Archive for Value-Stream-Mapping
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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Have you listed all your delivery processes? What did you learn?
Posted by: | CommentsDeveloping a Marketing hour glass for a client, I was using my Systems2win Family Matrix Chart(it’s a plug). The chart is not that unique in that it has you list your product services down one side and then across the top it has you list your Delivery processes. The uniqueness of the template is a few other tricks it has as part of the package, but I wanted to address your delivery processes. BTW, this template is a great way to start your journey in creating a Value Stream Mapping process. 
What this template forced me to do with this customer is to identify first his product groups or services and then his marketing delivery process. Listing all the delivery processes across the top identifies the foundation in the Lean Marketing house. As I placed an “X” in the box. It is good to identify your marketing processes it of course helps you with budgeting, but it really is the first step in moving from just a simple marketing calendar to a marketing system.
Building this process allows you to discover:
1. Each Medium you are using for your marketing.
2. The overlap of the marketing message of your different products.
3. The uniqueness of several of your processes.
4. What items happen with the most frequency, the least.
5. The time it takes for the process.
6. Where a constraint may be on a resource!
However, after really reviewing the document for a while it was blatantly obvious, which of these of processes were important and were not to the customer. HOW MUCH TIME WERE WE SPENDING ON THE WERE NOTS?
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Have you taken the path of your customer?
Posted by: | CommentsOne of my steps in working with a client is that I like to put together their Marketing calendar to understand what they have on the table, events, conferences, advertisement, fliers, etc. They usually have some type of marketing in place, and we are looking at improving the system not dismantling it. After the marketing calendar has been constructed, I start moving, sometimes just the post-it-notes from a chronological order to a marketing flow stream based on the customers’ viewpoint. We could even call it an assessment, but initially I am just on a fact finding mission, in Lean terms = Current State Map.
However, this week the procedure took a strange turn. I completed the process but I happen to know one of the client’s customer very well. So, after constructing this hour glass with the new client, I was able to sit down with his customer and my friend and map the process from the customers’ point of view. Voice of Customer seems to an over-used word in our industry but this was one of my best experiences. We actually pulled the clients file from the customers file cabinet, reviewed the folders on his computer including e-mails and bookmarks. I then laid out all the marketing material that had accumulated, highlighted and even taking note of the bent corners in the catalog. This was all followed by an interview.
Of course, my sample size of 1 is not a good indicator. The key to this process was the awaking to the client and myself on what the customer valued and what his procedure was in making the decision. His process was simply different. We talk about going to Gemba and walking the walk from the customers’ point of view, but do we? How much non-effective marketing could you save by doing this? How much effecting marketing could you implement?
P.S. Use a larger sample size.
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Is your Value Stream Mapping backwards?
Another word for Marketing – How about Voice of the Customer?
