901 Blogs: March 2011

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Are your webinars heading this direction?

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

Are your webinars heading this direction?

Friday, March 25, 2011

Is the Future of Business sharing?

At TED@MotorCity, Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer. Examples across industries -- from music to cars -- show how close we are to this meshy future.

Great Line: “We are more connected with everyone in the world except for the person next to us!”

Lisa’s book was interesting well researched but fell short in the hype that I read on Amazon. An accurate review of the book stated, “If you read this book, there's no reason everything can't work with sharing. If you think about the world, you know that can't be true. “ The good part of the book is that hypothesis of her idea is interesting and with her numerous case studies in the book and on her website you are hard pressed not to come away with an idea or two for your business.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Mixing Scrum and Kanban in Agile

Yuval Yeret was a guest on the Business901 podcast, Yeret on Agile and Kanban and below is a transcription of the podcast. Yuval is a practicing Agile and Kanban consultant/coach for AgileSparks in Herzelyia, Israel. He coaches individuals and organizations in their path to Agility and Engineering excellence, focusing on Scrum, Lean, and Agile Engineering practices.

Mixing Scrum and Kanban in Agile

Yuval Yeret will be speaking at the upcoming Lean Software & Systems Conference 2011 (LSSC11) and offered 5 of my readers a discount using code yy0005 when registering at http://lssc11.leanssc.org/registration/. He also offered 10 of my readers AgileIsrael2011 5% discount on top of current early bird discount using http://agileisrael2011.eventbrite.com/?discount=biz901

Monday, March 21, 2011

Future of Marketing is Lean

The sales and marketing structure has drastically changed. The typical structure still used by many is when competition was not as great and technology was not the force that it is today. Most of the time sales and marketing sold solutions without every defining the customers problem. The typical sales forecast was derived on increasing sales a certain percentage. That's changed. In today's business setting many companies are fighting for survival. Competition has never been so keen and the elements of the past are simply not working.

The new wave of marketing has seen an entire new set of tools being used with the components of social media leading the way. No longer do we trust print media, radio, television and other forms of traditional media. The tools have all become a commodity. Some organizations have even questioned the need for a sales force. To make effective marketing decisions, you need a clear understanding of what the customer values and what your company strategy is to support them.

Companies have found that they must listen at higher level than ever before to their customers, focusing on improving processes, and using teams. Companies have to build a culture that supports agility, relevancy and speed. To accomplish this there has to become an open sharing of information that will accelerate creativity and innovation. Value has to be understood that it is delivered at the point of consumption, not when it leaves your hands.

Lean Marketing is about installing a continuous improvement methodology to your sales and marketing process. It’s about constantly improving ever step up the way. In the smaller scheme of things it is about improving a launch, an advertising campaign and even a sales call. However, in the bigger scheme of things it is about building a structure that creates a learning organization based on an ever increasing knowledge of what the customer values.

The Lean practice of PDCA is ideal for learning and creating knowledge activities. Following this process it allows individuals and teams to recognize and take advantage of opportunities, make decisions faster, and be more responsive to customers. As part of the PDCA cycle you get feedback on the action from listening to customers and the companies’ measurement systems. Having information, taking informed action and getting feedback is part of the natural PDCA cycle. Effectiveness comes from when you use and take advantage of all your resources.

This why I believe the Future of Marketing is Lean!

Monday, March 14, 2011

Collaboration in a Customer-Driven Marketplace

From the McGraw-Hill Press Release:

Social Media. Brand Collaboration. Content aggregation. Microblogging. User-generated content. And the list goes on… It’s been said that business is in the midst of the customer-centric marketing revolution—a trend which points toward business treating brands less like “property” and more like an extension of an organization’s values. The upshot is this: Smart companies are finally figuring out how peoples’ desire to participate is becoming a key driver of marketing success. But to be a winner in this environment, businesses have to fill this need and at the same time compete for consumers’ increasingly scarce time and shrinking attention spans. More complicated still, companies have to do all of this while also earning consumers’ trust.

The secret to connecting with consumers in a fragmented, chaotic marketplace, then, lies in how businesses collaborate with customers.

