots of new ideas for a similar problem. I think this is good but you can't organize it on a Kanban, at least not that it would help so you could do Kanban but I think it would be of no help for anybody.

About Markus: Markus Andrezak has been active in different contexts as Product and Development Manager for high traffic and high revenue web sites. During the last years his main focus has been transitions towards Lean and Kanban product management and development practices across his portfolio. With Arne Roock, he also co-authored 'Replenishment', a free eBook on Kanban. His Blog: Portagile and Twitter: @markusandrezak. You can find more information at his company website: http://ueberproduct.de/en/.

No Steve, Jack or Bill, just The Caterpillar Way

How many companies get Leadership right? Do you always have to have that charismatic leader that makes us think about them before the company? Tomorrow’s podcast is with Craig Bouchard, author of the book, The Caterpillar Way: Lessons in Leadership, Growth, and Shareholder Value. If you know my legacy a bit, you understand the high degree of interest.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: What struck me about the book more than anything else is that there was not a Jack Welch, a Steve Jobs, or a Bill Gates. It was a credit to the entire Cat organization. Was that true? Is that how Cat is?

Craig Bouchard:  I really confess. It's incredibly true. I've been the CEO for a couple of companies. I'm the CEO of Signature Group, a public company right now, in a great company. But in the case of Caterpillar, I've never seen such a large group of people so thoroughly dedicated in increasing their revenues and decreasing their expenses as a team - which is kind of simple - but what I'm trying to say is that it's rare in real experience. That company is really - everybody is on the same page and that's a management feat of course that they've accomplished that.

Joe: Yes it's a huge management feat but not to have that person out there waving the flag just amazes me.

Craig:  Yes and when I look at Cat is and the most remarkable thing going back to the 80's. They had basically six incredibly large complicated decisions to change the company during this past thirty years. Six times, they turned the entire place upside-down strategically requiring such a flexibility of their management and their workforce - it's just really remarkable and each one of those decisions could have turned into a disaster and each one like them have turned into disaster for other companies, and Caterpillar went six-for-six. Basically with four different Chief Executive Officers through that time period responsible for those six decisions. Not only did they go six-for-six in decisions, they managed to get it right who was the right person to implement and come up with an implementation for each of them. This kind of a record is almost unheard of in terms of these types of gigantic decisions were implemented.

Joe: Did the CEOs get picked based on the needed initiative, or because they were good at, or did it happen because they were at that?

Craig:  We talked about that a little bit in the book. How much of it is luck and how much of it is that the board of directors, they had at the time, picked the right guy for the right job in the challenges that existed at that time. Between Donald Fites, Glen Barton, James Owen, Doug Oberhelman and George Schaefer before, these five guys are very different people with different skill sets. In whatever way that it was accomplished with the board of directors at Caterpillar and its succession planning is a very determined and thorough process in the company. To put in place the right person at the right time in those challenges during those thirty years and my conclusion because they got it right five times in a row - it is not luck.

About Craig Brouchard ( http://www.craigbouchard.com): Entrepreneur, writer, art collector, great father and pretty good husband. Crafted the first and only "hostile reverse tender merger" ever successfully completed on Wall St and founded two public companies; Esmark and Shale-Inland.

• 2013 - Founded Cambelle-Inland, named for my daughter Cambelle
• 2010 - Founded Shale-Inland, named for my daughter Shale, now public in the bond markets (A3)
• 2003 - Founded Esmark Inc., the highest appreciating stock on Nasdaq for the full year 2008

Improving Interactions through the Lean Value Chain

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do we involve, interact and improve with the non software parts of the value chain? Let Mattias Skarin walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive improvements across organizational borders.  Mattius is one of thought leaders of the Kanban Movement and is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is in Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013). He is speaking about: Improving the full value chain & Visualization – What‘s my brain got to do with it? (Lightning Talk)

Mattias Skarin works as a Lean and Kanban coach, building systems that enables you to cut time to market and improve quality. He has helped several software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams (cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations using Kanban. He is an author of the book, Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both, and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD. He blogs on http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin and the blog has one of the best set of sample Kanban boards on the planet.

 

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Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Marketing Magic of Moses: Content, Stories and Targeting

Everyone will tell you it is about Content, Stories and Targeting (Relevance) your audience. Well, sure it is, we have been talking about that since before the days of Moses. Just look at what Moses offered:

1. He was born a Hebrew, he was one of them.
2. Evidence to lead: He was practically king of Egypt   
3. His Call to Action was a better alternative to slavery, independence.
4. During the journey at certain moments of truth he brought a few (10) plagues,  parted a few seas and received the 10 Commandments to help form a nation.

This is not attempt to discredit Moses. I could have used the “marketing” campaign of our founding fathers that resulted in the creation of the United States. It is just an attempt to demonstrate that most “marketing” campaigns have contained the same successful platform for the last thousands of years. Today, marketers have taken this construct online with the tools that exist today.

I have always operated under the philosophy that the best indicator of future performance is past performance. We could argue this point, but I am betting my evidence on a few thousand years of history. What I do believe is communication happens at a more accelerated rate which causes change to happen quicker. Once when Moses campaign may take a lifetime, we now see an overthrow in Egypt materialize and happen in a short time span. It is the speed of communication.

