Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop

Having Lean in your Sales and Marketing toolbox is the most sustainable advantage that you can have in the marketplace. This 90-day program will create a continuous improvement program for your sales and marketing. The foundational work is in Lean, but you will find a flavor of Service Design, Appreciative Inquiry and Design Thinking intertwined. This is a systems based approach to sales and marketing.

How does it work? Business901 will introduce Lean Marketing Concepts in a rather unique way. Five times a week, Monday through Friday, you will be sent a link to view a video, a presentation, interactive lesson, workbook sheets, or a pre-recorded webinar. There will be a discussion group with a live chat option often available (not 24/7). Review weeks will include subjects that are voted on by participants for further discussion.

The program is divided into three different tracts to choose from:

1. Lean Champions: the person/group that supports leads various initiatives (improvement efforts) and provides expertise in Lean principles. We challenge the thoughts of waste reduction, data collection efforts and rigid procedures such as scripts and standard work. Rather, we develop an understanding that we must bridge the gap between operations (supply side thinking) to the sales and marketing side (demand side thinking).
2. Sales and Marketing: the person/group that works in this department or area, many times a Lean organization that wants to implement Lean in this area. We clarify the value that Lean can apply to the demand side of the business. Lean allows you to understand the big picture concepts (EDCA) but also the ability to drill down into very specific areas (PDCA) and to create a repeatable process (SDCA).
3. Lean Consultant: the person will introduce and train other companies in Lean Sales and Marketing Process. We introduce Lean Sales and Marketing concepts, how to apply them within your own organization and others, and how to include them to extend your services.

• Week 1 Lean Sales and Marketing Introduction.
• Week 2 Vision
• Week 3 Customer Value
• Week 4 Identify Value
• Week 5 Map Value Stream
• Week 6 Review Week
• Week 7 Flow
• Week 8 Pull
• Week 9 Engagement
• Week 10 A3 Communication
• Week 11 Putting into Practice
• Week 12 Review Week

This is not another system approach but rather an interactive action orientated program that organizes and develops your marketing efforts into a customer-driven process. We will literally build a Lean Marketing House for a particular segment or value stream; walking you through theory and into practice. The result is a continuous improvement process to keep your marketing ahead of the competition.

You must be a member of the Lean Marketing Lab to participate.

Program starts on the following Monday after sign-up. If you sign up on weekend, program will start Monday of the following week (7 days later). Join the Lean Marketing Lab and receive immediate access to the Marketing with Lean Book Series and membership to the Lab for the remainder of the year. The workshop price is an additional $299. That is just over $3.00 a day for training that is not available anywhere else in the world! The training is immediately applicable to your business. 

You must be a member of the Lean Marketing Lab to participate.

Reason you should do this: How many companies are systematically applying Continuous Improvement to their sales and marketing process?

An Appreciative look at the Seven Signs of Value (Waste)

In addition to my Tuesday Podcast this week with Paul Myerson, author of Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, I will host a Thursday podcast with David Shaked of Almond-Insight.  David is a leading proponent of Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma. This is an excerpt of the podcast where we discussed this article, The Seven Signs of Value.

Joe:  David, could you expand on the Seven Signs of Value and what you were trying to accomplish with it?

David:  This is one of the things that I learned from AI. AI really emphasizes that what you ask, you get more of. If you start asking questions about wastes and trying to look for wastes in your system, you will find more waste and you will possibly even create new waste. I've used the seven wastes, or eight wastes, or there are so many versions of the tool, seven wastes so many different situations in the past. Once I embarked on the journey of AI I actually realized, wait a minute, am I actually setting myself up for failure? Am I creating more waste by asking about the waste and trying to look for it?

That led me to this train of thought which led to why don't we actually look for where is the value? In all of the Kaizen events and everything that I have done in Lean, we very rarely looked at the value. Even when we identify where value is created we actually never even inquired how come we do it or what enables all that.

I started thinking about where is value created and how would I know that I'm creating value and that's what led me to these seven signs of value. Which in a way it's the flipside of the seven wastes but because you started asking about them, you're generating more value. In a way, the opposite of defects which is one of the wastes, would be perfect outcomes.