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Mike Dover, co-author of the book, WIKIBRANDS: Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace was interviewed on the Business901 Podcast and though we did not cover every topic above, we certainly touched upon how you go about engaging customers, creating experiences and building communities – FROM A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE.

Mike is Managing Partner of Socialstruct Advisory Group. As Vice President, Research Operations, for New Paradigm (Moxie Insight), he led the operations for research programs for the bestselling books Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital. He also has provided review support for more than a dozen other books.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Left Brain vs Right Brain = Management vs. Marketing

I was reading the book, War in the Boardroom: Why Left-Brain Management and Right-Brain Marketing Don't See Eye-to-Eye--and What to Do About It, looking for a few ideas on how to approach Lean concepts to marketing and more specifically CMOs. Of course, we all know trying to apply a discipline to a bunch of right brain thinkers is a difficult task but what I found might surprise you. Review this slide show for an introduction. As far as reading the book, it is fun read pointing to numerous examples of the disparity between the roles. However, I think the book falls short of pointing out what to do about it. The book champions the marketing cause with little supportive or quantize evidence. Oh, that’s the problem my left brain is working.

War in the Boardroom

The book makes a case for every marketing mistake in the last couple of decades and blames it on management. Every success is attributed to right brain thinking and marketing, again lacking evidence. Left brain thinking or right brain thinking there is a place for both. The collaboration of them is what makes for success.

Can you really afford not to have supportive evidence in marketing? The dollars that are spent there are very often astronomical. However, you do little to accurately measure and improve YOUR OWN PROCESS. You do time studies, create entire departments and everything in between to evaluate a single hourly employee but never consider how to improve the sales and marketing process.

One of the strengths of Lean Marketing is the improvement of processes. I think that is where many right-brain thinkers get bogged down in their perceptions. Everyone has some type of process, So, if you don’t think you do, what you do have is a poor one.

Lean marketing will help you identify and as a result streamline your own processes. Working on a process is typically what they dread. A process is a structure that you identify but don’t think of it in a typical linear fashion. Think of is more in cyclic structure that is involving and growing everyday. That blend of right brain – left brain thinking. You may have to accept the fact that you need a little left brain to make the right brain more productive.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Have you heard about anti-fragility?

Jim Benson, author of a Personal Kanban made the following quote the other day which I found very interesting and posted it to my LinkedIn profile.

A system that is not malleable, is brittle. A process which cannot adapt to context, is waste. One size does not fit all.

Terry Barnhart, a former podcast guest of mine, Applying the OODA Loop to Lean expanded that thought….

Have you heard about anti-fragility? Taleb's account is brilliant, it is like the package that says "Anti-fragile: Please handle poorly, it will improve the contents". This means a flexible system, but one that builds additional flexibility as brittleness is found. It means an adaptable system that gets more adaptable in adapting to emergent issues. It means a size that adjusts by itself.

As a result I found this video with Nassim Taleb,the author of The Black Swan describe Antifragility for the Economist.

Anti-Fragility

From Amazon on The Black Swan book page:

Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat, when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation. Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.

Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan.

There is also brilliant conversation between Daniel Kahnemann and Nassim Taleb discussing biases, the illusion of patterns, the perception of risk and denial at the Digital, Life, Design Conference in Munich. It is on the bentatlas.com website: Risk and Denial, Daniel Kahnemann and Nassim Taleb in Munich.

This is very interesting on how this all applies to the future of business.

A system that is not malleable, is brittle. A process which cannot adapt to context, is waste. One size does not fit all. - A Quote from Jim Benson, author of a Personal Kanban made the following quote the other day which I found very interesting and posted it to my LinkedIn profile.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Ask not what sales can do for you, ask what you can do for sales!

In what ways can Sales and Marketing impede lean thinking? I saw that question on LinkedIn and just had to join the conversation. My thoughts:

1^st Answer:

We should applaud Sales and Marketing in most organizations for the fact that they remained a silo. Seldom do I see organizations that have not created internal control points within the organization and called that pull. The very first thing that I always hear from Quality experts is not how to be a resource for S & M but how S & M can be a resource for them.

