Marketing Funnel :: Lean Sales and Marketing thru Service Design Thinking

Archive for Marketing Funnel

May

Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?

Posted by: business901 | Comments (0)

Have you ever evaluated where your customer finds value within your company?

In Lean you try to find the one best path – the value stream map. In the marketing, we have created the marketing funnel. However, Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel. Customers have the ability to access resources and information comparable to their suppliers and choose suppliers by their own definition of value and how that value should be created. Organizations must adapt to the networks our customer chooses to find value in the use of our products and services.

Verna Allee, M.A., is Co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC introduced me last year to Value Network Mapping through this Business901 podcast, What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks? I have played with it, not mastering and have become more and more intrigued by the concept. Our world is increasingly more collaborative driving changes in the way decisions are made. Our organizations need to change to a more collaborative structure but the question is where do we begin?

From Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by Verna Allee with Oliver Schwabe is a digital edition book located at http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com.

Roles and interactions – providing focus for collaborative work

Role-based exchange networks are the natural way that people organize and collaborate to create value and achieve outcomes. In such a network every single person executes a chosen role. Through that role they provide value contributions to others and receive value in turn. Further, as long as people experience a sense of reciprocity and perceived value or accomplishment from the interactions – people will stay engaged.

The collaboration patterns that make things work have been pushed to the background through more than two decades of focusing on business process models. Now, with the growing use of social networking and collaborative technologies, the importance of those patterns is finally being recognized.

Indeed, people, and their very human exchanges and interactions are at the heart of value creation. People, not processes, are the active agents in organizations. Only people have the unique capacity to identify opportunities, innovate, and provide value.

Value streams typically only focuses only on the more formal deliverables. In sales and marketing it is not only the formal deliverable but the informal, which in value networks are called tangible and intangible.

Verna defines these deliverables:

When we model business activity we get into the very specific kinds of exchanges that are critical for success and we define two types of exchanges. We call them tangible or intangible.Tangibles are those things that are formal, contractual. If you don’t do these somebody’s going to want their money back. The things you must do, the value that must be delivered. We also are modeling all of those intangibles or informal exchanges that really build relationships and help things run smoothly. That is what is missing from process modeling.

Value network modeling is something that allows us to understand the pattern of different activities within organization or within the same basic value network structure. It’s a very, very different way of thinking about who delivers value. I like to use red and black checker after creating a map and stack them on the individual roles. I use black for tangible and red for intangible. This way you can have a better visual on what role the customer derives the most value from and what kind of value the customer is seeking.

Below is a transcription of the podcast I had with Verna and I recommend that you view her website for more information and to download a map outline to try it out.

Verna Allee book: The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks

Applying Cellular Concepts to Marketing Segments

Posted by: business901 | Comments (0)

Cellular manufacturing is one of the most powerful Lean tools. It will allow for smaller lot production, quality improvements, and shorter lead times and simplifies the implementation of pull. Typical manufacturing systems had the same machines all grouped together and as a result batch type manufacturing was developed. As manufacturers developed cellular systems, they found quality improved and smaller lot quantities could be efficiently handled. Many of the work cells were rearranged into U-shaped or L-shaped patterns. This allowed one worker to operate several machines, which improved productivity. The benefits have been very well documented and applied to many industries.

Has quality suffered in sales and marketing? Many times, the customer seems to be more of an expert than the salesperson calling on them. Other times experts have to be brought in and duplication of manpower takes place. Many companies have a sales closer; sometimes a sales manager that comes in and has the power to close a prospect when ready.

In most sales and marketing applications, you have marketing assigned by their duties they do and salespeople assigned to certain accounts. Instead of this typical arrangement, what would prevent an organization from assigning personnel and cross-training them within one of the marketing stages? This way your team would become experts within the stage and be able to respond to the needs of a prospect better and more efficiently. Since they are handling the processes of the stage, that particular area would have a better chance of improving the methods utilized within it.

Take each individual stage and think about creating a work cell by defining the operations that take place within that stage. The number of resources within that stage will have to correlate to the number of prospects within the stage. It must be recognized that numbers don’t always work out perfectly or that certain talents may still have to be utilized in several different stages. But the quality of the interaction may increase with this type of system.

We have moved into a more collaborative cycle of business and many of us are considering that traditional marketing segmentation is not working. What would be the premise for segmentation by how a customer/prospect uses a product? I started this discussion in a blog post; Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?. If you have customers/prospects segmented by use, you may want to consider developing that stage as a community. Envision your own Ning Community site or Facebook page and build relationships versus a defined process to move prospects from one stage to the next. Many organizations do this in the after sale process utilizing clubs for example. But what if you had a community of early adaptors at the beginning of your funnel? Or a community of heavy users in the middle of the funnel? Would more innovation take place?

Customer Flow is not Linear or Controllable

Posted by: business901 | Comments (2)

Mark Tamis @ marktamis.com recently presented at the Selfservice Company UG and below is a copy of his slidedeck via slideshare. A blog post of Mark’s, Go With The Customer Flow is an insightful read. Read the entire thread to include the comments And…watch the video at the end of the blog post- exhilarating for a Monday morning!

What did Mark capture in this presentation? I believe that Mark actually depicts the Social Media Landscape accurately. Mark says, ”99% of interaction take place outside of Social Media!.” Many Social Media pundits will emphasize its importance and expand to be the focal point for delivering your message. The importance of Social Media has not been about delivering messages but how your “organization’s persona (brand)” has shifted to the hands of the public. This perspective is driving organizations to better understand customers through out the entire customer journey. An end to end value stream, where the focal point is the customer rather than internal operations that ends with a transaction.

Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel. Customers have the ability to access resources and information comparable to their suppliers and choose suppliers by their own definition of value and how that value should be created. The new wave of marketing has seen an entire new set of tools being used. No longer do we trust print media, radio, television and other forms of traditional media. The tools have all become a commodity. To make effective marketing decisions, you need a clear understanding of what the customer values and what your company strategy is to support them.