Where in my process am I actually creating perfect outcomes? If you're talking about excessive movement, where in my process are things placed in a way that don't require that movement, that they are so close to each other that you don't need to move things around.

All of these seven wastes can be translated. I actually wrote an article about it, which is available to anyone who wants it, which specifies these seven signs of value. How to look for value and how to find it? The conversations you're having as you discovered more and more value, it's a great conversation, it's motivating, its engaging, and it gives people more idea on where else can they create value. Which is really what we're after when we're talking about Lean?

Joe:  That's so well said. We don't go after what value we're creating so often. We're always looking for the non‑value instead of promoting the value and that is the strength‑based approach isn't it?…..

David is holding a workshop in Toronto the week of June 18th.

Related Information: 
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT
The Uniqueness of Hoshin Kanri
Mastering Positive Change eBook

Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT

How many resources do you have? Should you be using them on your weaknesses or your strength? In a recent post Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed not looking for areas of deficiencies and improvement but to expand on the areas we do well in. You cannot be everything to everyone and so you have to limit your resources. So why not use them on what you do well?

In the typical SWOT Analysis (SWOT analysis examines the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of different strategies), I believe most of us have a tendency to focus on our weaknesses and threats more than our strengths. Just doing the math SWOT/WT, we spend 50% of out time doing just that.  

In the Appreciative Inquiry  field, there has been a movement to use a SOAR (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results) analysis in lieu of SWOT. SOAR is a great method to use for expanding on the positive areas of an organization. It normally is much easier to gain buy-in from stakeholders with this approach versus others.

In the book The Thin Book of SOAR; Building Strengths-Based Strategy, the authors state:

People tend to look for problems and focus on weaknesses and threats before searching for possibilities. For example, one participant of a SWOT process described this tendency as follows: "Having used SWOT analysis for the previous fifteen years, I had experienced that it could be draining as people often got stuck in the weaknesses and threats conversations. The analysis became a descending spiral of energy." Or, as another described his experience of a planning process deeply rooted in a SWOT analysis, "[the SWOT approach] gave us a plan, but took our spirit. From our experience, drained energy and loss of spirit can negatively impact momentum and achieving results.

In SOAR, we focus on our strengths and opportunities, so that we can align and expand them until they lessen or manage our weaknesses and threats. Weaknesses and threats are not ignored. They are refrained and given the appropriate focus within the Opportunities and Results conversation. Ultimately, it becomes a question of balance. Why not spend as much time or more on what you do well and how7 you can do more of that? What gives you more energy to take action? What gives you confidence to set a stretch goal?

When I engage with a customer, I find the initial sequence of steps used to create a Lean Marketing System must ensure we carefully think through what outcomes we want to create, what supports and barriers we need to plan for, and who we have to involve within your organization to guarantee success. Our starting point looks like this:

1. (Definition) What are you presently doing and how do your clients and organization feel about them?
2. (Discovery) What is your present value proposition for retaining customers? What is your present value proposition for acquiring customers?
3. (Dream)What are your targets? How will we measure success?
4. (Design) Do you understand your customer’s decision making process? For each product/market segment?
5. (Destiny) What’s your investment strategy – not only in media, but in time and events?

The SOAR framework is the beginning step in the Defining stage and is a natural lead in to the others.

• Strengths: Internal to organization; What is our core
• Opportunities: External to organization; What might be
• Aspirations: Internal to organization; What should be
• Results : External to organization; What will be

The first steps of any Lean process is identify value and create a current state. When working on the demand side of the equation, why should we identify the process through Non-Value Activities defined as waste (Weaknesses and Threats) versus the Value Added activities of SOAR?

Related Information:
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones

Daniel Jones is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation. Dan is my guest on the Business901 podcast next week and this is an excerpt from the podcast.

Joe:  Lean is leaving the four walls of the factory. As Lean moves into knowledge fields, I personally think waste reduction thinking is a burden on it. Everybody starts to look at that first rather than the collaborative learning aspect of it. I think Lean’s strength and growth is collaborative learning. That’s one of the secrets of lean. Is there a way to present that to people, better than what has happened in the past?

