Cohesiveness of People and Process drives Profit

Next weeks Business901 podcast is Vivian Hairston Blade. Vivian is the Founder, President & CEO of Experts in Growth Leadership Consulting, LLC (EiGL Consulting, LLC) based in Louisville, KY.  EiGL Consulting focus their energies on helping develop an effective strategy to create customer value. Through a combination of coaching and training, they help you put that strategy into place through change management strategies that create committed leadership and organizational discipline.

I gave the Vivian the perfect opportunity to promote herself in the podcast and instead she continued coaching and adding value:

Joe:  What are your plans going forward?

Vivian:  Well, our plan is to continue to build on this idea of people and process and that cohesiveness between the two that help companies drive growth. As you look at the environment, the marketplace, the economy, and how it changes and how it will change in the future and how we'll need to still continue to be conservative in so many ways especially when it comes to money and finances and investments, to realize that people investment is important, that operational process investment is important as it relates to customer focus and serving customer needs.

Helping companies realize that without that connection and that understanding of why you exist and how to operationally serve the why you exist, what your value is in this customer relationship, without this you won't have a business for very long.

You know, it's unfortunate that we see so many of these companies in today's economy who have been icons in the American industry, your Kodak and your Hostess, Hewlett Packard, so many, even Netflix recently who decided to change both their service and their pricing policy and lost millions of customers. They made a 360 degree turn. And, just in the Wall Street Journal in the past few days there was an article about how they are beginning to now recover their customers.

But, without that skill of listening that we just talked about a minute ago, you haven't a clue what the impact is going to be when you make some of those changes, or do you even really care it's almost too late? So, we're helping companies to have a good ear to the ground on that customer connection and building an environment where employees can thrive toward reaching their career goals and helping the company to achieve it's goals.

Related Information:
Lean Canvas for Lean EDCA-PDCA-SDCA
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Side Effects of our Desires and Abilities to Empathize
Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry

My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry

Most people want ideas and applications that I would propose before we start working together. I equate that to starting on the right side of the A3 (with the answers in layman terms). So recently I have developed a structure that makes more sense. I leave the customer determine the price and budget for the encounter.

I believe in creating a Lean Marketing system. You can't write and teach Lean Sales and Marketing. It is a Learn by doing approach. What I do is provide you a platform for co-creation through joint experiences and incorporate feedback as we put them into practice. The steps of Lean Sales and Marketing are first you go and create a current state. Second, you form a working vision from the user (customer) experience, an ideal situation of where the user wants to go. Third, you visualize the user's process. If you do that, it's more obvious to see what your next reaction should be and when to trigger it.

Many people respond to the latest fad or solicit the cleverest idea to implement some sort of solution, thinking it will make them better. What makes your marketing better is understanding the user or customer experience and their processes. Then with hard work, take the time to figure out how to engage with them. It's this process, that empowers you and which leads you to create better and more performing processes. Using this approach, a Lean system will outperform any other approach in engaging the customers you need, maintaining customers and working with people you like and who will be loyal to you and refer others to you forever.

This is the initial sequence of steps we use to create a Lean Marketing System in an organization. It ensures 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:

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?

What I ask for is simply a marketing budget for me to manage. We allocate a percentage of the budget for fees, creative and production, with the balance going to media, materials, internet presence and other out of pocket expenses. At the beginning it is slanted towards the fee side and overtime shifts as we don’t need to recreate materials and programs from scratch. It can be very cost effective if I am able to use my own resources and fold you into existing processes. I host and manage websites, post products to Amazon, handle news releases, create interview opportunities, host guest blog posts and podcasts, orchestrate events, create info product and manage shopping carts at little if any additional costs. There is little time spent by the client except for telephone interviews and final review of materials.

P.S. What I will not do is masquerade as your persona in social media. I believe that this typically backfires both in creditability and expected results.

Unbeknownst to me what I described in the starting points is the outline for Appreciative Inquiry. In parenthesis above; Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny is the AI Process, which I detail below:

1. Definition: What frames our inquiry?
2. Discovery: What gives life?
3. Dream: What might be?
4. Design: What should be?
5. Destiny: What will be?

Never knew I was an Appreciative Inquiry guy!

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

Lean Sales and Marketing Summit is Quickly Approaching

In preparation for this Duane Butcher of the hosting organization, Lean Frontiers wrote this in a recent newsletter:

Marketing activities such as developing promotion programs, branding, developing ads and writing copy are seen as creative processes that don’t lend themselves to systematization without losing the ability to think outside the box.

Most efforts to improve Sales and Marketing so far have come from Six Sigma or Lean Office programs that largely derive their practices from the production environment. The personality style of a star salesperson or an innovative marketer clashes with the type of person who is going to embrace standardized processes and continuous, incremental improvement.

If these arguments sound familiar, they are the same ones used ten years ago to keep lean out of Research & Development: breakthrough innovation cannot be standardized, lean manufacturing practices don’t work and star technologists don’t appreciate process excellence. The solution is to recognize that like R & D, sales and marketing functions are knowledge creation processes.

Product developers add value when they deepen their knowledge about the product design and then convert that knowledge into a product that a customer can buy. Similarly, marketing and sales functions add value when they deepen the company’s knowledge about customers and market needs, and then support R & D as they make decisions that lead to products to meet those needs. They also add customer value when they deepen the customer’s knowledge about the product. In fact, the best sales people are those who take the time to deeply understand an individual customer’s needs so that they can recommend the products and services that will best meet those needs.

We will be able to conquer the final frontier for the lean enterprise when we recognize that when the value a process creates is knowledge, it must be managed as a Knowledge Creation Value Stream to maximize the value we get from the knowledge created, and minimize the wastes of knowledge loss, ineffective decision-making.

P.S. You want a fresh approach to marketing that is something other than just a new set of tools. Consider attending the Lean Sales and Marketing Summit. I have a limited amount of tickets left; please contact me to check availability.

The Lean Sales and Marketing Summit is quickly approaching. It is a two day workshop.

Bill Waddell. On April 17th, Bill will be presenting Aligning the Entire Organization to Achieve the Sales Strategy. He will show you how to devise a sales and marketing strategy built around creating the most value for your customers; how to set prices strategically, rather than on the basis of standard costs, assuring that prices will not cause you to lose a sale.

The next day, I will be presenting Using Lean to Create Repeatable and Scalable Sales and Marketing Systems: A Customer Centric Approach Through Lean. The workshop will be two-thirds presentation and one-third interactive exercises.

Please consider joining us.
Related Information:
Lean Sales & Marketing Summit Announced
The Other Half of the Lean and Sales Marketing Summit
Traditional vs. Emerging Thoughts on Pricing