Value Stream Mapping your Sales Team

In my Microsoft Newsletter, I received the following enticement:

Find, Keep, and Grow Customer Relationships with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Start Your 30-Day Free Trial Today!

Today, businesses are asked to do more with less. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online delivers exceptional value because it combines your everyday Microsoft Office applications with powerful CRM software accessed over the Internet to rapidly improve marketing, boost sales, and enrich customer service interactions. Try it now for 30 days!

I am trying it this week but what I wanted to share is a piece of the collateral information, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Power Couple. In this PDF, MSN highlighted the Customer Decision Making Process aka Mirror Marketing( Your Marketing Funnel from your Customer’s Perspective.) but extended the concept to show the process from several other points of view.

I have always been an advocate of seeking Sales and Marketing’s response to each of the customer’s decision steps but MSN (they are selling software), highlighted the technology enabler and a team response to the Customer Value Stream process. This simple exercise utilizing a high level Value Stream Map can really get your individual departments on the same page!

In my recent work, I have been advocating breaking down the Sales Silo and making Sales a team effort. In most organizations, I have been met with strong resistance to this concept. Most sales people look at as another silly initiative and most internal people see sales as a vehicle to customer data. As a result, sales resist and rightfully so preventing themselves from becoming an extended clerk. However, the approach really should be about how to increase face time with the customer. The #1 enabler of increased sales.

Create your own sales team by reviewing who responds to your Customer’s Value Stream Map. Start having a few meetings, similar to a daily standup meeting which may not be feasible. I would recommend at first error in having the meeting to often, just cut them short. In a spirit of true collaboration, don’t automatically exclude your customer from the team. This concept really could increase face time! 

Related Posts:
Is your Value Stream Mapping backwards?
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept
Mirror Marketing eBook

Six Sigma Marketing Institute releases Audio Program

This is the audio section of the program I use to provide the basis for Customer Value in my Lean Marketing programs.  The series serves as a template for organizations needing to change from a customer satisfaction focus to a customer value focus. It has been deployed in a number of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies and has produced positive market share growth.

Author Dr. R. Eric Reidenbach says, "For organizations that have deployed Six Sigma or other quality initiatives, the 5 Cs approach provides a user friendly bridge for moving the quality focus from the manufacturing floor to the marketplace. Those seeking to become best in market must shift their focus from a product orientation to a market orientation, from an internal efficiency focus to an external focus. Best in market companies will be those that can make this transformation and make it soon."

The Five Cs gives you excellent background knowledge on how to build an effective and efficient marketing data set based on customer value. Customer Value is the only true measure for Driving Market Share. Learn the process of transitioning to using Value as a basis for Driving Marketing Share. 5 CD program or instant download that includes the titles:

1. Customer Identification
2. Customer Value
3. Customer Acquisition
4. Customer Retention
5. Customer Monitoring

Digital MP3 Download…$49.99

 

Audio CD Package……$79.99

 

Six Sigma Marketing is a fact-based, disciplined approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. The Six Sigma Marketing Institute is dedicated to the advancement and deployment of Six Sigma Marketing. At the heart of SSM is a modified DMAIC process that provides the architecture for growing top line revenues and market share.

More about the rest of program can be found at DrivingMarketShare.com.t.

Disclosure: I participated in the creation of this program and have a vested interest in the success of i

Related Information
Press Release: Six Sigma Marketing Institute releases the 5Cs of Driving Market Share
Applying Six Sigma Marketing to become Best In Market
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Value Stream Mapping differs in Lean Marketing
Can Voice of Customer deliver?

Who has Influenced My Thinking on Flow

Who are your most influential people on a particular subject? I started thinking of this after interviewing Don Reinertsen Tuesday’s Podcast, on the subject of Flow.

In my mind, the founding father on this subject was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (notice in the middle of his last name the word ZEN). I can remember first reading his book and later buying the tape series. I dangerously listened to it on a late night drive home. At one in the morning after driving 400 miles it was tough. That heavy Eastern European accent building a case for FLOW even though an eye opening subject it was not made to keep your eyes open. The secret of course was purchasing ice cream bars along the way!

This is not a resounding introduction to the video below but you may be quite surprised by the video it gives a good over view and if filled with background music from David Brubeck.

