Lean Marketing Principle #4: Minimize waste, errors and defects

The purpose of marketing and sales is to find, win and keep customers. It does this by adding value to the buyer throughout the buyer’s journey. Anything that does not add value to the customer during the marketing and sales process is unnecessary.

Michael Webb explains: “…in process improvement, waste is any activity or result that doesn’t add value for the customer. Errors and defects are unwanted results.”

Examples of waste include:

• Swiping the cards of visitors to a trade show booth and handing them off to sales as “leads”. Sales staff then contact a few of these leads, find out they are not qualified, and ignore the rest. This activity creates no value for the customer. The time spent by marketing to collect and collate is a waste. The time spent by sales calling them is a waste. Worse, it creates resentment between the two groups.
• Sending unsolicited “press releases” via email to a list of reporters and editors. If the company or the public relations agency has no relationship with the reporter, the email will be ignored. This is a waste and adds no value to the customer. In fact, it creates a negative value. Witness the flap over Chris Anderson’s decision to treat these emails as spam and publish the addresses of the senders.
• Preparing a proposal for a sales prospect before achieving alignment with the decision-makers about the project. The proposal will be rejected. Not enough value has been added to the customer to allow for a consensus decision. This wastes the time of both the customer and the sales team.

The causes of waste can be discovered by managing on data and facts and by analyzing cause and effect. And these causes can be removed.

But removing waste is not the hard part. Webb points out that what’s hard is seeing waste in the first place.

Why?

Partly because we are too close to the problem. We’re too accustomed to our current pattern of doing things. And it’s hard to believe that dramatic results are possible.

The best way to start seeing waste is to come back to the question: “Does this activity add value to the customer?” If the answer is yes, please continue doing the activity in the same way. But if not, it’s time to take a closer look.