Can Lean be applied to Sales and Marketing? When most organizations look at doing this they consider how Sales and Marketing can make the organization more efficient. They consider them to be their Voice of the Customer for the organization and how they could level work flow, etc. If you want to Lean your Sales and Marketing, partner with the S&M Team and increase Face time with the customer and supply resources better or on demand when a customer/prospect needs them. Flatten your organization and trust your employees to be real resources not only for the S & M team but the customer.

Leveling demand is an act of understanding the marketplace. Hitting numbers is an act of poor management; (Sales Quotas lead to Waste, http://bit.ly/hJ2Doe). Maybe, the problem with leveling is that you are accepting pull from an internal control point versus the marketplace. This sounds a little pie in the sky but no more than the uncertainty that is built into production and sales forecast.

Variation is seldom understood within a company let alone in Sales and Marketing. This is an area that "efficiency" experts can help in the Sales and Marketing field. Manipulating and simplifying the data that they already have to help S & M respond to better qualified leads and understanding the customer desires is where they should be spending their time.
BTW: Pay attention to the word customer. The only true Customer is the person that uses the product or service.

2^nd Time Around:

I agree leveling is important but it exist because organizations don't experience true pull. It is an internal control point that manages internal operations and your expectation is that it should manage Sales and marketing and customers also. That is why you can't level anything. Customers just wait till the control point needs to adjust and react accordingly. End of month, end of quarter, etc. They just play the game by the cards that they are dealt.

Your points are all valid if you live in world of excess demand. However, the world I live in is one of more supply than demand. So if a customer doesn't like me, he finds a product from someone else (my insignificant customer quote that Terry was waiting for(said in fun)).
My quick take on the article that Frank mentions:.the article is in MADEinPA on page 6-7.

Is that the author mentions six points of marketing excellence and my reactions are on the right:

Segmentation - I think Community(Tribes)
Value Proposition - I think Value Conversations
Price to Premium - I think Partners
Master channel Selection - I think Agile
Product Development - I think Co-creation
Customer Loyalty - I think Value Creation

These are not all pie in the sky terms. These are terms and practices that are being used at Xerox, IBM, Cisco and even Wal-Mart to an extent. The funny thing is that it is all PDCA. If you look at Liker's description of Toyota's Vendor selection in The Toyota Way Fieldbook (blog post on this: The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota ), it is a good foundation. You are also seeing an increase usage and books on Kata and Liker's new book publishing in April that has similar thoughts.

Lean professes to be a continuous improvement methodology based on value streams and pull. I believe the evolution of these principles are based on the success that we will have is not whether incorporating Sales and Marketing into lean but incorporating organizations into Sales and Marketing thru co-working, co-creation (practically on a one on one basis) with our customers. I think Lean, PDCA and Agile type methods are the best ways of achieving this.

BTW: Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …

Respect for Customer is essential in Lean Marketing

In my younger days I used to sell process equipment. It involved a fairly technical process that included combustion, material handling, air movement, computers, etc. My engineering background proved quite valuable and it was quite a strength as I made sales calls. Most of the time, the sales process went through manufacturer reps and dealers. I was always amazed how little they knew about the equipment and never could figure how they sold anything. As I got older, I recognized the value they provided was the relationships that they had developed and the support they have given their customers through the years was more important than the equipment I was “selling”.

As I matured, I began to respect those relationships more and more. However, I always retained the thought why don’t these people get technically better? They would sell so much more. So, I put workshop on after workshop. They would all attend in body but I could see the spirit was not there. At the breaks and after the workshop was over, they were mingling and developing relationships even with what you may consider adversaries.

But as I watched those truly good salespeople, there was something else that separated them. I wanted to emulate them and it took me many years to see what it was. What did the best salespeople do? They left the customer become the teacher.

10 just saying to be a good listener but they actually engaged and were learning from the customer. The customer was their Sensei (I am defining this as the Japanese word for "teacher" or "coach”). He would steer them down the path and they would accept what he said, even when being the expert that I was, knew it was wrong.

The really, really good salesperson even went deeper than knowing that the customer is always right. They even went deeper than the words teacher or coach. It went to a higher level and the word I would use to describe it is “respect”. That is why, I used the term Sensei.