Dan:  “There are some obstacles in that kind of environment that make it hard for people that want to grasp this. The first obstacle is that we are knowledge workers, we don't want to have people standardize what we do. We are creative folks. We got away from that factory environment where we just do the same thing over and over. So the idea of standardization is an anathema. However if you look at any work, particularly design work or transaction processing work, a lot of it actually is fairly similar and routine. Also that's where the problems are. If you can standardize those routine tasks actually what you end up doing is freeing up time for the creative tasks. So once people see that, they switch their views and think, well the standardization not of everything but of the routine and getting the hassles out of the routine that really makes my life better.

That's one obstacle. You can't tell people that standardization leads to creativity but actually it does. That's what people discover. And in the end, you ask them after they've done a bit of this, and improve their lives, where they'd like to go back and they always tell you, no you're kidding. Now it is so much better. So that's one way in. The other way in, in that kind of work too is that people are typically working on too many projects at once and so there is lots and lots of changeovers going on.

They are typically working ahead of the customer or the user specifying what they actually want. So there is a tremendous amount of confusion as to what the actual task, the actual problem that you are trying to solve is. That just generates a tremendous amount of unnecessary work that people are happy to do but actually isn't creating any value for the customer and it's not always easy to see which work is really work and which work is actually going to lead to something tangible for the customer.

The thing about the construction industry for instance, in the construction industry the business model is such that the contractors actually make money on the changes. They don't actually want the customer to really specify in detail exactly what the building is going to look like, because they are bidding low to get the business anyhow, and they want the customer to make changes so that they can then charge a hell of a lot for the changes, and that's where they make their money.

There is a similar aspect in IT systems as well. Partly we are trying to always sell prototypes that are not fully developed and get the customer to pay for the development part but also because the customer is not knowledgeable at what the capabilities might be, and because it takes too long to develop these systems and type of things needs change, this all adds a tremendous amount of confusion. So in IT development I would say you don't start until the very last moment when the customer has done all the specifying they want, until they are really clear what they want.

Then don't work on anything else until you finish it. So you have all the information you need, work on it, completely, uninterruptedly, until it's finished. That will end up with less work per project and much better customer satisfaction. So you just got to start looking at the workflow and the type of work and the influences on that work in a slightly different way.”

Listen to next week’s Business901 podcast as we explore the future of Lean!

Daniel Jones is the author, with James P Womack, of the influential, best-selling management books:
The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Seeing the Whole Value Stream.

Related Information:
Defining the Roles of Lean IT
When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together
The Difficulty of Mastery = The Difficulty of Lean
A Collaborative approach to Value Stream Mapping

Using Desired Effects to find Root Cause

Since being introduced to Appreciative Inquiry by Ankit Patel principal partner with The Lean Way Consulting, I have used it quite extensively. Starting with visioning positive outcomes and working backwards to find a way to achieve these many times uncovers root causes of existing problems. I find conflicting viewpoints of this process with many Lean and Six Sigma practitioners but I could safely say the majority are very skeptical.

In a recent podcast with Matt Wrye, Developing a Learning A3 I uncovered that he was a a certified Shainin Red X Journeyman. If you are not familiar with Shainan, don’t feel alone.  Shainin is probably one of the least known structured problem solving methodology. It has always intrigued me because of its approach of focusing on the Effect to find the Cause (Y to X) versus the traditional X to Y. The traditional way of problem solving (X to Y) list potential causes or variables (Xs or CTQs) through brainstorming and engineering judgment then test to see if the Xs have an effect on the Y. 

From Wikipedia:

Dorian Shainin's development of the “Red X” concept originated from his association with Joseph Juran. In the 1940s Juran coined and popularized the notion of “the vital few and trivial many,” also known as “The Pareto Principle. Shainin recognized that the Pareto principle could be applied effectively to the solving of variation problems. Shainin concluded that, amongst the thousands of variables that could cause a change in the value of an output, one cause-effect relationship had to be stronger than the others. Shainin called this primary cause the “Big Red X”.

