Lean Sales and Marketing Cycles are Knowledge Building Tactics

When you discuss Lean Sales and Marketing, PDCA Cycles and how Continuous Improvement can be used; people jump to a couple of basic conclusions. When you throw in additional words like quality, effectiveness and efficiencies they dig deeper and more often than not forget to take a ladder with them. Many of my writings even follow this path because it is just so intuitive to attack continuous improvement efforts from this view. The typical conclusions are:

1. Lean Sales and Marketing will increase our effectiveness and efficiencies on a project by project basis. We will better utilize people, processes, practices and products to do this.

2. Lean Sales and Marketing will increase flow through our sales and marketing cycles, the marketing funnel metaphor.

There is nothing wrong with improving your sales and marketing through these two methods. I encourage this and both of these concepts are very dominate in previous books, Marketing with A3 and the Lean Marketing House. But there may be a better path and you may be better served by taking a step back and looking into the hole versus jumping in it.

I start taking a deeper dive in my book, Marketing with PDCA;

For starters, the funnel metaphor is broken. People no longer are making buying decisions in a linear fashion, going from awareness to familiarity to consideration, evaluation, and purchase or perhaps they never did. Second, people are now turning to their peers, friends, and other users of a particular product for advice instead of to the company. Third, the potential number of choices that prospects can have in their product consideration set is much larger than it has ever been before, and the information sources through which those products can become part of buyers’ consideration sets has grown exponentially as well.

But this is where I think people stray, when I say,

Quit looking at trying to fill you funnel with “qualified” prospects. Instead participate in communities and discussions that highlight your knowledge, developing an ever-expanding network of touch points that allow prospects to self-serve information and to locate you. Think of ways for trials or templates of your organization’s best practices to be used that will allow prospects to move into a more collaborative arrangement. As this happens, greater human interaction occurs but typically as a result of the customers qualifying themselves.

Sounds like your typically social media mumble jumble but most including myself seldom see or appreciate that view when you are down fighting in the trenches. Try to take a step back and look at the cycle or iteration from more of a big picture viewpoint. This is where the joint meeting between the Value Stream Manager, Team Coordinator and Team Leader can be so critical.

A sales and marketing cycle consist of numerous decision making steps of a customer. The customer (prospect) may be in the awareness (pull), buy or upsell stage of the process. What we attempt to do is move them “through the stage” as in the marketing funnel metaphor versus leaving them experience that individual stage. For example: most of time, no matter what stage a prospect enters, they enter it through a data collection or information seeking process step (See blog post: Changing the shape of your marketing funnel!). The Lean Sales and Marketing process moves the customer not through a pre-determined sequence of events but instead through a hierarchy or increasing knowledge from data to wisdom.

The flow through each stage is not time based. It is not an iterative cycle such as scrum cycle of two to four weeks. That seldom works; the customer is in control. Instead, I prefer to use more of a Kanban type structure. Taking each stage of the Data through Wisdom hierarchy creating the columns and queues and visualize the work flow that way. Limiting the work in process for teams is essential since a higher degree of interaction and many times expertise happens as we go through the progression of the Kanban. Visualizing the cycle in this way allows you to look at how you can “improve the knowledge of the customer” during the cycle or from one stage to the next. think about:

How are you going to take that data and translate it into information and later knowledge?
How are you going to go from the What and When and move the conversation to the How and Why?
How are you transferring efficiency conversations to effectiveness conversations?

This viewpoint develops a better understanding of the customer needs and the required responses that are needed.

Theory of Constraint flow concepts can be readily apply in the progression. Many people when finding a constraint assign more resources. In the TOC world, we know that adding another “Herbie” (resource) is sometimes impractical. Just as hiring another superstar salesperson seldom is the answer. In lieu of trying to increase the rapid flow of customers through the cycle, view the constraint as a poor transfer of knowledge. Don’t try to attack the problem from your point of view. This is where the concepts of design thinking and prototyping become useful. Use these tools to uncover what knowledge the customer/prospect is missing in their decision process. What will allow them to make their decision easier? Or, it may not even be a decision? It may be an idea of that needs to mature and they are just trying to put pieces together. As you do this, more of these concepts that seem strange to you start to shape. Collaboration and Co-creation cease to be words that you read about in blogs. They start becoming reality.