Value Stream Marketing – Reduce your Work in Process

Many people believe that applying Lean Techniques using Value Stream Marketing is all 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.

Reduce your Work in Process (WIP)

After you have determined the steps of your marketing cycle this becomes your Value Stream. Typically, you will have more than one. This is when a Marketing Kanban comes into use to visualize the flow and the WIP. Create a Kanban for each Value Stream that you can reasonably map. Visualizing the process step by step will improve the overall system performance. I like the visualization trick of thinking about lowering the water in the river. When you do, the rocks will appear and it will be easier to navigate around them. The larger rocks may be prospects that you have not adequately defined a solution or your product is not a perfect fit. Other rocks or channels may have to many hidden cost or layers of distribution. There can be numerous areas of concern but mapping them brings the rocks to the surface so that they are noticed. By the way, you may have a couple of channels that have no rocks appearing at all.

Don’t be worried about producing too many Value Streams, we can combine a few later or decide not to manage certain ones. The different channels create a lower level of flow (wider river) and more rocks to appear. It also identifies and reduces variation which just about always is the reason people believe it will not work. This is similar to the concern many manufacturing companies have about reducing batch sizes to gain continuous flow. Defining the exact Value Stream will be the single most important factor in increasing flow and reducing your WIP.

Reducing your Work in Process requires that it becomes a physical process. You must put real numbers and real events on your Kanban Board. The measurements that you determined in Protect Sales become real. Your direct mail pieces may be only bringing a 3% response. Your Auto-responders converting only 10% of your prospects into attending a webinar or downloading an eBook. As you visualize the process try to get a feel for the pace and look for missing areas. A Value Stream Mapping trick is to chunk certain areas of the Value Stream grouping them. This will help you assign responsibilities and find missing or extra steps in the process. This is also a great time to remove a little of the low-hanging fruit. However, this is not the time for wholesale changes this is a time for you start gaining knowledge that you did not have before.

This is actually your first step in developing a pull system. You will start seeing overproduction or bottlenecks and on the flip side you will see where you may be starving a resource. This is the time that you will get a feeling of what leveling and pace is all about. Many times you can identify these areas of concern and limit or re-channel incoming prospects into underutilized resources. Further defining your steps and more specifically creating a Kanban board will help you see that next step. That physical point of a handoff or a transaction to that next step is very important. With hardly any effort at all you begin creating a pull system and leveling the demand.

This Part 2 of the 4-part Series: Part one – Good Marketing should minimize your Pipeline