It's not your grandmother's lean anymore!

The yellow boxes on each slide contain a

summary of my notes for the presentation.

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In Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated by Womack and Jones, the authors introduced the five core concepts.

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Many would introduce the 8 types of Waste and

5s as the first step.

The next step would be to apply Lean on a project by project basis to the sales and marketing activities. Extending the waste and cost cutting focus of Lean efforts to marketing in an attempt to make these activities more efficient. Everyone knows that sales and marketing offers an opportunity for cost savings when made more disciplined and structured.

This is not what sales and marketing needs! But can Lean grow market share or top-line revenues?

Value Chain is a concept from business management that was first described and popularized by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage. The chain of activities gives the products more added value than the sum of the independent activity's value. Is this still true?

The customer plays a significant role in determining value but many us are still

grounded in the value chain when determining price and the value that we deliver.

Is our revenue still growing?

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•As described in The Discipline of Market Leaders: by Treacy and Wiersma, we decide on which one of their three value disciplines will become our value proposition. Understanding this Value Proposition relative to our competition is how we create our growth strategies. Does this still work?

Our buyers are now being influenced differently. Funnels are

basically flawed as customers are anything but predictable.

4 Ps

• Product

• Promotion

• Price

• Place

3Cs & V

• Collaboration

• Content

• Value

• Community

Have we really done anything besides change the name? Do we really understand

what pull is? Evaluate your marketing budget, how many dollars are spent on

push and on pull. Are sales people told to wait for someone to call them?

Smart companies haves started to change trying to create

experiences versus traditional methods. Have you?

Customers require more touch points and interaction.

And have we changed the tools – you have to be a marketing technologist. Funny thing is now we have these marketing technologist sometimes called Geeks telling us about marketing, content, strategy, context and value?

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The latest quarterly report from McKinsey tells us these tools have come up

short. Most of us have hardly even started?

McKinsey sums it up by saying: The major barrier to engagement is organizational rather than conceptual: given the growing number of touch points where customers now interact with companies, marketing often can’t do what’s needed all on its own. CMOs and their C-suite colleagues must collaborate intensively to adapt their organizations to the way customers now behave and, in the process, redefine the traditional marketing organization. If companies don’t make the transition, they run the risk of being overtaken by competitors that have mastered the new era of engagement.

Overtaken! As I said many have not even started.

And the ones that have, are they that far ahead?.

McKinsey’s answer is make everyone a marketer, Forrester says touch points

without channels, Pine/Gilmore says create experiences. Does anyone really

understand collaboration, community, content and specifically customer

value. Are we going to wait for a customer to pull us in?

So Marketing is getting squeezed. In one case the Supply Chain as we know it is gone. Marketing is becoming more and more about tools. The pressure is on and many of us to catch up rely way to much on the tools!.

The two pillars of Lean are Respect for people and Continuous Improvement.

It is not about tools, it is about empowerment and Lean is our enabler for this.

In a Supply Driven Economy the customer did not ignore these value-added services. A lot of people have focused on the fact that the Economic times right now are really bad. What a lot of people are missing is the fact that the world around us has fundamentally changed. What we see now across the world is that we have excess capacity.

We are seeing volatility like never before and at the same time they no longer have the reliability of understanding what the customers are going to demand and when they’re going to demand, because customers are increasingly fickle. So what we’ve got is the perfect storm that has come together of excess capacity and incredible product variety.

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More people, More touch points, More Tools?

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There are many marketing “systems” in the world. When you think about a system it is just a series of functions or activities within an organization that work together for the aim or the organization. However, most of them have relatively little value towards improvement or optimization as a whole. Deming believes that the journey continuous improvement requires the understanding of systems which is emphasized in his own system of Profound Knowledge.

How true Deming was when you apply his thoughts to sales and marketing. Our natural resource was that demand always exceeded supply. Sure, it was not handed to us on a silver platter and not all of us were successful. But for the most part, there was a demand. That demands has diminished or cease to exist in many markets. We are competing in a state where there is excess supply. There is a scarcity of sales and marketing’s natural resource, customers!.

Can Lean work? Can it be about getting rid of waste and efficiencies?

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•Five core concepts are still there:

• Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer. • Identify all the steps in the customers value stream. • Make value-creating steps occur in tight sequence for better flow. • As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity. • As value is specified, wasted steps are removed, iterate and continue it until a state of

perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

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But you must think about Lean as a knowledge creation model. It is very common as a

customer goes through a decision making process that their minds will change. The

PDCA provides feedback to justify our hypotheses and increase our knowledge. This

allows both the customer and us not to be perfect the first time. The rate of change or

the speed of the improvement is a key competitive factor in today’s world. PDCA

allows for major jumps in performance not through massive breakthroughs but through

frequent small improvements.

