Archive for Six Sigma
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
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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.
The Marketing Funnel using Six Sigma – Control Stage
Posted by: | CommentsThe first 4-steps of the DMAIC process answered the questions: What is important, how are we doing, what is wrong and what needs to be done? We also considered the marketing funnel stages of Awareness, consider, prefer and evaluate. The fifth stage of the process in DMAIC is Control and in the Marketing funnel it is the commit or buy stage. This is where in Six Sigma we document the process and standardize meeting critical to quality (CTQ) issues.
This step involves taking the improvements and implementing them. We will document standard operating procedures, create are process control plans, and establish a control process. The one final step is handing off the process or transitioning the process for implementation. It is imperative that we create an operation that is stable, predictable and meets the customer requirements. This is the implementation supported by documentation and project management to put all the work into practice. Another way of saying this is how we are going to guarantee performance.
In the marketing funnel it comes down to the basic decision to commit or buy the product or service. As I said in my last post, clarity is the number one issue that may prevent you from succeeding if you meet root cause. Customers want consistency. At this stage, you will see price and confidence that you can deliver what you say seemingly becoming the greatest issues. If price was the overwhelming issue, just think of how many times you have lost a job to a better known brand. Why? Security and your lack of ability to address the root cause with unquestionable clarity.
The Control process of Six Sigma can certainly teach us a few things. Creating an operation that delivers a stable and predictable outcome is the purpose of not only the Control stage but the entire DMAIC process. If you have identified predictable measures that the customer can visualize and satisfy the root cause of his problem, you are well on your way of obtaining commitment.
Another stage of Control is handing off of the project for implementation. How many marketing projects are not supported by sales or vice versa? Sales efforts can be undermined especially when the process is does not monitor predictable results. The ability to control this stage of the process may prevent you from caving into unreasonable demands that prospects may place upon you. However, most worries are not about the prospect but in the effort to close sales many organizations will take their eye off the target and take jobs that may or not solve the root problem for the customer. Seldom in that circumstance will you deliver the product or service that the customer is hoping for. It may even be over delivering, which not only is wasted but to the prospect unclear and not evaluated appropriately. Sales will look at this as part of these results and either determines that there is a greater degree of flexibility in the product/service than there is and/or that pricing could be adjusted because the next customer may not need all this. This is not a problem of sales, you have built the platform and handed off a poorly designed control phase. Build a process management plan for implementation and establishing ongoing measure and methods to be used for improvement will facilitate your process.
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