My last post was a brief summary of the principles of lean thinking. How lean thinking is a concentrated focus on core processes. How it starts by understanding the way the process creates value for the customer, continues by identifying the steps in the value stream, making the value stream flow, letting the customer pull from you, and constantly improving the process with the goal of achieving perfection.
It’s easier to imagine applying these principles to marketing and sales if you start by thinking about just one buyer. And by visualizing the buyer’s journey (see below).
Specify value – Every step in the marketing and sales process should create value for the customer. After each interaction, customers should feel that they received value. Any action that doesn’t create value for the buyer is waste (muda).
An advertisement that interrupts the buyer with an irrelevant message? Waste. A delay in getting a quote or a question answered? Waste.
Identify the value stream – The buyer encounters different value streams at each stage of the buying process.
At the early research stage it may simply be a sequence of events starting with a query to a search engine, clicking on your entry on the search engine response page, reading some pages on your website and downloading a white paper.
At a later stage it might be requesting a quote, a series of meetings with a sales rep, placing an order, and receiving your product.
Flow – Once you have mapped the value stream for a particular marketing or sales process (and eliminated obvious areas of waste), you can start to make the process flow. In the first example above, it might mean watching your analytics closely and modifying your website to make it easier for buyers to find the information they want.
In the second example, it could mean examining and improving the steps in your quoting and ordering process.
Pull – In a manufacturing environment, pull is when a customer makes a purchase and initiates an order. In marketing, sales and customer service, pull occurs when the buyer or customer initiates a series of actions that satisfy the need for information at that stage of the buying process.
An important question to ask is “What is the circumstance in which a buyer would want to pull information from my company?” This is a different way of looking at marketing. But it’s a way of forcing ourselves to look at it from the buyer’s point of view.
Perfection – There is no end to the process of making it easier and faster for buyers to solve their problems using the capabilities you have to offer. Understand the buyer better. Make it easier for customers to get the information they need at each stage of the buying process. Continuously improve.
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Manufacturing companies have not only gained significant improvements in productivity, by creating more value for their customers they have also grown their business simply by focusing on making their processes more lean.
Can we do this in marketing and sales also?
Some other related posts you might find useful:
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