Get Clients NOW! Workshop – Special Offer

On October 10th, I will be starting my rendition of the Get Clients NOW!^TM -28 Day program. This started as a basic referral, networking type program and with the influence of Social Media, I had introduced a special session on how use social media to extend the conversation. My Achieving Expert Status and Marketing your Black Belt has been an outgrowth of this program.

The bottom line is that if you want immediate business you must institute an action plan to maximizing the creation and leveraging of your touch-points with prospects and customers. The truth of the matter is that the principles that are contained in this program are the same basic principles that is still make marketing successful today. Some of the tools have changed but that is covered rather easily in the session. The basic ideas are

1. Planning out a program that you can implement immediately.
2. Recognize Short-term improvements needed and develop actions to correct.
3. Review Long-term improvements and develop actions to correct.
4. Simplifying (not just automating) what works and ridding yourself of what doesn’t work.

Get Clients NOW! program

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This program is not just a coaching program. It is a learning program for a Professional Service firm or individual that is highly intensive and requires work on your part. The special offer for this session only is that you will receive the following at no additional charge: 

1. Get Clients Now Book
2. The GCN Six-Month Marketing Guide
3. Membership to the GCN Answer Center for 1 year
4. Lean Marketing House Book
5. Marketing with PDCA Book
6. Marketing with A3 Book

You must supply a valid email for these  to be sent.

Business901 October 10th G.C.N. Program

This link is the only thing stopping you from getting more clients!

Offer Ends Friday!

These are timeless principles that can be utilized over and over again.

Related Information:
Achieving Expert Status
Marketing your Black Belt

Answers to Sustainability

I was participating in a discussion on LinkedIn and came across an article, How to Sustain Front Line Process Improvement Activities from the Harvard Business Review and like most of us, if it says sustainability we take a look. It has to be the most difficult part of any continuous improvement process.

I found the author of the article, Brad Power handling the comments masterfully and engaging in a great dialogue with the commenters. He is actually researching sustaining attention to process management and is currently conducting research with the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Our podcast centered on Brad’s research of sustainability and his findings so far may not be unique but the structure he puts to his information is.  Also, I think you will find out as much about researching and the questions you ask as you will sustainability. At times I wondered who was being interviewed.

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

Brad Power is a consultant and researcher in process innovation. In his latest consulting engagement, for over a year he's been helping a healthcare insurance company reengineer its interactions with providers and members to reduce cycle times. And for the last three years he's been researching why few companies sustain their attention to process management — how they can make improvement and adaptation a habit (even fun?). He's been collaborating with the Lean Enterprise Institute on his research. You can see some of his research insights in his blog posts at The Harvard Business Review at bradfordpower.tumblr.com. He's interested in hearing stories of companies which embarked on a process improvement program and either kept going, or didn't, and why.

Related Information:
Learn more about the Xerox Design for Lean Six Sigma
Design for Lean Six Sigma, The Xerox Way
Sustaining Lean in Manufacturing
Does Lean Marketing deliver what the customer wants?

Customer Experience more powerful than the Supply Chain?

During the past few months I have been spending time understanding the Service Design concept. The history according to Wikpedia:

The earliest contributions on service design (Shostack 1982; Shostack 1984), the activity of designing service was considered as part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines. This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a “service blueprint” to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner.

In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD), and Prof. Birgit Mager has played an integral role for developing the study of service design at KISD in later days. In 2010, 23 service design professionals published the first comprehensive textbook This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases , edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

Wikpedia goes on the give a brief description of Service Design:

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by (Morelli 2006), who proposes three main directions:

1. Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service, using appropriate analytical tools
2. Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, sequences of actions and actors’ role, in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organizational structure
3. Representation of the service, using techniques that illustrate all the components of the service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Where Service Design has made an impact in my thinking though is its obvious connection to two areas. One in the ability to involve customers through co-creation or open innovation and the other as it relates to The Experience Economy popularized by the book of that name by Pine and Gilmore.

In the 90’s business processes was all the buzz and Lean, Six Sigma led the way. They have continued gaining popularity but and this is a big “but” may soon lose out to the methodologies of Service Design and Design Thinking.

Why? Lean and Six Sigma cannot move away from that supply chain mentality. They are continuously bogged down in the internal world of product delivery. They continue to think the more efficient you become the better company you become. They relate everything to customer value but seldom is that referenced to an external customer.

What’s different about Service Design? In the Service Design context they put the customer experience at the center of the organization. Many product companies have been using this concept with Apple being the shining example. Design is the differentiating factor.

When viewing the customer experience perspective from The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing framework that states, value is not created till your product/service is put into use creates a different spin. It obsoletes the supply chain and operational excellence as the primary reason your product is purchased. Many efficiency experts are simply at a loss to explain this and struggle to comprehend this concept.

I am not saying improvement of a process is not a good thing. But to do it without improving the customer experience will provide little value and may even prove to be “invaluable”. More information on this can be obtained in a recent blog post: Will Lean always internalize the customer?

Related Information:
The Service-dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
7 Principles of Universal Design & Beyond
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing