Quickest way to deal with a Marketing Constraint, Slice it!

If we find the constraint what is the first thing we want to do, fix it. That’s our natural tendency. Many of us have learned to go through the Theory of Constraint Five Focusing Steps:

Identify the system’s constraint.
Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.
Subordinate everything else to the above decisions.
Elevate the system’s constraint.
Don’t allow inertia to become the system’s constraint.

This way we can fix it and increase throughput. In a previous post I stated:

Marketing Kanban, I like to use the constraint or the bottleneck as my control point. You can argue that you have an external constraint, outside of your marketing. If that is true, then the dollars and resources must be allocated appropriately. However, I would argue that there is a constraint within your organizations marketing cycle that is limiting your throughput. I believe that dealing with this constraint is easier, less costly and more efficient than dealing with trying to fill the funnel.

The overriding principle of the Theory of Constraints is that any work done outside of the constraint will not increase throughput. If you take that principle as a fact, than I would venture to say that any segmentation of your marketing that is not based at the constraint will provide little improvement.

Identifying the constraint however can be quite a chore in marketing. Finding it may be one thing and even changing it may be another. However, if the change is not so apparent there are a couple of things that I have learned from software developing people and primarily Donald Reinertsen author of The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. He suggest when attacking a bottleneck, you may prefer reducing batch size versus adding capacity. In the Marketing Kanban after identifying the constraint we would review the preceding queue. The action of filling that queue would be where we would want to segment our prospects or value stream.

The segmentation does not need to be equal. If you could just identify a portion of your value stream and become more targeted you would gain better and quicker feedback resulting in better management of the constraint. The smaller batch size is a proven method of increasing throughput.

Testing or qualifying a prospect is a key component of effective value stream management. With a reduction of batch sizes you can ask more direct questions of that group that will also allow for better sales management.

These methods lead to better reviews and knowledge of the process. When you are focusing on this process only at the constraint, you will see how this will effectively increase capacity at this point. So before you create a new website, re-do auto responders or ad capacity, you may want to simply slice a portion of your bottleneck creating several smaller segments.