Archive for Marketing-Hourglass
Speed may be the biggest Determent to your Marketing Success
Posted by: | CommentsThe company that gets to the customer first, the company that releases the product first, the company that slides in and closes the sale while you are still waiting to get the final specifications, all demonstrate how important speed is to your marketing success.
Speed is much, much more than the ability to run your customer through your marketing cycle. it is an integral part of building a marketing system that responds to customers needs. Having built in trigger points to help you identify your customers readiness to proceed to the next stage in your Marketing Hourglass is imperative. I discussed handing the baton off in an earlier post and how many times that gets dropped from one stage to the next. It is similar to an athlete starting the season off and building his “speed” back up. Or a student taking the same test after summer break and scoring lower. These things happen because of the lack of activity during the non -value added time that you have identified in your Value Stream Mapping Process. The lack of speed in your marketing process equates to the lack of engagement that you have with your customer. This can be one of the most effective uses of social media and a good content marketing strategy. The engagement of your customer is driven by the needs they identify with your product. Here are some examples of items that may help in decreasing that non-value added time.
1. Attempting to late or to early to move a customer to the next stage.
2. Not building upon the previous stage by starting with different content. You effectively lose the momentum that was built by the earlier stage.
3. Reinforce the previous stage. Creating the linkages between stages is extremely important. It is a great time for a warm-up.
4. Make sure the customer is on the right airplane. You have been there, even if it is embarrassing when the stewardess says this plane is headed to Detroit, and you are not going there: you are getting off. If a customer is not ready for this stage give him a graceful exit and provide them an opportunity to get off, or you may lose him forever.
5. Make a better offer. Each stage should create a better offer than the previous. You have a more qualified customer at this stage so treat them that way.
6. Create interactive platforms or trials that the customer can use or interact with to solve some of their problems. This happens quite frequently in the construction business when someone leases a bulldozer to a contractor or online with free downloadable software.
7. A superior call to action, an offer that cannot be refused to go the next stage.
Even with these improvements, without a marketing system in place to monitor results and improve upon them, you will fall behind. Speed is not automation. Automation can be a component of developing speed but don’t mistake the use of automation. People even in the online society we have created. They still want conversation and personal connection surrounding the product and especially the service they may purchase. They want a live body behind the curtain or in our case the Marketing Hourglass.
P.S. People mistake Lean for being just about waste. It is about speed too.
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Improve your Marketing Cycle, Increase your Revenue
Have you listed all your delivery processes? What did you learn?
The Pillar Worksheet – Lean Marketing House
Posted by: | CommentsThis video series will explain the process I use in building the Lean Marketing house. This particular segment is an overview of the Pillar Worksheet that is an integral part of Lean Marketing House.
The entire series will be posted during this week.
Improve your Marketing Cycle, Increase your Revenue
Posted by: | CommentsThe very best thing about organizing and systemizing your marketing is that you now have more tools at your disposal to understand and facilitate not manipulate your customer’s efforts. One of the tools, I found quite useful after working with the hourglass is the use of Cycle time. A Value Stream Map is quite useful in visualizing and providing calculations for cycle time.
Before I go into the explanation, the question should probably be: Who Cares? Throughput or decreasing your Marketing Cycle time can have very beneficial results. If you put customers through the cycle quicker it will more than likely increase revenue. If it takes 1 person 60 days in a normal cycle time, and you reduce it to 30, you should be able to double sales for any given period. It may also reduce expenses as there would be less people in the cycle at any given period. So increasing throughput is good.
If you look at the chart below, you will see the cycle time depicted in a value stream map. The blocks represent our value added marketing efforts. The empty spaces the non-value added time or waste. I am not going to be so naive and say that you can remove all that non-value added time and close a sale in 3 days. The point that I am delivering is that: you must learn how to mange the non-value time more effectively. Most companies deliver good presentations, advertise and get good PR. Where they fall short is handing the baton from one stage to the next. Non-activity turns marketing rotten. Even with good (refrigeration) techniques our leads may go stone cold.
If you can make an effort to understand the customer’s process during this time, significant gains may be made. Your actual processing time is insignificant in marketing. It is the lead time between the processes that are important. Consider, for example, if we would increase the offer to transfer from one stage to the next Stage. Or maybe, you have noticed that quicker conversions happen when they attend a webinar. What would happen if we paid them to come to the Webinar? You may find out segmenting your process halfway through the cycle would allow customers to better understand the results that they may gain from your product. Many of your features and benefits may be confusing certain prospects that don’t care for them anyway.
Total cycle time can be improved. It seldom can be done without more feedback loops in your system. Speed is important in the buying process. Develop process blitzes to reduce these non-value times. Go to Gemba or the customer’s place of work and find out what happens during this time. See what is stopping him from moving forward. It may be an internal constraint within their company. However, the constraint may be yours. Your responsiveness to the customers latest needs and the ability to focus your resources with enough but not too much material providing better clarity. He needs this to make a more rapid decision.
Create a vision of shorter cycle time, greater segmentation of your customers, it will enable you to do fewer actions in the cycle and much quicker. “It not the big that ate the small. It’s the fast that eat the slow” – Jason Jennings. Cycle times need to be addresses and improved. What methods are you using to accomplish this?
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