There is another component that I believe that is happening that couples with the speed of communication, it is influence. We construct our present day messages with more data and information than ever thought possible (I have read that data can now predict where I will be (location) a year from now). As Kaiser Fung said in a Business901podcast (Framing Big Data Transcript):

Having the data and the numbers are really important. Like we said previously, completely trusting the numbers and the analysis is also very foolish. You need human intelligence to interpret these numbers. It is really an interplay of the numbers and your interpretation because ultimately, even though the numbers will never give us cause of information – they can never really tell you with certainty that A causes B, it would tell you that A is related to B. It is human interaction that is needed that kind of tie these things all together into a credible story. Forget the notion that you will find one story that is correct, and everything else is wrong. All we are trying to look for is a story that is our best story, given our constraints of what we can and what we cannot.

Even with all the data in the world, it is the influence of the person delivering that has the most significant effect on our decision. How do you gain that influence? How do you become an influencer? Is it by the number connections? Is it by the books you have authored? Or, do we leave LinkedIn tell us?

I think it can be summed up in one word, participation. Are we participating in the conversation? Are we participating in doing the work? Are we participating helping to create outcomes? I think it goes past  the thinking of the Jobs To Be Done thinking. It goes into what I have always termed playing in the customer’s playground. It requires additional influence which equates to a cooperative structure both internally and externally.

This is what my new eBook CAP-Do (More Info) discusses, The change that is needed in the conversation between the supply and demand side. The change in structure of that overlapping responsibility. That area where we struggle to maintain balance between “whose job it is”. We must assume it is a joint responsibility versus drawing the line in the sand. It is not saying the customer is always right. It not one of assuming the blame. It is about how, we frame the opportunity to move from a solution type thinking to openness that we are willing to be influenced ourselves before asking others to be influenced by us.

Mindfulness for Sales?

I have this on and off relationship with Meditation, NLP and Yoga through the years. An extension of this is the practice of visualization. Many of us will consider this for sports and have at one time practiced the technique of visualizing our next golf shot from behind the ball. Of course, we can argue the success of this technique for ourselves, but most professionals do practice the technique.

If it works for sports, why would it not work for sales? Would it be a crazy practice to sit in the car and just visualize the outcome of the sales call? Would it help rehearsing the problems that may be encountered or the people you might see during the call? There is an easier and more beneficial practice that could occur. It is the act of mindfulness or unloading. If we just take a break to rid ourselves of everything going on around us and participate in the presence – would that make us more effective?

When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment. (No need for incense or sitting in strange positions.)

Jose Silva is the person that may be best known for bringing meditation to the western culture or at least North America. He also is one of the few that has taken this type of material and applied to the sales arena. His book, Sales Power the Silva Mind Method for Sales Professionals, provides an outline for the process. It is somewhat dated material but I do enjoy the Silva Intuition System. This program has been updated by his daughter Laura Silva and provides an excellent introduction to meditation. If you try it, let me know your results.

Using Scenarios for Current Applications

This video does an excellent job of explaining Scenario Planning. The most common application of is for futuristic thinking and considering the different scenarios that may play out. In the video, it will comment on how this method is used in lieu of forecasting or maybe even when Predictive analytics, no longer work (Podcast,  The Power to Predict Who will...).

When you view this video take a different approach. Instead of looking at the limiting perspective of Scenario Planning for the future view it from a perspective of building Customer Scenarios along the Customer Journey. Instead of assuming a customer was going to react a certain way, we match them to the Scenarios that may happen as a result of being in this position.

 

If we view the Customer’s Journey as a Scenario Journey does that cause a different reaction? Would that help us to seek to understand first?

Do Personas, Stakeholder, Journey Maps work?

Successful companies are now viewing their marketing as a method for getting the message in from the marketplace versus pounding the message out. It is this inbound marketing stuff we have been talking about the last few years. The new methodologies of User Experience, Service Design, Design Thinking and the Lean Startup^TM are all about using this found wisdom and all expound to be “Customer Centric” and concentrate on the “Customer Experience”. It is that Outside – In thinking.

The three tools that have become prevalent are Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. They are tools that we use to understand and improve the Customer Experience. There is seldom a workshop that does not utilize these three tools, and they have been widely adopted in the community. I use them myself and find them quite fun to talk about and to do.

I wonder after a workshop, how many participants actually go back to their organizations and create personas, stakeholder and journey Maps. I am familiar with a few that have, especially the customer personas. However, if you are like most, you go back to your everyday job and work. It was an exercise and only an exercise. If you do make the attempt, you do it in an isolated group with participants that already have a decent idea on what is needed. There is little disruptive change that occurs. We may bring a few “outsiders” in, but those people seldom understand the bigger picture of the organization (said in jest).

The truth is if you try to use these tools you find them cumbersome. There is not the external knowledge of the customer present, and so assumptions are made. If sales is included, they seldom are, the salespeople are disengaged and looking at their smartphones and stepping out to make urgent calls. The innovative organization would like to have both salespeople and customers included but without mastery of the tools find it difficult.

Lately, I have been challenging organizations to turn back and think internally. Think inside-out versus outside-in. At the end of a workshop or webinar, I no longer ask participants to take this knowledge back and design customer facing services or involve sales and marketing. I ask them to do it for their vendors. I ask them to take one of their own particular services or outsourced products that they use internally and create Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. I encourage the Lean Champion to head the project if and only if he can stop it from making it the typical Lean or Six Sigma Project. We are empathizing with the users and discovering how decisions are made within our own company. Our goal is one of discovery and definition. Seek to understand not fix.

