Extended exposure of the night sky with Polaris, the North Star, in the center of the star trails.

Principles are the essence of our work. They don’t change with time or place, technology or tactics, conditions or context. They are a constant reference point to guide us.

Lean and Six Sigma are two well-established initiatives that organizations use to improve how they do their work. Making a process Lean improves its productivity, and Six Sigma is used to improve quality.

All Lean and Six Sigma initiatives are built upon the same set of core principles. These principles can be applied to Sales and Marketing as well as to any process in an organization. Sales and Marketing groups that hew to these principles will deliver more customers, bigger deals, and more profitable revenue to their company.

Marketing and Sales: advancing the buyer’s journey

The process of Sales and Marketing revolves around the buying cycle. Sales and Marketing creates value that motivates buyers to move from stage to stage in their journey.

The Buyer's Journey

Buyers don’t start out thinking “Hmm, of the products that solve this problem, which one should I buy?” No, they start out unaware that the problem even exists. They then proceed through a series of stages from becoming aware, to looking for solutions, and to making a decision. The job of Sales and Marketing is to help your buyers move smoothly through those stages.

Lean: removing friction to increase customer flow

The goal of making a process more Lean is to remove unnecessary actions (waste) from the system and to cause the process to flow more smoothly. Lean methods have their origin in the production system at Toyota, a story that James Womack and Daniel Jones tell well in The Machine that Changed the World and elaborate in Lean Thinking.

The principles of Lean are:

• Specify value – Value is defined by the customer. In Sales and Marketing, value is what meets the specific needs of the buyer at each stage of the Buying Cycle. Value is what buyers are willing to take action to obtain to answer their questions and solve their problems at each stage. This action could be to read a white paper, to visit your website, to see a demo or to review a proposal.
• Identify the value stream – For each type of buyer at each company, the value stream is the sequence of value creation steps that support the customer’s buying cycle.
• Flow – Make the value stream flow faster by removing obstacles that create friction for the buyer. Increase the motivation of the buyer to move forward in the Buying Cycle by showing the alignment of the buyer’s goals and your goals.
• Pull – Once your value stream flows, then it is easier to let the customers pull value from you as they need it.
• Perfection – Work towards perfection through endless steps. Perfection of what, you might ask? Perfection in what you do to create value for the customer at each stage of the buying cycle.

Six Sigma: fact-based management

Once you have made your Sales and Marketing process Lean by creating a series of value-creating steps that flow, then you can focus on improving the quality of the value you create. Here is how Mike Webb describes the core principles of Six Sigma for Sales and Marketing.

1. Create Value for Customers: A company exists to create and sell something of value to customers; that’s the North Star that must guide all our activities.
2. Manage Data and Facts: We need measurements, data, and facts on what we’re doing and the results we’re getting before we make decisions; otherwise, we’re operating from opinion and politics.
3. Analyze Cause-and-Effect: A problem occurs for a reason; if we find the cause of a problem and eliminate it, then we’ve solved the problem.
4. Minimize Waste, Errors, and Defects: Like a watch or a car, a business process should have all the parts it requires, and do everything it’s supposed to do and nothing else; if we rid the process of useless activities and eliminate or at least minimize mistakes, the process will run correctly and produce the intended results.
5. Create Collaboration: All process improvement methods recognize that business activities and functions are interconnected and that they all have to work together for any of them to succeed.

Regardless of your size, your industry, or your customer, the principles of Lean and Six Sigma enable companies to improve the speed with which buyers move through the pipeline and the quality of buyers that become customers.