It was not that I did not respect the customer. I did. But not in the way that a great salesperson did. They took what that customer said and let that empower them. Think about it for a moment, have you ever told a salesperson that just can’t be done. I am not being critical of the correct and logical answer. I just want you to remember the reaction of the salesperson. It is typically one of complete disbelief and frustration.

I find the respect issue an interesting concept as we move forward in the sales and marketing process. As our organizations get flatter and the co-mingling of customers start occurring at different levels within the organization, there will become a greater issue of respect for customers. Organizations that have successfully applied Lean principles, which includes respect for people will be much better acclimated in the respect for customer world that we now live in. I am not sure you can teach it. It is something that you have to live to get it right.

improve collaboration using Medieval vs South Park figures

Ingenious isn’t it. More than 13 million people across the world have discovered Kingdomality, an extraordinary way to learn about others, maybe more than you thought possible. This is a book you'll want to share with everyone from the CEO to the newest entry-level hire.

I have use this simple survey many times working with clients. I show them the results of mine and then have them take the test and we discuss the results of theirs. It is a great ice breaker and also we learn very quickly about each other. In this time of collaboration and the complexity of the virtual world, it is quite nice to know early in the conversation the other parties personalities.

I always looked at this as a good thing. I am also a Prime Minister type. My wife looks at it totally different and sees it pretty much as a waste of time. She so happens to be a Shepard. Kingdomality creates a better understanding of your workplace. yourself, and others.

Take this simple test and see where you fit on the circle: Kingdomality Survey.

From the Book cover:

By reading to Kingdomality, a parable of a king at his wits' end in a disorganized kingdom, you'll see the startling and clear parallels between the kingdom and your office. Then, you can take a simple, eight-question test to determine which of 12 different jobs you would have held in a medieval kingdom, and learn how each job is essential in the running of a kingdom or any business anywhere. You'll receive valuable lessons in the creation of high-performance teams, assigning appropriate tasks, hiring and rewarding employees, and creating an effective, efficient, fun, and profitable workplace. In this fresh and original way of approaching business, you'll join the millions of others who have discovered why you should never send a Sheperd to do the job of a Black Knight, and vice versa.

A similar book of equal value: StrengthsFinder 2.0

Social Messiness Explained

This is a transcription of a the Business901 podcast, Making Sense of Social Messiness. My guest was Francois Gossieaux is co-founder and partner at Human 1.0 (Beeline Labs), a marketing innovation strategy firm, a Senior Fellow and a Board Member at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).

Making Sense of Social Messiness

The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media , Francois Goissieaux of Human 1.0 and Ed Moran of Deloitte identify how (and which) social media are fundamentally changing core business processes and the way businesses and customers interact. These changes are being driven by what the authors call the “Hyper-Social Shift.”

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Pinck on Kanban eBook

Pascal Pinck works as a Strategic Collaborator with individuals and teams who face high levels of uncertainty in their market context. Pascal was a guest on the Business901 Podcast, A Strategic Collaborator’s use of Personal Kanban and this is a transcription of the podcast. He also gave us a snapshot of his own Personal Kanban board Personal Kanban Board Sample.

Pinck on Personal Kanban

About: Personal Kanban is neither a prescription nor a plan. The book provides a light, actionable, achievable framework for understanding our work and its context. This book describes why students, parents, business leaders, major corporations, and world governments all see immediate results with Personal Kanban.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Yeret on Agile and Kanban

Yuval Yeret is a practicing Agile and Kanban consultant/coach for AgileSparks in Herzelyia, Israel. He coaches individuals and organization in their path to Agility and Engineering excellence, focusing on Scrum, Lean, and Agile Engineering practices.

Yuval Yeret will be speaking at the upcoming Lean Software & Systems Conference 2011 (LSSC11).

Yuval provides R&D organizations management and technology leadership with a focus on building new teams/groups and organizational optimization/changes. He has experience in Networking, Operating System, Storage, Security in both programming and engineering aspects. He adds a natural affinity to Linux and Open Source, backed up by comprehensive experience with Windows environments and other more exotic environments as well.