We first need to address the users of the service/product and create the Customer Persona Map. Then view the stakeholders and who is influenced by the use of this product and who influences them. Mapping the Customer journey in our organization can also be enlightening. If you want to have a little fun, have your supplier create his own three maps and see how they compare. Now, bring who you would designate as your outbound map makers and show them the results. How valid will one be with your customer? Would it be worth your time? Or, would yours look like the one created by your supplier?

If Value is Co-created in Use, Our Decisions Need to be Co-created

When we approach sales we typically think of how we will address the customer’s problem. What needs we need to address and how we will do this in an engaging way? We are in The Experience Economy says authors Pine and Gilmore. Though many of us dwell on the Experience Economy, I think we are moving past that at an accelerated rate. This movement has its foundation in Service Dominant Logic, where the fundamental belief is that value is co-created with customers. The value is in the use of the product or service. This type of thinking is awkward to many organizations. In my latest book CAP-Do: Connecting Demand to the Lean Supply Chain, I begin the journey discussing sales and marketing from a perspective of being systemic, emergent, and participatory.

My latest thinking has been a result of spending time with stakeholder and customer journey maps and building user personas. These processes have assisted me moving from inside-out thinking to an outside –in perspective. It also helped my clients build better customer experiences. What I realized working with customers was that many of common problems they encountered became rather standard to deal with and many even automated. When we addressed sales issues we found a striking number as either straight-forward or responding to “opportunities” we had little chance of winning. If you would like more information on my sales perspective, read the blog post, Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers.

The world of sales is on the edge of a collaborative way of selling. We no longer can just sell to a customer; we have to understand our customers’ business and our customers’ customer’s business. This can be done through scenario planning and from a perspective of being systemic, emergent, and participatory or The Cap-Do process.

From the book ' target=_blank>' target=_blank>' target=_blank>Solving Tough Problems, author Adam Kahane classifies problems. His definitions: 

• A problem has low dynamic complexity if cause and effect are close together in space and time.
• A problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time.

 

• A problem has low generative complexity if its future is familiar and predictable.
• A problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable.

 

• A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.
• A problem has high social complexity if the people involved look at things differently.

When any of the problems exist that are coded in red, they are fairly simple problems to address and most organizations know the answers and their preferred vendors. They may make a decision with preferred vendors or research other vendors just to confirm their decision (The dreaded request for proposal we often receive).

The other set of problems, not in red, we struggle with as organizations. They are often described as messy or wicked problems.  The latest inbound marketing programs that are “social” in nature fail to deliver. They are simply built from our old thinking of a marketing funnel, responders, and workflows. We guide and manipulate the customer down some arbitrary path to arrive at the correct (our) decision.

As Kahane says,

Simple problems, with low complexity, can be solved perfectly well—efficiency and effectively—using processes that are piecemeal, backward looking, and authoritarian. By contrast, highly complex problems can only be solved using processes that are systemic, emergent, and participatory.

We as an organization do not have solutions to problems of high generative complexity. They cannot be calculated in advance, in a journey map, based on our past thinking, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds. Seldom are they miraculously worked out by “single experts” but rather by a team of highly involved people. A coalition or a team made up of customer(s) and vendor(s)  must accept the fact that there is not one right answer. It must emerge from doing or working towards the problem. Just as value is co-created in use our decisions need to be co-created.

We always equated the experience economy to a theater with actors being the customer facing people, the back stage the supporting cast and the audience the customer. I think that is a broken metaphor. A better metaphor may be a race team where the product/service is the car, and the driver (customer) is using it. The pit crew (vendor) is in constant communication and in support of its use. There is no backstage, we are completely transparent and, in fact, the customer’s own support might be part of the pit crew.

Do you have an analogy that might work?

What is your Organizational Persona? Map it!

Do we focus on the customer too much? Most of us would disagree and say no that we should focus on the customer more. However, recently we have seen a tremendous amount of books written on organizational clarity. One of the reasons is that without understanding our purpose as an organization or as an employee of organization we limit our effectiveness. Dating myself, you go back to the 80’s where a tremendous amount of work was done on corporate vision and mission statements.

In a recent interview, Handling Impossible Projects, I asked author Michael Dobson, “When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?”

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said “Yes, we did mean it,” then they had a basis to go on.

This demonstrates how this understanding will guide is organizational decision making. Simon Sinek message of starting with Why, (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)) embodies this message. Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” He then draws another circle with “How” and another with “What”. It is powerful message and one of best Ted videos of all time. Not to downplay the effectiveness of the message but it is a very clever packaging of the old mission and value statements created in the 1980s.

How do we convert to a powerful Why statement?

Whether you call it Why or Vision, there is not anything else that maybe more instrumental to your success. Do you believe your organization has a heart? Does that mission pulsate throughout the entire organization? It’s not an iterative process. It is not anything that is cloudy or mysterious to your organization. It is Why you get up in the morning and go to work. With Vision, With Why, a unifying theme of purpose exists. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become aligned.

I believe the simplest method of crafting our Why is through the use of an Organizational Persona Map. We use build personas to understand and empathize with customers but do we have one to understand our own organization? Can we easily identify what is the personality of our organization? As Sinek says, we know what we do and how we do it but do we know why? A humble attempt at creating an Organizational Persona Map:

Organizational Persona from Business901

Without vision, without why, you seldom provide a unifying theme of purpose. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become disjointed. In a Business901 Podcast, Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI said, “Vision comes from the heart”. That should dictate how we act and the personality of our organization. Does it? How would your customer complete this?