 

The subject of Flow is important to the marketing process. Understanding how your Customer flows through the decision making process in buying, becoming a loyal customer and recommending your product is essential. In fact, you lose the most customers when the flow stops or in between stages (Queue) of your marketing process. Understanding your Customer’s Flow should be at the root of all your marketing processes.

When I think of Flow, these our the people/books that have had the most influence on my thinking. Do you have any to add?

Amazon Links:

1. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
2. The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
3. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
4. Managing the Design Factory
5. Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos
   
6. Value Stream Mapping for Lean Development: A How-To Guide for Streamlining Time to Market
7. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
8. Kanban
9. Personal Kanban(Release Date in November 2010).
   

Blog Posts:
Constant Feedback makes for Continuous Work Flow
Marketing Kanban Cadence
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Value Stream Mapping your Marketing
Flow

Storyboards give Insights to Space and Time

Would like to have additional insights to your customers’ ACTIONS? Maybe, even additional insight to your organizations RE-ACTIONS? The benefits to visualizing your processes have been proven over and over again with the practices of Mindmaps, Value Stream Mapping, Process Charts, Charts, and other visual tools to include Powerpoint! Through the use of Storymapping, you can extend these tools and create a more graphical description. I believe this adds more insight to the process through a better understanding of space and time. 

In the book, Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity, author David Sibbet points out to some of the successful companies that utilize the Storymapping Process. We are not talking Disney or Pixlar but maybe less creative types.

Examples of organizations that have achieved great results this way include:

• National Semiconductor shared its turnaround vision worldwide in the early 1990s, and in tour years achieved 95% vision recognition throughout the company.
• Hewlett Packard Labs shared potential new business ideas to top management using plotter-generated murals instead or slides.
• Ralcy's top management shared its history, vision of the future, and strategy of their grocery store chain store with managers.
• Save the Redwoods League shared its vision, strategies, and goals with all its stakeholders in three different 5 year planning processes.
• VISA corporation orients all new employees with a large graphic history (updated three times so far).
• Adobe Systems created a graphic history of Adobe and Macromedia when the two organizations merged.
• The RE-AMP collaborative illustrated bow its system works to the 120 environmentally oriented non-govcrnmciit organizations and I5 foundations at its annual meeting in the upper midwest. They also used large charts to map progress toward their goal of cleaning up
  global warming pollutants in the energy industry.
• Nike communicated its visions for its Treasury function, and then later for its IT function using large Storymaps.
• National Academy Foundation designed large Storymaps to illustrate its process of establishing high school learning academies.
• The San Francisco Film Society used a large Storymap as a centerfold for its five-year business plan focused on growing this very successful, full-service film arts organization.

They went on to further explain the results of the National Semiconductor Vision Map in more detail stating:

Every top executive could tell this story, using this mural as a backdrop. It shows the overall vision to the far right, the history to the left, leading to the unassembled spaceship represented current realities. Critical business issues lie in front of the ship. Key values are the windows. Marketing messages are in the talk balloons. The top of the spaceship illustrates the new organization. The way forward has question marks intentionally; because Amelio wanted to enroll the rest of the organization in redesign. This vision got 95% recognition in employee surveys by 1994.

So how can you use Storymaps in your business? Use it as a communication tool. People learn through pictures and it directly engages people if designed correctly. A Storymap won’t do it all. You still have to show up and tell the story. However, having all the information visible allows a person to leave the story unfold as they tell it. I like the big visuals where everyone can soak in the entire picture as you are talking.

After the presentation, leave the Storyboard up or have small handouts. I thought the added question marks in Amelio’s Vision were an excellent way to stimulate additional thoughts. Welcoming and having additional post-it-notes lying around so that ideas can easily be added is the best form of suggestion box that you can have. They can be anonymous or not and I would encourage a different color so that you can tell that they were added at a glance.

The authors went on to suggest a few ideas that Storyboards could be used for…

• Orienting to histories and culture of an organization.
• Communicating the need for change.
• Understanding driving forces in an industry.
• Understanding customer needs.
• Sharing new visions and strategies.
• Sharing implementation plans.
• Communicating new process designs

The above picture may represent a persons experience in purchasing a car. What they consider: price, payments, usability, function, gas mileage, looks. Storyboarding the process out tells me a little more on how they look at it, what is important to them.and what the choice says about them. It is not much easier to develop your sales and marketing process from this description? 