His Specialties include: Scrum( CSM, CSP, CSPO) , Lean/Agile Development, QA/DEV Relationship and Optimization, Test Automation, Storage, Networking, Distributed Systems Architecture, Linux, Security, Project Management, Development Methodologies, Organizational Improvement, Team Building

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Our podcast centered on the use of Kanban and how Yuval blends the more traditional Agile practices of Scrum with it.

Learn, Solve, Save with PDCA

Why do we need to use a continuous improvement methodology. Look how Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge describes creativity and innovation:

Starvation, Pressure, Perspective Shift

However, when you have a passion for a project, look at Michael McDaniel , a senior designer at frog design. Prior to joining frog design in 2008 as a Senior Designer, he worked on large, diverse teams to solve complex interaction, experience, transportation, wayfinding, environmental, and branding problems for a variety of industries.

His Motto:

Learn what problems keep reoccurring.
Solve permanent long term solutions.
Save Lives the next time this happens.

Learn, Solve, Save

In Michael’s example we can see the starvation of resource, the pressure(passion to do something about it) and maybe more importantly the shift in perspective. Lean Thinking, PDCA can really assist someone in creating that shift. Using a structured approach enables each element of the decision or problem to be considered; systematically and sufficiently. The outcome is almost always more complete and more effective than one done instinctively.

BTW: Problem solving can be a lot if fun when done on a regular basis versus only under panic conditions. The panic approached in Michael’s video resulted in the Astrodome being the best alternative even with a problem that has been reoccurring for years.

ASQ Columbus Spring Conference will host Marketing with Lean

The theme of the ASQ Columbus Spring Conference 2011 is Leadership through Quality. After enjoying morning and after-lunch key-note speakers, attendees will have the opportunity to choose from both morning and afternoon tracks covering more than 14 different topics to include Marketing with Lean and I will be presenting it!

The conference is held at The Columbus State Conference Center, 315 Cleveland Avenue,
Columbus, Ohio 43215. It is a one day event on March 24th with registration beginning at 7:30 AM and the conference from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Additional information and registration can be obtained at http://www.asq-columbus.org.

Joe Dager says of the Marketing with Lean program, "This requires re-thinking about the way you do business and the way you think about your markets. More importantly, the way you think about value. Value in terms of how your market defines it. Stop thinking about product or even product benefits. Your marketing systems must support the delivery of value to your customer at a much higher rate than your competitor’s. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitate the journey to customer value. Learn what the terms Agility, Speed and Relevance fit into the marketplace today and in the future."

ASQ is a global community of experts and the leading authority on quality in all fields, organizations, and industries.

* As a professional association, ASQ advances the professional development, credentials, knowledge and information services, membership community, and advocacy on behalf of its more than 85,000 members worldwide.
* As champion of the quality movement, ASQ members are driven by a sense of responsibility to enrich their lives, to improve their workplaces and communities, and to make the world a better place by applying quality tools, techniques, and systems

Friday, March 4, 2011

Should you Manage your Organization with Agile Techniques?

Steve Denning’s new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010) was the topic of our discussion. Radical management is a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation: focusing the entire organization on delighting clients; working in self-organizing teams; operating in client-driven iterations; delivering value to clients with each iteration; fostering radical transparency; nurturing continuous self-improvement and communicating interactively. In sum, the principles comprise a new mental model of management.

Steve is also the author of the award-winning books, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) and The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. Steve works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on leadership, innovation, business narrative and reinventing management. From 1996 to 2000, Steve was the Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank. In November 2000, Steve Denning was selected as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos). In the Fall of 2009, Steve was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls Colleges, Oxford University, UK.

Driving Market Share Special Offer

Organizations need to change from a customer satisfaction focus to a customer value focus. The Five Cs of Driving Market Share serves as the template for this transaction. 5 Cs of Driving Market Share is not a project-by-project approach for reducing the costs of marketing activities, but rather an approach that seeks to enhance marketing’s effectiveness and efficiency. For organizations that have deployed 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.

Customer Identification Program Content: The first step in the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share is identifying specific products/markets that offer the organization its best options for growth. You will learn how to evaluate products and markets using metrics such as current market share, market growth rate and competitive intensity to assess the best targets for the organization. When completed, you will eschew the notion that a company can be everything to everybody, and instead focuses on key market opportunities. This occurs in the Define/Identification stage and differs from the more project-oriented approach that traditional Six Sigma uses.