Shainin asserted that his application of statistical methods was more cost-effective and simpler than Taguchi methods. In order to determine the "Red X," Shainin would swap pairs of parts between functional and faulty equipment until the one part responsible for the failure is discovered. Shainin would claim that he could often find the primary defective part within a dozen paired swaps.

Shainin's policy of "talking to the parts" was the primary distinguishing factor that set his methods apart from Taguchi's. In classical or Taguchi DOE (Design of Experiments), engineers would brainstorm to form hypotheses regarding possible causes of a problem. Shainin's methods postpone this theoretical step, requiring first the diagnosis of causes via one or more of four clue generation techniques designed to determine, through the empirical testing of the actual parts in question, the root cause, or "Red X".

Matt offered me a brief overview of Shainin in this interview;

 

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Matt Wrye can be found at his blog Beyond Lean.

I find the Shainin approach very closely resembling an Appreciative Inquiry approach. However, it is backed with a much stronger statistical analysis that may be better suited for some. Shainin’s approach offers the bridge needed in the rapid changing world we live in. Shainin's policy of "talking to the parts” could be the statistical alternative needed for Lean Sales and Marketing. “playing in the customer’s playground.”

P.S. In Shainin DOE, it is said: “We talk to the parts. The parts and process are smarter than the engineers.” In Lean Sales and Marketing via SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch); we must co-create value with a customer through use. There is no value from our product or service till they are used.

Related Information:
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
Lean Marketers concentrate on SOAR vs. SWOT
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!
Root Cause Analysis of Success

Is forecasting the pull for a Lean Supply Chain?

Paul Myerson, author of Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management is my guest enxt week on the Business901 podcast. Paul claimed to have written a practical guide hand from this excerpt I think you can tell. He takes the most complex subjects and makes them simple. I re-read many parts of the book not because I did not understand but because I wanted to understand more.

Joe:  When we think about lean, we always think about pull. Is forecasting the pull for a supply chain?

Paul:  Customer demand is the pull. That's another thing you talk about. What's the supply chain? It's really, to me, more like a supply web. Also, some people break it out ‑ there's really a demand chain, which is really part of the supply chain, but at the front end between you and the customer. It is pull, but a lot of these days, and I got involved in this in the early '90's, with what they call "quick response." Now, they refer to it as CPFR, collaborative planning forecasting replenishment ‑‑ basically, working with your customers to develop accurate forecasts by getting to actual point‑of‑sales, and using that information to have a much improved forecast. My thinking is, if you can get your top 20 customers going through some kind of quick response CPFR programming, you're at least collaborating on the forecast, if not managing your inventory for them and placing orders for them.

That top 20 customers could be 80 percent of your forecast. You could then minimize what they call the "bullwhip effect," where things get magnified along the supply chain disruption. You can help to get closer to actual demand and build that into your forecast and have a much more accurate forecast. That's one major step to becoming leaner because we know inventory is used to cover a lot of things, one of them being variability and demand and lead time.

Joe: You're saying the secret to good supply chain is getting deeper with your customers?

Paul:  Right. One of the secrets and with technology today, it's a lot easier. These days, you hear a lot of the terms, "visibility," "collaboration." It's critical to have visibility downstream in your supply chain towards the customer. Maybe it's not a secret anymore because a lot of people are doing it, but I think some people look at it as more of a, "Well, our customer wants us to collaborate or work with them on forecasts or manage or place their orders for them." You have to look at it as a competitive advantage, a strategic choice to go that route to improve not just your process with your customer and make them happy, but to improve your process and also your suppliers' processes.

About: Paul Myerson has been a successful change catalyst for clients and organizations of all sizes. He has more than 25 years of experience in supply chain strategies, systems, and operations that have resulted in bottom-line improvements for companies such as General Electric, Unilever, and Church and Dwight. He is currently Managing Partner at Logistics Planning Associates, LLC, a supply chain planning software and consulting business (www.psjplanner.com).

Related Information:
Why won’t Lean commit to the Demand Chain the way it committed to the Supply chain?
A Collaborative approach to Value Stream Mapping
Customer Experience more powerful than the Supply Chain?
Summary of the 6-part blog Series using DDMRP

Behind every Decision to Buy..