Related Information:
The Kipling Growth Strategy Map
The Lean Business Practices of a Deli

Progressing to SD-Logic Thinking

Joseph Michelli, author of Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People is tomorrow’s podcast guest and like all his books he bases them around five principles. This is Michelli’s second book on Starbucks, the first one was The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary. In the first book, the five principles were…

1. Make It your Own
2. Everything Matters
3. Surprise and Delight
4. Embrace Resistance
5. Leave your Mark

In one of my highest rated blog post, Is Zappos the Next Toyota?, I discussed the The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW. The Zappos principles were…

1. Serve a Perfect Fit—create bedrock company values
2. Make it Effortlessly Swift—deliver a customer experience with ease
3. Step into the Personal—connect with customers authentically
4. S T R E T C H—grow people and products
5. Play to Win—play hard, work harder

The first Starbucks book was written about 10-years ago and the Zappos book two years ago. As you can see, the progression of the principles from a focus on operations to customer experience. In his new book, Leading the Starbucks Way, I asked the author about the new set of five principles.

Joe: In all your books, you frame them in a certain way which I really like. You base them on certain principles that companies can identify with. Could you start out by giving a brief introduction to the principles that you used in Leading the Starbucks Way?

Joseph Michelli: I'll be glad to. I think for me I have to kind of get it in bite size pieces. There is so much information when you're dealing with a company the size of Starbucks. If I can kind of comeback and pull the cameras back a little we can get on that, some of the principles that we talked about in this book are really kind of around focusing on product and making sure you can savor and elevate your product. They have to do with really extend employees so that the love and I know it can be a tricky we can talk about, but the love that you extend is a leader to your employees is something then that moves into the life of the customers.

We are talking about mobilizing the connection in this book. The world has changed, and the notion that people are just going to walk into your store front or on to your page on online business is just not there. You going to have to go out and find where their lives are and mobilized your connection to make sure that you step into that space with them. There really is a principle in the book that really kind of looks at the importance of not just focusing on transaction or the customer relationship of the day, but really extending yourself out in the life of the customers by challenging your legacy, making sure that you have a lasting legacy statement that goes out into the customer’s space.

In the world which we live today there is a need to have a global of a connection with your customers as possible will also maintaining nuance for cultural relevance. So the business principles in the book are specifically dedicated to that and by name….

1. Savor and Elevate
2. Love to be Loved
3. Reach for Common Ground
4. Mobilize the connection
5. Cherish and Challenge your Legacy

The new perspective of these five principles is similar to many of the forward thinking companies today. We have progressed from operational to customer experience to Service Dominant Thinking (SD_Logic). This is where value is co-created. Delivering great experiences requires participation. We must engage our customers so that they are part of that experience and so much so that they may even take responsibility on delivering part of it. It is not a theater anymore. It not actors delivering to the audience, rather the audience and actors have joined together. For example, think about reality shows. Think about customizing your smartphones. It is the personalization of your experience that elevates it, and you savor the moment.

Where Strategy and Customer Service Meet, Part 2 of 2

John Goodman, Vice Chairman of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting (CCMC), has published scores of articles including “Using Service to Grow the Top Line” in the AMA Journal, 8 articles in Quality Progress as well as BrandWeek, the American Banker and Marketing News. Business Week credits John’s research for creation of the GE Answer Center, the original customer satisfaction contact center, as well as instigation of service initiatives at American Express, Coors and Toyota. The American Management Association published his book, Strategic Customer Service, in May, 2009.

John was my guest in the podcast, Where Strategy and Customer Service Meet, Part 1 of 2

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John will be presenting at the ASQ 2013 Service Conference. He holds a pre-conference on Sunday, October 6^th WKSP01: Using the Voice of Multiple Customers (VoC) to Drive Quality: Be Easy to Do Business and Monday’s  Session M04: Beyond the Buzzwords: Using Data to Enhance Loyalty and Service ROI. On Tuesday afternoon, I have the honor to be presenting at the same conference, Session T06: Lean Service Design.

Lean Service Design Program

Lean Service Design changes the way you think about business. No longer can companies focus their efforts on process improvements. Instead, they must engage the customer in use of their product/service rather than analyzing tasks for improvement. We no longer build and hope that there is a demand. We must create demand through the services that we offer and Lean Service Design is the enabler of this process. It changes our mindset of thinking about design at the end of the supply chain to make it look good and add a few appealing features. Instead, it moves design and the user themselves to co-create or co-produce the desired experience to the beginning of the supply chain.

The umbrella of Lean offers Service Design a method of entry into a well-established market. Lean has been very successful in Services and Design through traditional practices. However, we must move away from these traditions and institute a wider scope of Design to Services. This download contains a 130-page PDF book, workbook with forms, PDFs and training videos.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Lean (SDCA)
• Chapter 2 – Service (PDCA)
• Chapter 3 – Design (EDCA)
• Chapter 4 – Trilogy

In addition, for a limited time, I have included 2 popular eBooks from the Marketing with Lean Series:

1. Lean Engagement Team (More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.
2. CAP-Do (More Info): What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers. It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services.

But wait, you can get a CD with this same content free if you attend my presentation at the 22nd Annual Service Quality Conference, October 7–8, 2013 in Las Vegas, NV. The theme of the conference is 
Seizing the Competitive Advantage with Service Quality. REGISTER: Program details are now listed on the site. To or get more information, visit asq.org/sqd or call 800-248-1946. If you are from outside of the United States of Canada, please call +1-414-272-8575. Look forward seeing you in Las Vegas! Or, purchase the Lean Service Design Program!