Customer Value Program Content: In the Value (Measure) stage of Driving Market Share, you will create a value model for each of your targeted product or markets. This value model is the voice of the market (VOM) that drives all operational and strategic initiatives undertaken by the organization. The VOM replaces agendas, hunches and strategic guessing as the guiding factor in growing market share. Value has been shown to be the best leading indicator of market share and top-line revenue growth. Learn how to use superior value creation and delivery to propel growth within the targeted product or markets.

Customer Acquisition Program Content: In the Acquisition (Analyze) stage you will use primarily the Competitive Value Matrix to guide you through the delivery of value delivery. An organization’s value is relative to that of its competitors. This is part of the buyers’ comparative calculus in assessing where to buy. The buyer is asking a simple question: “Is this brand worth it?” By understanding your organization’s competitive value proposition, leaders can make better decisions regarding market share growth.

Customer Retention Program Content: The Retention (Improve) stage could also be called the Enhancement stage. For value leaders, the focus should be on enhancing value to sustain their leadership position. Extending the gap between the value an organization provides and the value provided by the nearest competitor can lead to best in market status. Value followers will want to improve those elements of the value creation and delivery system that will close the gap. This is when organizations need to enhance or improve their competitive value proposition in accordance to the directives of the market place.

Customer Monitoring Program Content: The Monitoring (Control) stage is where you learn how to put monitoring systems into place to ensure that their competitive value proposition accomplishes what is intended. This control effort focuses not only on the more strategic value proposition, but also can be set up to monitor specific transactions such as sales, repairs, inquires and other customer experiences. This monitoring process acts as a trip wire, providing information where there are potential people, product of process issues that require intervention.

For 72 Hours, March 4th to 7th you can receive a special offer, a $200 savings. on the digital download of this program.

Driving Market Share Program

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Have you been told to increase sales this year?

Increasing or sometimes just maintaining sales is a major challenge for a company these days. Many companies will receive an edict that we want to increase sales 10% this year. But really how are you going to do that? The mechanics are one thing. Gaining consensus and understanding is a totally different thing and maybe your biggest stumbling block.

The central theme of 5Cs of Driving Market Share is to provide a direct line of sight to customer value. That line of sight is actually from the customer’s point of view. I am going to walk you through the program mostly for the reason to explain the diagram I have included for you to demonstrate how and where you increase in market share will come from.

The first things we do in the program is identify your customer buying segments, the product/market relationship that exist and where you most profitable market opportunities are. It is based on not only how your customer defines value but also how the market defines value. We take this knowledge and identify competitive value and performance gaps that enable you to create and implement the processes that we think are needed to reach the targeted goal. This is basically the Plan and Do phase of a PDCA cycle.

After implementing the initial efforts, we Check (phase) those efforts to against the targeted gap. If they have been met, we continue to the Act Stage and standardize the process and move forward. If they are not, we return to the Plan phase and start the cycle over.

I know this sounds simple and to a certain extent it is. Most of us complicate much of it with shortcuts and a lack of true understanding of customer value. We just don’t take the time in the planning phase that is required. However, I want to use this explanation to discuss what is needed in gaining market share. Simple or not, few companies can really define correctly how the customer and market views the value that they add and are willing to spend money for.

Most companies seldom have one value stream. They will have numerous ones based on Customer Segments and product/markets. After analysis very many times these segments and product/markets are reduced to a critical few. We don’t walk away from all the others but our focus and energies go towards what is paying the bills now and in the future.

These models can be used to determine quite easily what efforts and budgets must be created to increase market share. For example, if we have one very significant product (service)/market and our best opportunities are in that area, we may dedicate 50, 60 percent of our marketing budget and resources to it.

In the picture I show that the gap we are trying to increase or maintain is 1 million dollars. Through analysis utilizing tools opportunity and loyalty matrixes for example we divide the dollars up between customer retention and acquisition. We then take a look at dividing that again by utilizing your existing value proposition and maybe a new product innovation proposition. We can further divide these up as we dig deeper into our customer segments or product/market. Just utilizing a very simplified value stream such as this it starts giving you a feel for how you will increase sales. As you drill down through these various stages, you also become much more targeted and focused on what your customer values.

