Archive for Six Sigma
Faster, Better, Cheaper is the Norm. What are you doing different!
Posted by: | CommentsThat’s right the old Mantra; Faster, Better, Cheaper is the norm nowadays. It really is not separating you from the crowd, it is only the average. How are you going to build Market Share? How are you going to be increase revenue? When you are only average? 
People start utilizing methodologies like Lean and Six Sigma and start showing remarkable improvements. However, the market is a living thing and most companies have a tendency towards improvement which means that the bar is being continuously raised. As a result the "average" continuous improvement project gets you absolutely nowhere. Unless you can make significant improvements there is only one way to make those improvements effective.
In any given product/market there are Critical to Quality components that are important to the customer that makes them buy your product over another. You may have the WOW, availability, price, etc. The market may define those CTQ’s or other CTQ’s differently and that is why they buy another product. The acronym may make it sound complicated but it really is not most of the time. I mean really does anyone buy an iPad for reliability or price. No, they buy it because it is cool and seemingly will make their life easier. You still have to be competent in other areas but they are not the driver of sales.
That dirty little secret is that most companies take an inside out approach to improvement and really don’t concentrate on the CTQ’s of the customer for retention and the CTQ’s of the market for acquisition. So if you take an outside in approach in improving quality you will improve more than the average guy and as a result improve market share and/or profits. It really is that simple.
I had three recent discussions on this very subject and they all took a slightly different approach but all had a central theme of Customer Value.
- Dr. Eric Reiedenbach when we discussed Best in Market on the podcast Applying Six Sigma Marketing to become Best In Market. Eric discussed finding the Critical to Quality Issues that determined how a Customer defined Value in your Product(Service)/Markets.
- Mike Bremer co-author of Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes
. Mike discussed tying all improvement efforts to the CTQ’s components and more specifically to your Value Proposition.
- Christine Moorman co-author of Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value. Christine discussed developing your strategies and the deployment of those strategies through an Outside in approach.
These are three very unique perspectives that really approach the issue of customer value totally different. They all take a different path, disdain average but arrive at the same place. They even agreed on the same metrics: Market Share and Profitability. I wonder if all three of them have found the Holy Grail?
Related Posts:
Profiting from Customer Value
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing
What does a Customer want?
Six Sigma Marketing introduces 5 Cs of Driving Market Share Webinar Series
Your Value Network Participants; Who are they?
Using Six Sigma for your Marketing Data?
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the reasons I am a proponent of using Six Sigma in Sales and Marketing is the importance of having meaningful data, Six Sigma provides the tools to do that. Doesn’t marketing already have data driven metrics to use? Six Sigma has a proven set of data collection tools and by utilizing a proven set of tools it gives marketers an opportunity to work on the need versus the tools.
There is more data than you really know what to do with and that’s a major concern, collecting unnecessary data is wasteful and harmful. It just adds a lot of noise. You need a template to follow. You have to look at meaningful data as your customer sees it.
I’ve been through a few marketing meetings and few of them are about what the numbers tell them. It’s a process based on intuition and if you ask, how did you get from here to here? Well let’s say you are not invited back. Looking at situations and relying on your intuition may mean to a large extent you’re simply guessing and in many cases it’s not an educated guess. Follow the facts. The facts will lead you to where you need to go.
It reminds of a story and I don’t know if it was green belt or black belt training at the time that I was going through. But they would show us, different scenarios of the story on the overhead and then they had us pick what we thought the outcome was. We would than put the data into a mini‑tab set. When we analyzed the data, the answers were practically counter‑intuitive. I can’t really say that anyone guessed the right answer from intuition.
How do you, how do you remedy that situation? You remedy by bringing information, numbers, facts, into the decision making process and you base your answer, your solution then on what those, what that data, what that information, what those numbers tell you. This makes for a much more informed decision. One that is, has got accountability to it too because if something’s wrong, if an outcome is not what we want it to be we will have the capacity to go back and see where we may have made a mistake in there, correct that mistake and then go forward again. But if you’re just operating on intuition what do you go back to?
The use of data in Six Sigma provides a disciplined, fact‑based data‑driven approach, so you measure things. Marketing does not measure to the extent that they should. That is why we say that a lot of marketing is intuition‑based or it is agenda‑based, but it is not data‑driven. That’s what Six Sigma Marketing would provide. For example, measuring how loyal your customer base is. You can actually put a number on it.
When you can put a number on something like that, than you can begin to manage it. That old saying, "If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it." I have never run across something more true in my whole life than that idea: If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. If marketing remains intuition‑based, it will prove very difficult to manage.
Just think if you never did any marketing that you could not put a number too. Can you imagine the power that you create? You decision making becomes a lot more focused. It is fact-based. It is data-driven. And when someone says, “We should be doing this,” you simply say, “Show me the numbers.”
All this comes from the ability to measure things!
This blog post is an excerpt from a conversation that I had with Eric Reidenbach in our discussion about the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share.
Audio Post: Role of Managing Data in Marketing
Related Posts:
Ur Customers Need
Another word for Marketing – How about Voice of the Customer?
If you are going to Improve, you have to know your math
Six Sigma Marketing
Marketing needs Six Sigma Methodology to Improve
Start Fixing Marketing Mistakes with a Process
Updated the Lean Marketing House
Posted by: | CommentsUpdated the Lean Marketing House with a short video that shows the utilization of Value Stream Marketing and the Marketing Kanban. A couple of glitches in the transition of slides. This is the first time I used MS Powerpoint 2010 to record within the program.