The term Experience Economy was first described in an article published in 1998 by Joe Pine and though this chart has taken a fair amount of abuse over the years, I like it because it depicts the hierarchy of what a customer is willing to pay for. As you go up the pyramid shows that a customer values wisdom/knowledge over product. Though not entirely true – it depends on the business that your in, it does provide a baseline relative to the competition.

The drawing is reflective of a Scrum sprint. Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for project management and agile software development. I use the loops to demonstrate a higher level of intimacy with a prospect. The top loop is for existing customers to nurture an even stronger relationship.

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Mimicking the customer buying process is at the heart of Lean Marketing. This marketing channel or Value Stream would equate to one of the pillars in the Lean Marketing House. As you build the relationship with the customer the cycles typically get smaller and faster.

The Lean practice of PDCA is ideal for learning and creating knowledge activities. Following this process allows individuals and teams to recognize and take advantage of opportunities, make decisions faster, and be more responsive

This is a diagram from the book This is Service Design Thinking that could

serve as an outline for a specific iteration or even a very simple marketing channel.

Focusing on the customer decision marking process allows you to create a system

of purposeful interactions and flexibility versus benefits and features. Most people

struggle with this idea. But is it much simpler than first perceived.

Our Steps

Plan Offer Order Loyalty

Mapping the customer steps and your matching resources allows you to build an

internal and external network of support.

The mapping exercise allows you to create a sales and

marketing team to deliver the require support needed.

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What a system needs to do is help you develop certain touch points that will identify and link your product or services to your customer base. How well you can make this authentic and even transparent can be very important.

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The book, The Power of Pull: discusses the elements of a successful journey towards pull: trajectory (where you are going), leverage (the ability to mobilize the passions and efforts of other people), and the best pace (the speed at which you progress).

Trust Real value with all stakeholders

The only competitive advantage you have is ability to learn more efficiently and

more effectively from your customers. Positioning your organization in your

customers playground is the most important role marketing has.

When you first think about co-creation you jump to innovation. There are

many other parts to co-creation and how you co-create depends very much

on the level of trust you have with a customer.

Your product/service is relatively unimportant. Even a company like Caterpillar

recognizes that it has become their dealer network that provides the value to the

customer.

From the book Design Thinking for Growth, the above chart provides a different set

of tools for a value stream providing a culture of co-creation.

People are mystified at times thinking

that mapping a customer decision

process would work for them or a

large customer. Co-authors Jeffrey

Liker and David Meir, co-authors of

The Toyota Way Fieldbook created

this pyramid of the Supplier

Partnering Hierarchy of Toyota that

consisted of these 7 steps.

PDCA

PDCA

PDCA

PDCA

PDCA

PDCA

PDCA

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• Map Value Stream

• Create Flow

• Establish Pull

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We have walked through the pillars of the Lean Marketing House and discussed 3 of

the 5 core principles of Lean.

We must now look at identifying value for the customer and for the organization.

Alex Osterwalder

You can modify this to fit your needs but the standard canvas is a great starting point.

The canvas when completed serves as a guide for the sales and marketing team. It

provides the clarity and empowers the team.

Alex Osterwalder

There should be a canvas created for every value stream

and sometimes for every Sales and Marketing team.

You can have as many pillars(channels) as needed The teams can be

organized vertically, horizontally or even in a combination of both.

Seeking perfection requires that continuous improvement is practiced in

the interaction with customers in the pillar section.

• Identify Value

• Map Value Stream

• Create Flow

• Establish Pull

•Seeking perfection requires that continuous improvement is practiced in the interaction

with customers in the pillar section. But the pillars must be supported by a foundation

of marketing activities (blocks).

These blocks are made up of the tactics we will employ to move prospects from one

stage to another. As we move the forward, a more formal collection and reporting

system will emerge. We can improve these tactics through the traditional Lean tools

such as a checklist and A3s. .

Tools for the sake of tools are rather ineffective. In Lean, we provide tools in a context

that can be recorded, measured and as part of a continuous improvement process.

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Using A3 in the marketing process provides a standard method of developing and creating your marketing programs. It will recap the thoughts, efforts, and actions that take place for a particular campaign, such as advertising or public relations or even a launch.

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Follow-up:

Resources Books: This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage The Toyota Way Fieldbook The Service-dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers Websites: Value Co-Creation: Wim Rampen Slideshare McKinsey Quarterly: We’re all marketers now Forrester: Welcome To The Era Of Agile Commerce Scott Brinker: 8 things every marketing technologist should know Janet R. McColl-Kennedy: Co-creation of Value and S-D logic

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Our Mission is to bring

Continuous Improvement

to Sales and Marketing.