Purchase the 130 page PDF for download, Lean Service Design  at a special price for the next 4 four days.

Lean Service Design Presentation at ASQ

I have the pleasure of participating in the conference and will be giving a sixty-minute presentation on Lean Service Design. My presentation will be building offering a unique perspective on applying Lean to the Service Design Field. All participants of my presentation will receive a CD that contains:

• 130 Page PDF eBook
• PDF & Excel work forms
• Training Videos
• Bonus eBooks and Audio Tracks

My discussion will begin with a discussion on Service Dominant Logic and go through the use of Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps and Buyer Personas. We will use these 3 outlines to develop several service prototypes narrowing it done to a single choice. The Lean Process of moving from EDCA to PDCA to SDCA will be discussed in conjunction with the before mentioned processes. The last part of the hour I will introduce CAP-Do and the use (sorry for the pun) of User Personas and Scenarios creating a process that I call Persona Mapping.   

This ASQ 2013 Service Conference provides how-to’s, step-by-step advice, and the latest in service delivery methods and networking opportunities. Speakers will engage you on topics to help organizations improve customer service, reduce costs, and build both customer loyalty and satisfaction. Join us in Las Vegas for two days of networking and discovery.

22nd Annual Service Quality Conference
October 7–8, 2013 • Las Vegas, NV
THEME: Seizing the Competitive Advantage with Service Quality

REGISTER: Program details are now listed on the site. To or get more information, visit asq.org/sqd or call 800-248-1946. If you are from outside of the United States of Canada, please call +1-414-272-8575.

The Starbucks Way of Connecting with Customers

It is a lesson in strategic marketing that few books meant for that purpose can even come close. After reading, most of Joseph Michelli’s books, and doing a podcast with him several years ago, I concluded after reading Joe’s latest book, Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People, that it is his best work to date.

From the forward of the book:

Each of Dr. Joseph Michelli's books offers a learning laboratory that's rich with examples from leaders as they address the aforementioned challenges and opportunities. They provide information, insights, and analysis on how leaders seek to create a high-performance organization that operates through the lens of humanity. This book demonstrates both the setbacks and the breakthroughs that the Starbucks leadership has encountered as it has attempted to position its products and people to deliver consistent, engaging, and loyalty-enhancing experiences.

Herve Humler
President and Chief Operations Officer
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.

I have another compliment for Joe. There may not be a better interviewee that can make an interviewer feel that good about himself. At times, I had to remind myself who the “star” was. – My hat goes off to Dr. Joseph Michelli. 

P.S. When you find out Joe’s next book subject, you will be anticipating the arrival for the next two years.

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Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do

Cap-Do Audio Excerpt of Book

When we use our typical sales and marketing approach, we form an idea of the way things should be, forming maps or journeys that we want our customer to adhere to. As they get further along, we have so much invested that our manipulations get stronger. When they push back, we push back. When we apply what Stephen Covey said, “Seek first to understand,” we only do that for qualification purposes. Successful companies are destined to create the future of the outcomes with their customers. It is not incremental change or problem solving. It is not a prediction, it is what we think will happen.

We can only bring this about through challenging ourselves to first let go of our pre-determined thoughts and build structures based on possible scenarios. It requires experimentation, prototyping and the practice of learning by doing. This is not an easy process and one that requires a well structure outline. CAP-Do offers such an outline and will create a process of understanding and collaboration to help determine the future with our customers. In the Check and Act Stages leads to discovery of what we must attempt, experiment within the Plan and Do stages.

Enjoy the brief introduction of the book

 

 

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CAP-Do is included in the Marketing with Lean Book Series at no additional cost.

Is Starbucks a Lean Organization?

I asked that question of next week’s Business 901 podcast guest, Joseph Michelli, author of Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People. I am a big fan of Joe’s work and had the pleasure of interviewing him about two years ago, The Zappos Culture Defined! about his new book at the time, The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW. This latest book, I believe is his best book to date. It is a lesson in strategic marketing that few books meant for that purpose even come close.

Joe: Does Starbucks consider themselves a Lean Organization?

Joseph: They like to think of themselves as a customer’s centric Lean kind of organization. Not a true manufacturing Lean where the efficiencies are driven essentially for the outcomes of the business. I think there's a lot of debate within you whole Lean community and you are far more of an expert than I am, but I can tell you that Starbucks would say they're Lean different than say "McDonalds is Lean. They have to figure out ways to build in the emotional relationship connection to customers as a value, not as a waste.

Joe: I think that is predominantly how I talk about Lean. How does Lean relate to the customer experiences? Is it just in the queue? Is it just in the handling of customers and doing it more efficiently?

Joseph: It is largely there. It is at the store level where a lot of labor and material cost are associated. The key operational challenge is to get that as efficient as possible to reduce the number of people you have to have on staff, to have the right staff in at the right time. To decrease the number of steps, to decrease the number of, actions that are wasteful. That's where the bulk of it happens it also happens in new product roll out making sure that there are repeatable processes that people have that makes for consistent delivery of product across the entire landscape. Beyond the brick and mortar store, I think the entire way that Starbucks runs its corporate headquarters has looked at Lean's principles to see what kind of processes are not officially being manifest within the organization. I think it’s gone beyond the customer facing dimensions and gone into the business processes. It is just becoming part of the culture. You know how it is though it catches fire, but it needs to continue to be kindled by somebody responsible and they've got the right numbers of people organizationally driving it throughout the organization, keeping it front and center.

