The slide deck for a Lean Sales and Marketing presentation at Agile Cincinnati.

1. 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.

4. 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?

5. 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?

6. 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?

8. Our buyers are now being influenced differently. Funnels are
basically flawed as customers are anything but predictable.

9. 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?
4 Ps 3Cs & V
• Product • Collaboration
• Promotion • Content
• Price • Value
• Place • Community

10. Smart companies haves started to change trying to create
experiences versus traditional methods. Have you?

11. Customers require more touch points and interaction.

12. 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?

14. 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?.

15. 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?

16. 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!.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

22. 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!.

23. 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

29. 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

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. Our
Plan Offer Order Loyalty
Steps
Mapping the customer steps and your matching resources allows you to build an
internal and external network of support.

33. 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).

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

42. PDCA
PDCA
PDCA
PDCA
PDCA
PDCA
PDCA

43. •
• 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.

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

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

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

49. There should be a canvas created for every value stream
and sometimes for every Sales and Marketing team.

50. You can have as many pillars(channels) as needed The teams can be
organized vertically, horizontally or even in a combination of both.

51. Seeking perfection requires that continuous improvement is practiced in
the interaction with customers in the pillar section.

52. • Identify Value
• Map Value Stream
• Create Flow
• Establish Pull
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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).

53. 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. .

55. 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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58. Follow-up:

59. 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.