Archive for PDCA
Marketing with Lean Series – 4 Pack
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It is even more special for a limited time, if you visit the Business901 website and wait 30 Seconds! 
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. Recommended 2nd reading of series.
Lean Engagement Team(More Info): The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Recommended 3rd reading of series.
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. Recommended 4th reading of series.
Save when buying all 4
This series of books are about developing a continuous improvement culture in your sales and marketing and re-positioning your customer as the center of your organization. The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.
Disclaimer: There is no silver bullet introduced in these books.
Related Information:
Lean Marketing House
Marketing with PDCA
Lean Engagement Team
Marketing with A3
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Posted by: | CommentsSales and marketing can no longer operate in a vacuum. It has become a process output that intertwines across many of the departments within the organization. As companies have become flat, their decision making is increasingly being done by committee. As a supplier, you must mimic your customer decision-making path and as a result your sales and marketing will also be done by committee. Our highest priority is to deliver to the customer content that he deems valuable to his decision-making process. 
Lean is the future of marketing and one of the main reasons is the development of Agile under the Lean umbrella. Using the Agile Manifesto as a basis for Agile marketing or Lean marketing is a good start. In summary they are based on these principles:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Content-rich material over elaborate promotion
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Response to changing customer needs over following a plan
The further we are from our customers’ knowledge base the more effort has to be made to create a larger and larger supply of prospects. The ability to share and create knowledge with your customer is the strongest marketing tool possible. Successful Sales and Marketing Teams are no longer trying to get their message out but developing strategies to get the message in.
Table of Contents
- The Path
- Positioning your organization from your customer’s viewpoint
- Only the Customer Determine Value
- PDCA from the Outside-In
- The iCustomer and iTeam
- New Lean Thinking
- Lean Engagement Tools
- Lean Engagement Team
- Marketing Gateway of EDCA, PDCA, SDCA
The book is available as a PDF download on the Business901.com website or on Amazon:
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [Ring-bound]
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [CD-ROM]
Related Information:
SALES PDCA Framework for Lean Sales and Marketing
Profound knowledge for Lean Marketing
If all of us need to be marketers, what’s the framework?
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota
Blog Carnival Annual Roundup 2011: Graham Hill at CustomerThink
Posted by: | CommentsGraham works in innovation, service design, value co-creation and private equity with DesignThinkers, Optima Partners, Loyalty Factory, and Nyras Capital. Graham was formally the head of CRM at Toyota Financial Services and can be found at the Customer Insider Blog on the Customer Think website. I am honored this year to be part of John Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival and equally honored to introduce Graham to this audience. 
For several years now, I have been developing concepts and practicing Lean Marketing in conjunction with Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints. Lean was always the guiding light but it was not till I started to get involved in Service-Dominant Logic, Service Design and Design Thinking that my thoughts crystallized. In fact, it strengthened and reinforced my Lean Thinking. Lean has developed as the architecture in software over disciplines such as Agile, Scrum and Kanban. Lean has similarly developed as my architecture for sales and marketing. Graham Hill did not start me down this path but he has certainly reinforced my thinking with his comments and articles he presents. I remember few doors that have been opened such a vast amount of knowledge and learned experiences than Graham did when he used 3 tweets to say:
Marketing in highly competitive markets is about exploring new propositions on the innovation fitness landscape. The environment determines where to start and complex marketing environments need EDCA. Complicated ones often start with PDCA ½.” EDCA = Explore, PDCA = Plan, SDCA = Standardize. Marketing Operations is all about moving along the EDCA>PDCA>SDCA pathway.
Another comment of Graham’s that reinforced my journey into Design Thinking and Service Design:
I was taught and used Toyota’s approach to lean, to improve all aspects of Toyota’s and its dealers’ customer-facing business. Toyota doesn’t see lean as a collection of tools (unlike many so-called lean experts), but rather as an organizational philosophy to engage the whole organization in creating more value together with customers. Toyota’s approach to lean is much closer to design thinking than you may think.
You can read the entire explanation on this blog post, Asking the right questions about Lean?
The real value that you derive from following Graham is his cutting edge thoughts and practices that he exhibits in his Customer Insider blog, such as:
Seven Simple Steps Towards Better Collaboration: In an earlier post on CustomerThink I described Ten Principles that Drive Effective Collaboration. And why just implementing collaboration technology would not improve collaboration. Worse, how it would make you into an ‘Expensive Old Organization’; with all the costs of the new technology, but none of the desired benefits. If simply implementing new technology isn’t the way to increase collaboration, what is? Fortunately getting started with collaboration is much easier than you might think. In fact, you are probably doing some of it already.
What’s Your Platform for Value Co-Creation?: A couple of years back I wrote a speculative blog post at CustomerThink entitled How Customer Co-Creation is the Future of Business. In many ways my prediction was right, Customer Co-Creation IS the future of business, but not exactly in the way I had imagined.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been with us for over 20 years. It is built around using customer analytics to improve marketing, sales and service touchpoints. And it works very well. Or at least it does for companies. But it doesn’t offer much of any value to their customers. And as a result, its effectiveness has started to fall.
Customer Experience Management (CExM) was created about 10 years ago as an antidote to the blatant one-sidedness of CRM. It still uses the same customer analytics, but it applies the insights generated to improve all the…
Social CRM: What’s Right, What’s Wrong, What’s Next? Inside Scoop with Graham Hill: CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson interviewed Graham Hill in a discussion about Social CRM.
P.S. In the world of Social Media, I can think of few people that have a more engaged following especially from an individual that uses it to serve his purpose (not meant in a selfish manner) in lieu of having a social media presence. You can tweet him @grahamhill.
Related Information:
Carnival page on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
Blog Carnival Annual Roundup: 2011: The 99 Percent Solution
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing
Value can no longer be defined as What a Customer will pay for!