Behind every decision to buy–whether the item is a service or a product, an argument or an idea–is an unspoken emotional motivation. This is the hidden agenda.

Says Kevin Allen, author of the book called The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following. Kevin was my guest on the Business901 podcast and I believe you will find the master storyteller entertaining and a wealth of information.

Kevin worked with the McCann World Group, the Interpublic Group, and Lowe Worldwide, where he helped gain Ad Age’s recognition as "Turnaround Agency of the Year" in 2009. He has spent 25 years in advertising and was a key developer of the now iconic Priceless campaign for MasterCard.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

An excerpt of the podcast can be found on a recent Business901 blog post, Can you name your target audience in two words?

Kevin can be found on the web at Kevin Allen Partners.

Related Information:
Business Processes as Value Networks
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle
There is no Team in Kaizen
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?

Will someone pay for Intangible Value?

In a recent blog post, Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!, I discussed the book Uncommon Service. Next weeks Business901 podcast guest co-author Anne Morriss discusses the four universal truths outlined in the book for delivering uncommon service:

1. You can’t be good at everything.
2. Someone has to pay for it.
3. It’s not your employees’ fault.
4. You must manage your customers.

This is an excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  The next service truth is that "Someone has to pay for it." We talk in the Service Dominant Logic^TM Thinking (Vargo and Lusch,2006) world where the value is in the use of the product. That is what attracted me to your book, the service side of everything. One of the things that is happening, we are making a transition from a product to a service focus; we're switching from a tangible to an intangible world. The things that we are giving away free to sell our product now, are actually the things that have value because our product has been commoditized. I thought your number two service truth, "Someone has to pay for it," addressed that. Does that really address moving from that tangible to an intangible world?

Anne:  It's such a wrenching process and an important journey for some many companies. So many companies are going through it right now ‑‑ some of the most competitive companies in the world. GE used to sell light bulbs. Now, they're providing energy solution, if you look at the profit‑drivers in that company. The same is true for IBM. Those companies are on a big learning curve, right now, in terms of figuring out, what does it mean? We would argue it changes everything! It changes every part of your model. You have to think about the four pieces of a service model. We're talking about in our world view, it's very different depending on services whether you're selling products or selling services.

The importance of culture, it matters more in services. The funding is harder in services. To your question, Steve Jobs can go into his secret phone lab and come up with the perfect phone. Most of the value of that phone is embedded in the product itself. But, when you're selling services you have to involve customers. You have to involve employees in a very intimate way in the value creation process. All the rules are new and different.

Now the funding mechanism is a lot harder. It's easier for us as consumers to pay more for something tangible that we can touch and feel. That's why Starbucks charges you a lot for that drink that's sitting on the counter even though a big part of the experience is the beautiful space, and the comfy chairs, and this third space that Howard Schultz envisioned that was just as nice if not nicer than your living room, and filled with beautiful people, and inspiring in terms of your productivity.

It would be absurd to put meters next to those chairs. It's a lot easier to charge five dollars for a cup of coffee. That's one of the challenges that service companies have to wrestle with when you're talking about this kind of intangible value that you can't drop on your foot. How do you get people to pay for it?

Our basic message is you need pricing that's simple, transparent, and fair. The other piece of it is that the answer might not be to charge your customers more. You may have to figure out other ways to fund it.

The book’s website is an excellent resource and I encourage you to take the survey and utilize the Service Design Tool located there. This is a very challenging perspective for most of us. However, I think you will find the information to be well researched and presented in a compelling fashion.

Related Information:
Does Lean create Innovative Companies?
The End of Best in Market
Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!

Does Lean create Innovative Companies?

Many people only view Lean as a methodology to reduce waste and improve flow.  It has been a driver of internal processes. Many of us have even hijacked the term customer and created “internal customers” and lose sight of the true customer and the marketplace. These companies do not recognize Lean as a business process that strengthens and grows a company through collaborative learning. It is this model in conjunction with the concept of “Pull” that are the fundamental concepts of Lean that provides so much value to Innovation . 