Lean has always relied on Value Stream Mapping as one of its core tools. Six Sigma Storyboards have also been popularized to document the project results. In my opinion, both of these seem to follow to rigorous of a process and don’t include some of the great visualizations tools that exist. The Agile, Kanban and Scrum contingencies have introduced a much more visual aspect to their boards. Even assigning cartoon characters to people to designate who is responsible for the task. The point is allowing a little fun in the process not only creates a better environment but also enhances and extends the learning experience.

Picture Credit: http://www.sketchartist.tv

Related Blogs:
Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
The Disney Way
Using DMAIC for your A3 Report in the Lean Marketing House
Lean Six Sigma Storyboard
Crafting your Storyboard
Converting Storyboarding to Marketing or Value Stream Mapping
Storyboarding for Business

Lean Marketing House ebook

Lean Marketing is the Future of Marketing

Released as an ebook, Lean Marketing House is now available on the Business901 website. "When you first hear the terms Lean and Value Stream most of our minds think about manufacturing processes and waste. Putting the words marketing behind both of them is neither creative nor effective. But the future of marketing may be closely related more to these terms than you may first think. Whether Marketing meets Lean under this name or another it will be very close to the Lean methodologies developed in software primarily under the Agile connotation,

The book uses the symbolic Lean House to symbolize the five basic principles of Lean:

1. Identify Value (Roof)
2. Map Value Stream (Header)
3. Create Flow (Value Stream – Pillars)
4. Establish Pull (Foundation)
5. Seek Perfection (Base)

In addition to these five sections, the book also includes a section on Lean Tools and Tips for the marketing process. The book consist of 112 pages and over 40,000 words. The book is the first in the series of the Marketing with Lean Program: This series consist of the five individual products.

1. Lean Marketing House
2. Driving Market Share
3. Value Stream Marketing
4. Using A3 in Marketing
5. Marketing your Black Belt

Related Information:
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …
The Pull in Lean Marketing

Quallaboration Video

I follow up to the Quallaboration Podcast with Jim Benson is this you tube video of the same name. Jim did a lightning talk about a recent project.

About Jim Benson: His company, Modus Cooperandi, helps organizations change through the application of Lean principles, Agile methodologies, and social media. He is also the developer of the productivity tool Personal Kanban, an adaptation of Industrial Kanban. His book on Personal Kanban, which applies Lean thinking to daily living, will be out in the Fall of 2010.

Related Posts:
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Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing

Is Training within Industry (TWI) old hat?

Jim Huntzinger has over twenty years experience developing lean enterprises through system design and development, implementation, and guiding organizations both strategically and tactically through the transformation process. Currently he is the president and founder of the Lean Accounting Summit, TWI Summit, and Lean and Green Summit. The podcast is a good introduction to TWI and a current synapse on where it is at today.

Huntzinger has also researched at length the evolution of manufacturing in the United States with an emphasis on lean's influence and development. He has researched and worked to re-deploy TWI (Training Within Industry) within industry and uncovered its tie with the Toyota Way. He is also developing the history of Ford’s Highland Park plant and its direct tie to Toyota’s business model and methods of operation. 

 

TWI Summit: Training Within Industry is needed more now, in this down economy, than ever before. It was in a time of crisis that TWI proved its worth more than 60 years ago, and leading organizations are turning to TWI again. Why?

• Get more done with less machines and manpower
• Improve quality, reduce scrap by achieving standard work across workers and shifts
• Reduce safety incidents
• Decrease training time, especially for temporary workers
• Reduce labor hours
• Reduce grievances
• Transfer knowledge from a skilled, retiring workforce to an unskilled, green workforce

He authored the book, Lean Cost Management: Accounting for Lean by Establishing Flow, was a contributing author to Lean Accounting: Best Practices for Sustainable Integration, and has authored many articles including the ground-breaking article, Roots of Lean - Training Within Industry: The Origin of Kaizen.

P.S. Jim is also a contributor to the Lean Edge.

