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