Archive for Marketing Funnel
The Perfect Storm has come together of Excess Capacity and Product Variety
Posted by: | CommentsCarol Ptak, a recent guest on my podcast said…
A lot of people have focused on the fact that the Economic times right now are really bad. What a lot of people are missing is the fact that the world around us has fundamentally changed.
A we see now across the world is that we have excess capacity when you add to that the Internet where we get on the Internet we expect to have an experience like Amazon, or order it is going to tell me instantly when I’m going to get it. If you don’t provide it at the price I want to pay and the time I want to pay then I can just go someplace else. Why can I do that? That’s because I have all this excess capacity out there.
So what companies are seeing today is volatility like they never had to manage before and at the same time they no longer have the reliability of understanding what the customers are going to demand and when they’re going to demand, because customers are increasingly fickle.
So what we’ve got is the perfect storm that has come together of excess capacity and incredible product variety. Think about a new product lifecycles. They’re getting shorter and shorter and shorter. The world we’re trying to live in and started about four or five years ago is that we can no longer afford to build unless someone’s going to buy.
I have to agree with Carol, fundamentally the world has changed and if you are going to wait for the shift back you are in trouble. We could cal this a pull market. No longer can we build and build an force our product on others without serious consequences such as price slashing. However, in the long term if our markets have changed and more specifically our delivery methods have changed, we must change.
So how 
do you survive the Perfect Storm? Do you sail right into it? The problem you have is that there is not a mental model for this. You do not have a map. You cannot process and organize all the data that is arriving, let alone organize it. If everything or on the other hand to little is considered you will not come up with an adequate model.
How do you overcome all this? Most people can focus effectively only on one thing at a time. I am not saying that organizations have to focus on only one thing at a time but maybe, I am. If you are to survive, the very first thing you need to do is face reality. That reality is that you have to be crystal clear on what your customer and what your market values! There is quite a bit of understanding that goes into building a Customer/Market Value Model. Obtaining the Voice of Customer/Market is part of it but so is Customer/Market Identification. Your perception alone is biased, you are not the one buying your product. Your judgment must come into play when interpreting the right data from the right market. Not deciding what your market is thinking. Having a true understanding of what is important about your product or service to the marketplace is the strongest survival tool you can have.
If you are to face the Perfect Storm, your thrust has to be very precise and with as much strength as you can muster. Just riding it out seldom works!
Carol’s ASR Website: http://beyondMRP.com
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Value Stream Marketing – Improve your Cycle Time
Posted by: | CommentsMany people believe that to apply Value Stream Marketing using Lean Techniques, it is about removing waste. Eliminating waste is one of the Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing but you must make some fundamental improvements in your marketing cycle before a pull marketing system will work. Value Stream Marketing (VSM) is about having a minimum amount of Work in Process (WIP). However, you cannot just wake up one morning and decide to do it. You cannot just remove marginal leads or work with only higher valued leads. It’s about a journey versus the decision to reduce your WIP. Managing your WIP will make you aware of many wasteful processes and as a result provide opportunity to remove them. In VSM there are four critical components that you must understand: Protect Sales, Reduce your WIP, Improve your Cycle Time and Remove waste.
Improve your Cycle Time
Improving the Marketing cycle is where the fun really begins. By protecting sales and reducing your WIP you have only made minor changes other than discovering what makes your marketing process flow. Developing your Marketing Kanban has allowed you to sort out variation and discover over and underutilized resources. Visualization of your marketing cycle has hopefully allowed you to remove some of the low hanging fruit, I actually hate that term.
Most people will have you take your Value Stream mapping Process and create your Kanban board. What I explained in the Reduce your WIP section is to create a simple flow diagram with a Kanban. Why backwards, I find most marketing people are somewhat intimidated by Lean Tools of mapping and can readily identify a Kanban board. Creating that structure and working with it to provide flow makes the transition to a Value Stream Mapping project much easier. Using the Kanban, you have created a Current State Map with the metrics you need to develop a Future State Map. The outline I use for creating a future state:
In the book,Value Stream Mapping for Lean Development: A How-To Guide for Streamlining Time to Market, Drew Locher explained how to create a Future State Map by utilizing seven basic questions:
- What does the customer really need?
- How often will we check our performance to customer needs?
- Which steps create value and which steps are waste?
- How can we flow work with fewer interruptions?
- How do we control work between interruptions, and how will work be triggered and prioritized?
- How will we level the workload and/or different activities?
- What process improvements will be necessary?
Drew goes on to conclude that future state mapping is not a brainstorming session. He likes to use a key ground rule of 70%. If the team believes that they have a 70% chance of implementing a particular idea in less than one year, it could be included as part of the future state. If it is longer, the entire improvement effort would suffer. These specific improvement efforts will be depicted in a value stream map by the use of a Kaizen Burst icon.
When considering how to use value stream mapping in the marketing process I think the seven questions provide an excellent base for walking through the process. You have to remember, you already have a current state map drawn. In essence what you are trying to do is to move not only current state to future state but from an internal perspective to an external perspective. Your customer should be determining your value stream.
I believe this is the best way to improve your marketing cycle. Taking each channel or swim lane on your Kanban board one at a time and mapping the process will give you the best results. After creating the Future State Map move the process back to the Kanban board for execution.
Related Posts:
Value Stream Marketing – Reduce your Work in Process
Your Marketing Funnel from your Customer’s Perspective.
Posted by: | CommentsThe Mirror Marketing eBook describes an alternative way of looking at your marketing funnel…from your customer’s perspective.
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Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept
Marketing Kanban
Value Stream Mapping
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Posted by: | Comments
Do you think it is Scrum? Do you think it is Kanban? Do you think it is a Marketing Funnel? …or is it all three? Or maybe Agile? This is an empirical view of Value Stream Marketing.
The drawing is reflective of a Scrum sprint. Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. The sprint is typical a two to four week process with the large loop representing the overall process and the smaller (top) loop representing a twenty-four period and the daily scrum meeting. In the Value Stream Marketing Process, I use the loops to demonstrate a higher level of intimacy with a prospect. The top loop is for existing customers to nurture an even stronger relationship.
The three separate areas of the diagram will have their own Kanban board, if there are separate teams working on them, or you could visualize each as a separate swim lane. Separating these three processes apart allow you to better identify the process steps and the tools needed to facilitate the value stream flow. And, of course, using a Kanban board for this process will help you identify where the process is not working or where the bottleneck is occurring.
The Kanban board is where the actual work gets done. We want to limit unnecessary work in process to be no higher than it needs to be to match the control point or pacemaker of the process (bottleneck). We will use these boards to limit Work in Process into each stage and as a result create a smoother work flow(Heijunka) with a goal of eliminating what Lean refer to as the 3 M’s, Muda (Waste), Mura (Unevenness or Inconsistent) and Muri (unreasonable). This way we maximize your marketing efforts to the fullest extent.
Scratching your head a bit? We will develop our Kanban Boards in later posts which will clarify things a bit. Don’t get hung up on process. All you really need to do is break down your present marketing systems onto a Kanban board and start.
Related Posts:
Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream = Involve-Influence-Interaction- Intimacy-Commit: Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept
Marketing Kanban: Marketing Kanban