Related Posts:
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The Kaizen Event, A Critical Component of Xerox’s Customer Experience

Thinking Process and System Thinking in Management eBook

This is a transcription of a podcast with Bill Dettmer, Senior Partner of Goal Systems International. Bill is the author of The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving ) and Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy, two books around which Goal Systems International’s internationally renowned Thinking Process Course is based. An excerpt form the book.

Joe:  One of the things that ‑ and this is going to be my Six Sigma side coming out. Don't you have to support all this with data? You can't be intuitive about everything because sometimes just the outward appearance of something lies to you if you don't have the supporting data.

Bill:  Yes, you're absolutely right. Where does the data become most important? The data is most important in the identification of the problem. It's not in the creation of the solution because that's a projection of what should happen in the future. It's not in the establishment of the goal and the necessary conditions because those are value judgments. But, when you start to analyze what the problem is, in other words when you're building the current reality tree, that's where data become really important. One of the key lessons I try to convey in my thinking process courses is the most critical of all of the categories of legitimate reservation is entity existence.

Systemizing your Approach to Management with Bill Dettmer

Related Podcast: Systemizing your approach to management, Podcast with Bill Dettmer

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Thinking Process and System Thinking in Management eBook

Great discussion on Content Marketing

Jason Fried is the founder and CEO of 37signals. Fried is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear, and elegant web-based user interface design. He spearheaded the concept, design, and development of Basecamp, 37signal?s web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers, and creative services firms. Fried is also the co-author of Defensive Design for the Web.

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Value Stream your process thru Lean Accountancy

In this eBook, we discussed how accountants need to become an integral part  of the other departments. No longer can accountants only relay past financial data. They need to participate in the Value Streams with real time numbers which will enable other departments to make quicker and more accurate decisions. Lean Accountants are simply spending more of their time on the shop floor these days.

This is a transcription of the podcast with Ross Maynard, a Senior Consultant with BMA Europe Ltd., and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

Managing Value Streams using Lean Accounting

Related Podcast: Rapid Decision Making enabled thru Lean Accounting

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Can Voice of Customer deliver?
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Quality and Collaboration eBook

The relationship between Quality and Collaboration, Quallaboration was the topic of a recent podcast with Jim Benson, the person behind Personal Kanban. This is a transcription of the podcast. I typically edit the podcast, so you may find some new material in the transcription.

Quallaboration eBook Transcription

About Jim Benson: Jim incorporates his background in cognitive psychology, government, and management to build community through policy and technology. His company, Modus Cooperandi, helps organizations change through the application of Lean principles, Agile methodologies, and social media. He is also the developer of the productivity tool Personal Kanban, an adaptation of Industrial Kanban which helps individuals and small teams actualize. His book on Personal Kanban, which applies Lean thinking to daily living, will be out in Fall 2010.

Related Information:
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Quallaboration Podcast with Personal Kanban Founder
Constant Feedback makes for Continuous Work Flow
Personal Kanban
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Can Six Sigma and Marketing Co-exist

In my journey over the past few years to bring a Continuous Improvement philosophy to marketing, I have primarily focused on Lean and identifying the individual Value Streams though segmentation. Lean was a much easier methodology to implement and utilize. As I continued with a customer, I found the Six Sigma toolbox provided me a stronger set of analytical tools that was needed in handling the vast amount of data. In any case, I practice a mixture of Lean and Six Sigma. Transferring this philosophy to other marketers and Lean/Six Sigma Practitioners has been very difficult with each side very skeptical of the other.

Working the past several months with Dr. Eric Reidenbach of Six Sigma Marketing Institute to develop the program the 5Csof Driving Market Share has provided a much clearer path or the bridge between the two methodologies. In the program, we challenge the way both the Six Sigma community and the marketing area think about business and the way they currently do business. It does so by providing a detailed and structured approach one that is entirely data driven to unleash the power of Six Sigma on the crucial need of Customer Value for revenue growth. An outline of that bridge between Marketing and Six Sigma is provide in the table below.

Related Posts:
Lean your Marketing by Dominating with Customer Value
Value Stream Mapping differs in Lean Marketing
Can Voice of Customer deliver?
Unclear Customer Value leads to Failure

The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot Revisited

The recent resurgence or maybe recognition of the use of the The OODA Loop has resurfaced recently as a basis for much of the current ideas surrounding Iterations, Rapid Development Cycles and Decision Making. What makes the OODA Loop such a popular subject? When we first think of the OODA Loop we think of fast competitive cycles needed by a fighter pilot to gain a differential advantage.  Is that the reason?