As you drill down and segment your list don’t just think about percentages of budgets and resources. Using real $ if you can versus %. It not only adds more meaning to the conversation but when you start looking at your expectations from customer segments and the value proposition you are offering them, well are you being realistic?

This is where continuous improvement efforts, PDCA and A3 problem solving come to the forefront. Starting A3 before you drill down into a very tight cycle is useless. Your efforts will not be defined enough to pay off.

Some Potential A3’s that may come out of this exercise would be:

Reducing churn (Customer loyalty matrix)
Focusing on most important customers for growth (P/M Matrix)
Loyalty of customers (Customer loyalty matrix)
Brand's value proposition (Value matrix)
Competitor vulnerability (Competitive vulnerability matrix)
Targeting markets (market opportunity matrix)
Identifying people product and processes for improvement

How do I determine which markets to go into?

The starting point for identifying product/markets is to focus on first, the markets. There are two criteria that we use in Lean Marketing to assess or to evaluate markets.

The first one has to do with how attractive is that market?

Attractive of markets could be defined in terms of the market growth rate. Is it a growing market or is it a market that is in decline? For most purposes we probably want to target markets that are growing as opposed to in decline. We may want to look at the competitive intensity of the market. Is it a highly competitive market or is it more of a blue ocean type of market? One where there are few competitors or preferably even none.

What is the revenue flows within that market? What's our market share position? Who are the dominant players? There's any number of different criteria that we can use to assess the attractiveness of a particular market.

The second criterion is the ability to compete.

Now we take a look at how capable are we in competing within a potential market. That goes back to this concept of what are our competencies?

And one of the things we may want to look at from competitive standpoint is what the qualifiers are? What are the must haves? Do we qualify for that particular product/market or are we going to have to invest additional resources to qualify?

Second, do we have a product line that has both the width and depth of the market? Can we successfully provide product and product support? That's a very important point. Do we have the product support systems to support the product lines once we are marketing there?

What about our distribution system? Do we have the right network setup? Are the dealers that we have adequate or the brokers, the agents, the middlemen, that type of thing? And again, do we have the right personnel?

So by matching the attractiveness of the market with our ability to compete, we can then begin to prioritize different potential markets. Clearly we want to target those markets that are highly attractive and for which we have a very strong ability to compete. Then we want to target attractive markets that we might have a moderate ability to compete in. We also want to be able to ask the question, what do we need to do to improve our capacity to compete with any of those markets?

This is an approach that is good not only for those companies that are embarked on a marketing development strategy where they're looking to enter new markets and they're trying to assess the efficacy of any market, but it's also a good thing for companies to do on an audit basis of what their current markets are because a lot of those companies have inherited markets and been serving them.

From time to time markets change, their attractiveness will change, the market growth rate may drop, and the competitive intensity may have increased significantly, the revenue flows have declined. So it's a good opportunity for the company to take a look at what they are currently doing and then make the assessment as to whether or not those markets are the right ones for the company to be in.

Leaders who take the time to really focus and understand their markets are super tough competitors. That's why they're leaders and not followers.

The following was derived from a conversation between Dr. Reidenbach creator of the 5Cs of Driving Market Share and me.

Nuts and Bolts of A3 Thinking eBook

This is a transcription of a Business901 podcast, The Nuts and Bolts of A3 Thinking that I had with Dan Matthews. Dan is the author of The A3 Workbook: Unlock Your Problem-Solving Mind

Nuts and Bolts of A3 Thinking eBook

Dan is skilled as a trainer, coach and implementer of Lean Manufacturing, having trained hundreds of associates in the methods of the Toyota Production System (TPS).
During his time with Toyota, Daniel was part of the original group of trainers at the Georgetown Kentucky Toyota plant charged with developing an A3 curriculum that would be used to educate team members at all levels of the organization. While working for Toyota he became an experienced Training Within Industry (TWI) instructor. He is presently employed at the Kentucky Manufacturing Assistance Center.

Website: http://kmac.org
email: a3workbook@gmail.com

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