In the book, Troy Alstead,CFO at Starbucks was quoted,

"As good as we were about spontaneity at forging human connections, we weren't as good at removing waste and creating processes that maximized efficiency and customer value while making it easier for partners to serve our customers. Over the recent past we have made great strides in these areas of discipline. So the idea now is to remove the things that really aren't critical to customer value. We shouldn't be putting our partners in positions of having to be creative with processes. Let's leverage their best practices that maximize efficiency for the partner and for the customer. Our partners should be encouraged to bring every bit of their creativity to how they interact with our customers, but quality and execution ultimately should be designed and measured by the benefit it brings to partners,
customers, and our business."

Inherent in Starbucks approach to reduce inefficiencies is the understanding that to be truly effective, those reductions should produce routines that free up people or resources to make stronger interpersonal connections.

This to me is what standard work is all about. It is about freeing up the mundane to make room for the creative. We enhance a workforce by having standard practices. In doing so, we give the power to frontline staff to create those “Aha” moments that we all talk about but seldom have time to do. I find time and time organizations and particular leadership for not empowering frontline staff. What I have come to realize is that it is lack of adherence to standard work as the problem versus empowerment. Clear, concise and documented standard work agreed on by leadership and frontline staff  creates the atmosphere for great customer experiences.  Go have a cup of coffee and see if you agree.

CAP-Do: Connecting Demand to the Lean Supply Chain

CAP-Do: What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers.  It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services. CAP-Do is an emergent process. You may know the outcomes that you desire but that is relatively unimportant in today’s world or The Challenger Model. It is the outcomes that your customer requires and how you adapt to his/her processes to produce their needed results. This takes a willingness to discover as you go versus leading the way. The essence of Pausing or as Peter Senge calls it “Presencing” is the act of acknowledging that there is more than right a answer. We refrained from trying to find answers or problem-solve in the Check and Adjust stage. We can now gather and understand the actions, roles and uses of our product/services. This is the stage where the connection between supply and demand occurs. Most organizations try to choose between what we know (Check) and what we learned (Adjust). The key though is acceptance and understanding or as I have explained earlier; empathy. This empathetic connection is important; not only to our customer, but as an external team we must also empathize with our internal organization. It is this preparation, done with a pause, before we move into the planning stage that is imperative. As we cycle or iterate between the supply and the demand world we will discover complementary answers. The obstacles will get smaller and smaller. The organization that instills the CAP-Do process will put a tremendous amount of faith in the Sales and Marketing teams. These teams must work and overcome the tension between supply and demand. CAP-Do is a Lean process that supports the tenants of Service Dominant Logic and Jobs to be Done. It requires a fundamental understanding of the idea that there is not one single answer in this world for any problem. The answers lie with the people that are addressing the problem at the moment and have a particular job-to-get-done. It is in understanding their needs and their outcomes with greater wisdom. More fundamentally, you create a way to get your own job done in any situation.

If you would to purchase CAP- Do, it is available for download as a PDF.

Chapter Outlines:

Check Chapter 1 - Structural Conflicts Chapter 2 - Enterprise Thinking Chapter 3 - A Learning Process, not a Teaching Process Adjust (Act) Chapter 4 - A Perspective of Strength Based Principles Chapter 5 - Lean and the OODA Loop Pause Chapter 6 – Pause Plan Chapter 7 - Lean Sales Methods Chapter 8 - Retool your Sales and Marketing with Lean Do Chapter 9 - Experiment through Prototypes Chapter 10 - Lean Thoughts Chapter 11 - Doing CAP-Do Chapter 12 - CAP-Do Process – Working with SDCA, PDCA, EDCA

CAP-Do is included in the Marketing with Lean Book Series at no additional cost.

Uncovering Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal. author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, is the founder of  Portigal Consulting. He has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at www.portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Steve was gracious enough to secure a discount code for the book, IUBUSINESS901 for 20% off,  if purchased through Rosenfeld Media, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

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Framing Big Data, part 1 of 2

If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there.

…says Kaiser Fung, author of a new book, Numbersense a previous book, Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do and the popular blog, Junk Charts. Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

This is the first of two podcasts with Kaiser. The second one will post next week.

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Kranz Dictum: The Miracle behind Apollo 13

Have you ever been part of an impossible project? Next week’s Business901 podcast is Michael Dobson author of Project: Impossible - How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible - and How You Can Too!. The book was a fun read for me and so was the podcast. Michael does an excellent job of weaving project management lessons in and out the stories. Michael, knows a thing or two about project management, he has written over twenty-five books.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said "Yes, we did mean it," then they had a basis to go on. You'll see this as a theme in a couple of stories. In Apollo 13, you know the famous CO2 exchanger that we all remember from the Apollo 13 movie, the fact is that there had been a tremendous amount of training in crisis response, there was an emergency kit. They couldn't very well have done it without duct tape. Somebody had to think about putting together an emergency kit that included things like duct tape that was available generically. With Patton in the Battle of the Bulge, he didn't do it in 48 hours. He anticipated it and had his planners hard at work. With Caesar at the Battle of Alicia, it was the long term training of the Roman soldier that allowed him to take on the absurd task of building this amazing set of fortifications in a very short period of time with very little in the way of supplies. If you don't start early, if you don't have the foundation, if you don't have the vision, if you don't have the training, if you don't have the emergency kit, well, your ability to handle a crisis when it shows up is extremely hampered. Normally, crisis management by definition is reactive rather than proactive, but a lot of training, a lot of the prep work, a lot of the mind-set comes well in advance and in most cases by the time the project officially starts, it's too late. If you haven't started early, if you haven't built a foundation early, well, there's not much you're going to be able to do to recover.