A little more insight was provided several years ago in an article, The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot written by: Keith H. Hammonds for Fast Company several years ago. An excerpt of the article:

Business is a dogfight. Your job as a leader: Outmaneuver the competition, respond decisively to fast-changing conditions, and defeat your rivals. That's why the OODA loop, the brainchild of "40 Second" Boyd, an unconventional fighter pilot, is one of today's most important ideas in battle or in business.

Bower and Hout's classic example -- and one that Boyd also studied -- was Toyota, which designed its organization to speed information, decisions, and materials through four interrelated cycles: product development, ordering, plant scheduling, and production. Self-organized, multifunctional teams at Toyota, they observed, developed products and manufacturing processes in response to demand, turning out new models in just three years compared with Detroit's cycle of four or five.

Systems like Toyota's worked so well, Boyd argued, because of schwerpunkt, a German term meaning organizational focus. Schwerpunkt, Boyd wrote, "represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time." That is, employees decide and act locally, but they are guided by a keen understanding of the bigger picture.

In effective organizations, schwerpunkt connects vibrant OODA loops that are operating concurrently at several levels. Workers close to the action stick to tactical loops, and their supervisors travel in operational loops, while leaders navigate much broader strategic and political loops. The loops inform each other: If everything is clicking, feedback from the tactical loops will guide decisions at higher loops and vice versa.

It has been noted in the latest work by such authors as Bll Dettmer,  The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving and Don Reinersten, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Even more popular use of Boyd’s OODA Loop is the Lean Startup by Eric Reis and his influential writings on the Customer Development Cycle utilizing the OODA Loop as a basis.

Dr. Terry Barnhart, the Senior Director Strategy and Continuous Improvement at Pfizer Global R&D discusses the OODA Loop in the Business901 Podcast this week and we expand this theory into some practical applications. One of the takeaways from the conversation is using the OODA Loop outside of rapid deployment. The use of it he expresses is in the adaption of it through the uses of various time cycles. 

In the most common use of the OODA Loop, adaption is rather direct. At the strategic level it involves around adjusting procedures, systems, processes and ideology.  Boyd advocated an agile cellular organization with some explicit control mechanism and feedback loops but one more reliant on common frames of reference and shared ideas. He always contended that Command was about clarity of ones goals and philosophies versus the traditional form of command and control thought of in a hierarchy structure. I enjoy the description that Frans Osinga discusses in his book Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History), highly recommend – not an easy read though) is that “Higher Command must shape the Decision Space of subordinate commanders.“  Actually, that is a pretty good description of Standard Work, is it not?

Related Posts:
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If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!
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Theory of Constraints in Services

John Arthur Ricketts, a distinguished engineer at IBM was my guest on the Business901 Podcast titled Using the Theory of Constraints in Services. This is a transcription of the podcast.

Using TOC in Services

John is a practitioner and innovator in the field of Theory of Constraints. His book, Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints , was published in 2008 by IBM Press. Dr. Eli Goldratt, founder of the Theory of Constraints, said it’s one of the best books ever written on TOC. John is also the author of “Theory of Constraints in Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services (Chapter 29 of Theory of Constraints Handbook) ,” a chapter in the Theory of Constraints Handbook published in 2010.

Related Information
Theory of Constraints eBook
Value Stream Marketing reduce your Work in Process
Good Marketing should minimize your Pipeline
The Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing
Theory of Constraints equals Focus and Leverage

Quality Conversations...The Global Voice of Quality

I am the guest today on Quality Conversations hosted by Steve Wilson where we will discuss Applying Lean or Six Sigma to Marketing. The call-in number is (646) 200-3898.

Quality Conversations, serves as a platform for communicating the best and brightest strategies, methods and tools for all those interested in improving quality and business process excellence within their companies. QC initiates dialogue with local, state, and national experts in many of the well known quality disciplines as well as additional topics and guests of interest. Special thanks to Larry Parah for his work at www.iqualityprocess.com and for his support of this program.

P.S. Thanks Steve for having me.

The link to the show: Applying Lean or Six Sigma to Marketing

Related Post:
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