The ever increasing platforms of co-producing, open-innovation, co-creation is moving innovation from an exclusive internal platform to a more external platform. As our Voice of Customer tools get more sophisticated we are not reacting and thinking of the next step needed to delight our customers, we are allowing them to show us the way. True innovation is not happening inside the 4 walls of an organization but out in the customers’ playground. Organizations may lead in "design" but in use it is the customer and in use is where the value is derived (Service Dominant Logic Thinking Vargo and Lusch,2006).

Many would argue the Lean is about incremental improvement. It does not allow for breakthrough thinking. I agree that SDCA and PDCA with a continuous mindset may not deliver breakthrough thinking. However, like most things you start one step at a time. The culture of Innovation starts with culture of continuous improvement. To start with breakthrough thinking is very difficult and typically not successful. So starting with PDCA and a continuous improvement is the only successful way, to create this "i (little i) culture. Now, to ramp it up and truly do breakthrough thinking, the big 'I" is when you must engage and understand your customer/market extremely well.

This could be a description of the culture a Lean company from a Scott Anthony FastCompany Post on innovation:

A classic example of this is how a calligraphy class inspired Apple legend Steve Jobs’s emphasis on typography on early computers. The professors then detail what they call the "Innovator’s DNA," four time-tested approaches successful innovators follow to gather stimuli that spur these connections:

• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycles with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

Design and Innovation takes place outside the four walls and Lean is the methodology of choice. It is the driver of both the Little i and the Big I. Why Lean? The first and foremost reason is that it allows the 1st step for innovation. Without it, you never start!

My upcoming Podcast with Dan Jones dives into this type of Lean Thinking. Review these past post to provide some additional background, Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011 and The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

Related Information:
Applying Cellular Concepts to Marketing Segments
The End of Best in Market
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

Individual Lean Transcription

In the Business901 podcast Individual Lean, the Root Cause of Success?, Dan Markovitz, founder and owner of Time Back Management discussed applying the principle of Lean to everyday life. These principles are the basis for his new book, A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance.

This is a transcription of the podcast.

More about Dan: TimeBack Management is a consultancy specializing in improving individual and organizational performance through the application of lean concepts. He’s a faculty member of the Lean Enterprise Institute, and teaches classes at the Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business.

Related Information:
Successful Lean teams are iTeams
Kaizen is Always Individual
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban

An Uncommon Way of thinking about Service Design

Service Design Thinking: Anne Morriss, the best‑selling co‑author of Uncommon Service says,

We live in a world where lots of organizations want to deliver great service. We work with managers all the time, who are committed to it. Customers, as we know, are hungry for it, and yet, our service experiences are still overwhelmingly negative. In pursuing this question, what became clear is that past excellence is not necessarily intuitive. It's not about trying harder, deciding the customer is always right. It's more about making careful design choices and very deliberate trade‑offs. There are some surprising rules and pitfalls along the way. We wanted to get some of those insights out in the world because we think, basically, the world is ready for it.

This is an excerpt from the Business901 podcast with Anne. We discuss the four universal truths outlined in the book for delivering uncommon service:

1. You can’t be good at everything.
2. Someone has to pay for it.
3. It’s not your employees’ fault.
4. You must manage your customers

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

The book’s website is an excellent resource and I encourage you to take the survey and utilize the Service Design Tool located there. This is a very challenging perspective for most of us. However, I think you will find the information to be well researched and presented in a compelling fashion.

Related Information:
The Lean Business Practices of a Deli
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Will someone pay for Intangible Value?
In love with your products more than your customers?

Looking for a Game Changer, Start Underperforming!

I think most organizations have the opinion that if we improve they will make more money. They think through operational improvements or becoming better, faster, cheaper in itself is a winning formula. There are a few basic problems with that premise:

1. You have to improve at a faster rate than your competition.
2. You have to improve on things that matter to your customers to retain them.
3. You have to improve on things that matter to the market place to acquire them.
4. You have to be able to support both the new and old items of improvement.

I am sure there are more but my point is better, faster and cheaper is not a game changer anymore. So, what do we do, innovate? Even with innovation we go through the same scenario as above, just with a little more risk involved.