Joe: In the movie Apollo 13, I think of where the person said something to the effect, "gentlemen" . . . .

Michael: Failure is not an option.

Joe: Failure is not an option. Yes, exactly.

Michael: Gene Kranz who never said it. He never said it. What he did do is he was the guy who developed the NASA response following the Apollo 1 capsule fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee. There is a long story about the origins of that. Some of it is in the book, and it was after that he developed and announced what he referred to as the Kranz Dictum that was a preparation and mind-set tool for NASA. He insisted and focused on it from the immediate aftermath of Apollo 1. So, by the time Apollo 13 came around, he had achieved what he did call, perfection in the art of crisis management. Simply no way to make space travel or, any kind of, going up explosive powered rocket, there's no way to make that inherently safe. If you're not ready with crisis management, you have no business going.

Gene Kranz did well with something he never said, His book is titled: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond

MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON, marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker, has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career.

A Story of Sustaining Lean

Robert B. Camp holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, and a master of business administration from Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, New Hampshire. Robert spent almost 20 years of his career working for Mobil and Lockheed Martin. Throughout his career, he has performed roles that have drawn heavily on his increasing body of Lean knowledge and experience. He is a board member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the author of Go and See: A Journey about Getting to Lean, and most recently Sustainable Lean: The Story of a Cultural Transformation.

In the podcast, Robert discusses a particular area that I thought brought out a very clear message. When you are talking culture and transformation, you cannot hire someone else to come in and do your work. An excerpt from the podcast:

Robert Camp: The problem is, they're unsustainable, unless, leadership with the organization agrees that they're going to change. I make a point of referencing that in my book, early in the book, the protagonist, Jim, who is a plant manager is talking to a consultant that he's heard at a gathering, and he approaches him afterwards. Jim approaches the consultant afterwards and says: "I hired these external consultants to come in and we did great. They did better than they even promised me they would do. Then, I was pressured by corporate to cut off the contract, and in the two years since, things seemed to have drifted back to where they had been". Frank, the external consultant, says to him: "What you did wrong was you entrusted the transformation to somebody else. Unless, you are willing to lead it, it's not going to be sustainable". I think, therein lies half of the answer that A is got to be led by the leaders of the organization. The second piece to that is by leading they literally get out front which means they need to understand Lean as well as anybody else and they actually have to drive the transformation. They can't hire somebody to come in and do that for them.

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Shoud we question Big Data?

Kaiser Fung is a professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical methods to marketing and advertising businesses. His acclaimed blog, Junk Charts, pioneered the critical examination of data and graphics in the mass media. Kaiser is my guest next week on the podcast and this is an excerpt from it. Kaiser recently wrote his second book, Numbersense: How to Use Big Data to Your Advantage.

Joe: Before the podcast, we talked about John Paulos. He of course wrote the book,A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper and how he frames what we read in the newspaper. I thought your book did a great job of reframing how – or framing how we should be looking at Big Data without saying who is right or wrong, but putting it in our court saying “We need to frame it.”

Kaiser: I think it is very important people need to realize before they dig into the book is, I focus on a very specific aspect of Big Data which is not receiving enough attention right now. We keep hearing about Big Data and it is like volumes of data, there are all kinds of new types of data. We are tracking everybody, every movement and that is true and an important aspect of it. Much of that aspect is very much what I would call supply folks – it is all about the people who are doing the data work, and the people that are tracking us. My book is focused on the consumption side, so one consequence of having so much data is that it is going to be that there are tons and tons of people who are going to come to us with all kinds of arguments, and they are going to tell us that their argument is supported by such and such data.

For most of us who do data analysis, it is probably even for people who read data analysis, you will realize that you can pretty much find data to support anything you want to say. So what is going to happen; we are going to have a lot of contradiction and confusion. There will be so much data analysis out there; we do not know what to think. In Numbersense, what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking about how you would interpret all these things out there. If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things, and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is believable and which one is junk. Like you alluded to this is not an exercise in figuring who is a hundred percent correct and who is not. Our problems are so complex, and the data sets, even though they are so luminous will never be complete. We will never be able to know for sure that, you are right, and he is wrong.

So, I mean I encourage people to take a skeptical attitude, and to basically develop your own framework for interpreting the data analysis out there. I would have expected some people would probably not hundred percent agree with everything that I have say in the book either. That is totally acceptable, that is sort of part of the mentality of how you approach the interpretation of data analysis.

Joe: Well that is really the whole point to it is – really who do we believe, and how do we analyze? If we want to talk about topical discussions, let us just talk about Eric Snowden for a minute. Should we embrace Big Data, or should we be somewhat sceptical and scared of it?

