Lean Marketing House » Sales Channels

Pillars of the Lean Marketing House

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:00:00 +0000

This video series will explain the process I use in building the Lean Marketing House. This particular segment is an overview of the Pillars of the Lean Marketing House. It discusses the use of the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass, The Ultimate Marketing System and Segmentation of your Marketing Channels.

The entire series will be posted during this week.

Related Information:

The Pillar Worksheet

Lean Marketing House Overview – Video

Lean your Marketing thru Segmentation

admin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:15:00 +0000

How do you look at your marketing? Do you know where your leads come from? How are you processing leads to make them successful? In my recent blogs about marketing and the Theory of Constraints, I discussed the connections between each step of the marketing hourglass. Many organizations do not look at their sales and marketing process in a linear fashion, let alone segmenting it. When organizations first map out the process, they look at connections where people come from being all over the map such as the diagram to the right. They look at a simple chain as an oversimplification of reality. Not everybody goes through each step of the cycle. Some will skip from step one to step three. Someone may enter the cycle in step three. These interconnections are not trivial, it is what makes your process work and it also may be stopping it from working.

So what is the purpose? The purpose of creating the marketing hourglass is very simple: Which is harder to manage the above diagram or this diagram?

Your flow system, The Marketing Hourglass, structure will allow an organization to operate at maximum efficiency. The secret in creating such a linear flow is segmentation. Without it, you will continue to operate in less than an optimum manner. You will never be able to find your constraint, because it will be moving around, practically every single opportunity.

Different opportunities, normal variation and changing workforce make it just about impossible to balance everything. There is a weakest link; there is one element in your system more limiting than another. Why is it so important to find that? Without working on your greatest constraint much of your work will be wasted and non-productive. Take a look at the diagram above and see how proper segmentation may alter your perception of the marketing hourglass. As you can see, not all steps may be needed for each and every channel. An excellent example is someone that has been referred to you. With the proper referral program in place, you will know exactly what step in the process that person should enter.

Keep segmenting your list, till you gain a linear flow. Yes, there may be a few exceptions. However, I think it might be interesting to scrutinize those exceptions. Are these exceptions really your target market or ideal client? I think you might find out that they are something less than ideal clients. Whatever you do, don’t ignore the exceptions; they may prove valuable insights to your marketing process. That thought may lead to another discussion.

Using the Theory of Constraints in Marketing

The Marketing Hourglass

Using your Marketing HourGlass to determine your Constraint

Identifying your Marketing Constraint

Exploiting and Subordinating your Marketing Constraint

Elavating and Repairing Marketing Constraints

Technorati : Duct Tape Marketing, Goal, Marketing HourGlass, Sales-Channels, TOC, Theory of Constraints

Lean Marketing House – The Pillars

Dager — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:31:44 +0000

Above the foundation of the Lean House are the pillars. In a typical Lean House these pillars represent JIT, Jidoka(Quality) and Motivated People. This is from the Toyota Production System and they are actually in a certain order. Typically the middle pillar is described as the most important pillar and it is the one of motivated people.

In the Lean Marketing House, I use the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass description as the pillars and have included a horizontal representation of it below.

Picture courtesy of Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch has written some great blogs on this concept and so have I, maybe not as great though. ;) Anyway, the purpose of the Hourglass is that it is the actual conduit or vehicle we use to apply our foundation blocks. We decide on how we are going to use each of them to achieve the best results with our customers. For example we may use social media to enable people to get to know us and our website to gain more acceptance. We can have free trial offers to build trust, low-cost seminars for trial and so on. All of our foundation blocks are applied through these pillars only when a customer wants and needs them. The true concept of Lean Marketing.

The number of pillars represent the different sales/marketing channels that we create. Segmenting our customer database into as small as a group will always make marketing more effective. Consider a toothpick laying on its side and the strength that it has. Of course, it is very weak, but so will your marketing, when you are trying to be everything to everybody. Literally, your sales will be flat and the cost of marketing will be astronomically. However, if you stand the pillars up in the air, segment your customers using multiple channels your marketing becomes more effective. If you can magically make your actions flow upward, the Leaner your marketing gets. I envision your customer sucking on a straw pulling your marketing efforts up through the glass rather than you pushing it through. A little blue sky, but what the hey! Its marketing!

Technorati Tags: Lean Marketing House ,Lean ,Marketing ,Pillars ,Sales Channels ,Segmentation ,Duct Tape Marketing ,Hour Glass

Lean Marketing House