The fact is most companies try to do too much. They want to match the competition with every feature and do it better, faster and of course, cheaper. I see this strategy many times and always joked with salespeople that if we had the best product at the best price and in stock, what would you use as an excuse? It is not about differentiation even. It is about doing what your customer wants you to do well and permitting yourself not only to be average but maybe even terrible at things they don’t care about.

In the field of Appreciative Inquiry, I find many of the same thoughts. We are not looking for areas of deficiencies and improvement but to expand on the areas we do well in. If we are looking for a sustainable competitive advantage, should we be viewing our organization from its positive core versus the negatives?

When you look at the way many companies are succeeding today, it is in exactly this manner.

1. Low cost airlines; Ryanair, Southwest Airlines
2. Software Producers: 37 Signals, Zoho
3. Apps: All of them just about
4. Baseball: Oakland Athletics

The Oakland Athletics did this and described in the book and movie Moneyball. Billy Bean looked at the things that mattered (on base average). Other parts of the game, that had limited exposure such as fielding or speed, he disregarded. He ignored conventional baseball wisdom. 

Most organizations try to do the same old thing. Need to increase sales, hire your competitor’s superstar! What if you considered what really matters to your customer? Does he value technical expertise more? Or maybe, he wants someone more literate in finances?

In the book Uncommon Service, the authors state:

Our message begins simply enough: you can't be good at everything. In services, trying to do it all brilliantly will lead almost inevitably to mediocrity. Excellence requires sacrifice. To deliver great service on the dimensions that your customers value most, you must underperform on dimensions they value less. This means you must have the stomach to do some things badly.

The concept can seem immoral at first blush. We recently did some work with a major health-care provider. The CEO wasn't able to join us until the last couple of days. When he arrived, we reviewed what we'd covered, including the link between underperformance and excellence. The CEO immediately pushed back, saying, "I don't see anything we could afford to be bad at." He continued, revealing that he saw the idea of lowering the bar on any dimension as dishonorable, particularly in a field like health care.

Hands immediately shot up around the room. His team disagreed, and after listening to their ideas for where tradeoffs could be made — where resources could be shifted from areas low on the customers' priority list to areas customers cared more about — the CEO finally backed down. "I get it," he said. "That's how we can afford to be great."

The authors suggest viewing your organization in this manner:

1. Your service offering: How do customers define "excellence" in your offering?
2. Your service funding mechanism: How will you get paid for delivering excellence?
3. Your employee management system: How will you prepare your employees to deliver excellence every day?
4. Your customer management system: How will you get your customers to behave in ways that improve their service experience?

Looking for a Game Changer? Start underperforming!

P.S. Most companies are reluctant to put this kind of trust in the customer.

Related information:
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts!
What happens when the factory goes away?
Compressing your Value Stream for Unprofitable Customers
Are you focusing on your customers conversations?

Insight into the Customer Experience through Theater

At Work•Play•Experience Adam St. John (aka Adam Lawrence) turns good services into memorable service experiences that start people talking. Adam says, “Your customers will feel better served, will appreciate the value of your work, and will be more loyal to your company. And they will have great service stories to share with the world.” In the Business901 podcast this week, Adam and I discusses the theatrical aspect of service design and how theater can play a vital role in developing your customer experience.

An written excerpt from the podcast is located here: The Show Business side of Service Design.

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Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Adam is a professional comedian, business consultant and writer with a background in psychology and the automotive industry. For years he has been using expertise gained in the world of theatre and film to help companies influence their customers.

Related Information:
Gamestorming for Service Design
Service Design via a Design Thinker ebook
Do you co-create value with your Customer?
A Service Design Thinking Primer

Can you name your target audience in two words?

Next week’s podcast is with Kevin Allen, author of a very unique book called The Hidden Agenda: A Proven Way to Win Business and Create a Following. Kevin comes across initially as someone from the Mad Men era. He worked with the McCann World Group, the Interpublic Group, and Lowe Worldwide, where he helped gain Ad Age's recognition as "Turnaround Agency of the Year" in 2009. Kevin has spent 25 years in advertising and was a key developer of the now iconic Priceless campaign for MasterCard.

