Applying Value in your Marketing process is not the only thing that is important. In today’s marketing managing the stream is becoming equally more important. I alluded to this concept when I discussed E-mail providers in a previous post. I concentrated on the value and the touch points within your Marketing Hourglass. Just as important though is the Stream or Flow of the process. Without managing this, you will end up creating a great deal of wasted effort in your marketing process.

Of course when I start discussing flow, I am going to start discussing Theory of Constraints. In your marketing process, you will have numerous constraints but Goldratt claims that at any given time, there is only one constraint. That constraint is much like the neck of an hourglass and will limit the entire system. Actually, if it is well managed you could throttle your process accordingly (We only wish we could that). Simply doubling the efforts in a constraint could be the easy solution and may just move the constraint to another area. However, we operate in a more complicated world than that. Something else usually cases something else to happen.

What is that something else? It is the marketplace. What we see in our constraints may not be problems but indicators. If we treat the perceived problem without really determining the root cause we just may go in a merry-go-round. It would be like just adding sales people. You could double your sales capacity and that may or may not increase sales. In fact, what typically happens is additional responsibilities are given to salespeople and you off-load other stages of your Marketing Hourglass to them without increasing sales. You did not find your root cause. The good or bad part is that your indicator will return because the constraint really never went away.

David Armano just wrote a blog post on Dynamic Signals for Business and how rapidly dynamic signals are transmitted and received. He discusses how Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority, but now the real-time Web behaves differently. It is about trending topics, and SEARCH JUST CAN’T REACT QUICK ENOUGH. He goes on and discusses how he receives trending information, and what they mean to him.

So marketing today has to address value and the content they are distributing. However, as importantly, they have to address the time or the stream of their marketing system. The acceleration or throughput is extremely important. Creating systems within our process that are efficient and propels customers through the Marketing Hourglass or Sales Cycle is imperative. Our days of leaving non-responsive customers on our mailing list, online or offline are ending. Creating advertising to the masses and expecting a reasonable return have already ended for small and maybe even medium size businesses. These statements are not meant to say that we only market to someone for 90 or 120 days and that’s it. It is more inline that we have to create interactive platforms that allow our customers to interact at their leisure, their timing and at their discretion. A good description of pull marketing, but how do you manage a stream?

You must understand your Marketing Stream well enough to have a throttle. You must know where your constraint is, maybe even on a seasonal basis. You must address indicators that are built into your process and not built into month-end reports. I look at my Google analytics daily. If I see web traffic dropping from referral sites, I realize that I am spending too much time pushing my message versus participating with others.

What are the real-time indicators within your business? Do you have a monitoring system that lets you know? Do you adjust your marketing message accordingly? Are you improving your stream with better information to qualify yourself to the customer? If you are proving a higher value of information to the customer, does that propel them through your marketing hourglass?

If you believe that your referral process is a sub-standard or your constraint, it may be a way to create an immediate impact in your process. Applying a couple of these principles to the bottom of the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass in the refer stage. If you worked in this area alone and increased testimonials and referrals, what would it do for you? Could you reduce the time spent in your hourglass? Do you give every customer the opportunity to refer and to provide testimonials? Try a few of ideas and see if you can get a handle on your throttle.

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