Kaiser: It is interesting because I just put up a blog post this morning – It is about Snapchat. I wrote that blog post, and at the very end, I cited Eric Schmidt, the past CEO of Google. He had a quotation for that I used to think “Oh my god, this is so creepy.” He said something like “There is no privacy anymore if you do not want anyone to know that you have done something, then you should not have done it in the first place.” I used to think that it is like a common trend how creepy this technology companies are, but I think all these revelations are essentially making me rethink what he actually said. No matter… whether we like it or not, the data is out there and somebody will collect it. It is extremely easy for some people to collect it, we just cannot avoid it. So I think he is just basically saying “If you take that as your starting point, then you should think about whether you should be doing things that you do not want other people to know.” It is a different thing from saying it is creepy.

Kaiser first book was Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do.

About Kaiser: He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching practical statistics.

Hi-Octane Innovation for your Brain

Today’s sales people are met with great challenges. They live in a world where we all talk about the importance of relationships, but few have the time to build them. Especially when, organizations are making more and more decisions as committees and the actual decision process, let alone the decision maker, is getting harder and harder to define. Your ability to be extremely focused and intuitive may be the most important assets you possess. Few sales managers or salespeople would disagree with any of the following statements:

Successful Salespeople:

• Focus
• High expectations
• Self-Motivated
• Stay in the Moment
• Intuitive

We view these as very difficult traits to be acquired. We might even say that salespeople are born with them. The truth is few of us know how to acquire them. We read self-help and how-to books, attend training sessions and receive coaching to improve these needed traits. This training  may helps us temporarily, but after time we slip back to where we were before.

Just as we need continuous improvement on the shop floor, we need continuous improvement in the sales arena. We need more than a method. We need a way to exercise and sharpen our mind.  We need to develop the skill of intuition. We need a way to develop and maintain a sales personality. What we need is to program ourselves, our minds to success.

Few of us will argue over the power of meditation. It can prove beneficial by providing us clear thought and more energy. It is a skill that needs to be developed taking many years to master. The benefits are enormous it is just a matter of practice. It comes down to the fact most people will not take the time, and if you are a salesperson, it is not even a consideration. I would like to introduce you to an area that I call, The Sales Neuro Charger or meditation on steroids. It is a combination of Brainwave and Biofield Entrainment. Review this page, How it Works, for more technical information. 

You should be cautious in buying into Biofield and Brainwave Entrainment. Brainwave entrainment has been around since 1960’s. Biofield is relatively new technology and should be approached with caution. I have followed and participated, off and on, with Brainwave entrainment and meditation for over twenty years. My recent return has been a result of being introduced into Biofield Entrainment. I have become associated with the product and feel that it offers some significant advantages for sales people. In fact, it is a great companion to Neuro Linguistic Programming or NLP.

Lean more by visiting this page, Sales Neuro Charger.
It has been called hi-octane innovation for your brain.

Empathy is the Fundamental Principle of Understanding.

From my blog post, Do you only Listen through your Ears?:

Empathy is a major differentiator between the traditional process methodologies of Six Sigma, and I say this tongue–in-cheek, Lean. Many times when you review Design for Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Product Development, and Lean Design (the list goes on), seldom when you search (like never) the index of the book will you find the words Empathy. I think that is a major difference in Design Thinking, Service Design and as I like to call it, EDCA.

That word empathy is a hard thing to practice. Some people may say you are born with or raised with it. I think you can acquire it, but it takes a different set of listening skills than most of us  develop.

In a recent article in the New York Times, The Morality of Meditation, I have taken the liberty of pulling several quotes:

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended.

The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

Meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

They confirmed that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

If we want to connect with our customer, if we want to develop an intuitive read of his organizations needs, do we not need first to have compassion and empathy. It is the act of empathy that we develop through using the Sales Neuro Charger and/or meditation that allow us to utilize them in the sales process. Empathy is the fundamental principle of understanding. How can we develop objective views without it?

The 5 Whys of a Lean Sales Conversation

I have found talking to little or too much are both ineffective ways to proceed in a sales conversation. When we discuss a Lean Sales Person, many people think of this problem solving person that is out finding the root cause and how their product/service could benefit the customer.  I have expressed my views on that subject as a problem solving salesperson ends up typically being an average salesperson. More on that subject in this blog post, Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers.

I think we need when having a Lean Sales Conversation it is not about asking 5 Whys to find the root cause. Rather, I like the CAP-Do approach where we concentrate more on the downloading of information at the beginning.  This conversation is not what I would call one of discovery, that seems to be little premature. I think of the yoga saying; ”if you want to take a deep breath, you first need to exhale.”  And, in a Sales conversation the person that needs to exhale is the customer.

I learned this process from the book, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone.  I get more mileage of these words than any other sales pitch or script I have ever constructed. Instead of saying Why, the response should be Hmm! Really! Sorry, that is the second response. Before I get into a parody of Who’s on first, Here is my list of 5 Whys:

1. Hmm
2. Really
3. And So
4. Then what Happened
5. Tell Me more

In my job, I will write auto-responders and telephone scripts. The first step in this process is not to think what you want a customer to know, feel, and do. That leads to an attempt  to manipulate the customer actions. Instead, try to learn what the customer knows, feels and wants to do. I look at this from a perspective of learning, the Lean way.  Hmm, and Really equate to exhaling. You learn what they know. And so, and Then what Happened draws out the feelings. Tell me more opens up the response that signifies what they are going to do.

These 5 little prompts, mixed with a small amount of conversation will get you further than any other preconceived  planning that you can do. This is the Check in the CAP-Do cycle and why you must stay away from the elements of PDCA and root cause. Don’t discover, learn! It all starts with a Hmm!

Consider Attending the Webinar, Lean Sales Methods on June 7th