Kevin may have spent some time in the Mad Men arena but he has created a space of his own. In the podcast he takes some of the most celebrated idea of advertising such as the word “pitch” and transforms it into today’s vocabulary. An excerpt from the podcast.

Joe:  If you find your target audience, a pitch is effective, you connect, you know that right away. How do you find that target audience to pitch to?

Kevin:  That's a great question. I think that over the years, a number of ways that we would define our targets. Still today, I work with a number of companies who still look at functional and descriptive measures to describe the people they're talking to, sort of women, 25 to 54, in certain counties with certain incomes and so on. But the fact is that community formation, now more than ever, not only say within the U.S. but around the world, community formation is on the basis of belief and value system. It pushes us further to try to figure out a way to develop a definition of our target audience that runs more deeply.

In a way, if you remember from the book, I take a page out of politics, whereby the notion of the conceptual target is a way by which you can develop a powerful emotional definition of your audience. Soccer Mom, for example, was a great one.

In the pursuit of the Marriott business, no matter whether the person was staying at the JW, their topflight property, and spending several hundred dollars a night, or they were staying at Fairfield, the emotional composition of that audience were called Road Warriors, people who are out there selling for their companies.

It's a terrific way because at the end of the day people come together because of what they believe and how they feel.

Joe:  When you're talking, it seems that you attach a nice conceptual name, that name that just grabs you right away, soccer mom. You identify and you know exactly who that is, who your target audience is, in two words.

Kevin:  Well a company that I work with, a dear friend of mine actually, it's a fantastic company that she runs. She was trying to figure out, "How do I better define the kind of companies that I work with," says this friend of mine. After a weekend of work, we realized that the one of the things that's common to the people that they really can help are Frustrated Visionaries. That was the term, because they are brilliant at being able to crystallize the pathway for someone with a vision.

You can see that no matter whether their prospect was a small company or a Fortune 500 CEO, they were able to define their audience in an emotional need state term and then connect their product, what they do, to that need state. It's terrific.

This is a podcast that is, should I say, “Priceless”.

Kevin Allen can be found at KevinAllenPartners.com – The Bookshelf on the website is a very clever idea.

Related Information:
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Will someone pay for Intangible Value?
Are you Smarter than a Monkey with your Money?
Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?

Continuous Improvement Program for Sales and Marketing

The Lean Marketing Lab opened several months ago, an online community created to further the cause of bringing continuous improvement to the sales and marketing. The foundational work is in Lean but you will find a flavor of Service Design and Design Thinking intertwined. Recently, I have moved the Marketing with Lean Series of books to this site and when you purchase the books you will receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.

Marketing with Lean Book Series:

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

When joining, you will receive immediate access to all four books, additional Learning A3s, 130 eBooks, numerous downloads, and forms all centered on Lean Sales and Marketing. If you are interested in beginning a journey to bring Lean to your Sales and Marketing this is the next step. In addition, I am presently creating learning tracks that will be shared only in the community for developing Lean Sales and Marketing from three different views: An Internal Lean Champion, Sales and Marketing Manager and as an outside Consultant. An additional fee may apply to these programs but there will be a substantial discount offered to the initial group.

Purchase the Marketing with Lean Book Series  and receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.

I look forward to your participation – Joe

Lean Sales and Marketing

You can't write and teach Lean Sales and Marketing. It is a Learn by doing approach. It is choose one problem and solve one problem. What we can do is provide you a platform through the recommended books and tools, teach them and incorporate feedback as you put them into practice.

Limited Time Offer: Receive Access to all 4 Books after joining the Lean Marketing Lab and receive free membership to community till the end of the year.

Lean Marketing House (More Info): A starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly Customer Value. Recommended 1st reading of series.

Marketing with PDCA (More Info): Targeting what your Customer Values at each stage of the cycle will increase your ability to deliver quicker, more accurately and with better value than your competitor. It is a moving target and the principles of Lean and PDCA facilitates the journey to Customer Value.

Marketing with A3(More Info): Enables sales and marketing to use the Lean tool of A3 as a structured approach for their problem solving, strategies and tactics.

Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible.

Limited Time Offer: Purchase all 4 Books and receive free membership to Lean Marketing Lab community till the end of the year.