“Lean (as applied to marketing & sales) is the process of maximizing the value delivered to customers by eliminating any wasted activity or expense in the marketing or sales process that does not create or enhance relevant customer-perceived value.”
Depending on your market circumstances, Lean has the ability to reduce your marketing and sales expenses, while increasing sales and market share and enabling increases in selling prices and margins. Lean is not too good to be true. The benefits are real and borne out by strategic research and real life success stories.
Lean is not simply a slash and burn offensive on the sales and marketing budget. It needs to be applied strategically and in a targeted way. It requires the re-allocation of resources and assets to the most important customer-perceived values and away from non-value-delivering capabilities and activities.
So, here are three principles to use when considering the application of lean principles within your Marketing and Sales function.
First: The Law of Economic Value© is Always at Work
That law states, “All economic value accruing to your firm has as its source, the customer’s perception that they will receive more economic, emotional, political or physical value from your product or service, than it costs them economically, emotionally, politically or physically to acquire and use.”©
Amazon got its foothold because the value of the traditional brick and mortar bookstore was irrelevant to a large segment of the book buying market. Bricks and mortar, attached Starbuck’s, store clerks and reading couches simply did not deliver value to buyers in that segment. Yet they cost book stores a lot to maintain.
Second: The Lack of Lean Creates Vulnerabilities in Your Business that Competitors Will Exploit
If there is any place in your product or service offering, marketing, customer service process or sales approach that customers consciously or subconsciously perceive as not providing the highest value possible, that gap will be the place you are most vulnerable to competitive attack.
Third: When assessing the relative importance and value of deploying a specific lean initiative in a specific part of your Marketing & Sales function, use the first and second principles above to guide your decisions.
You can’t improve everything at once, so you must prioritize.
The order of priority?
First, re-balance investment and assets to enhance the most important customer-received value dimensions (economic, emotional, political or physical) in your most lucrative market segment. Shift resource from non-value delivering activities to relevant values.
Second, apply lean to reduce or eliminate potential and emerging competitive vulnerabilities.
Third: Apply Lean continually. Lean requires continual vigilance.
Why?
Because the lack of Lean deployment is directly indicative of your competitive vulnerability and the graveyards are full of failed companies and products that ignored or completely misunderstood how to apply resources in proportion to what the customers really considered most important.
Copyright Jerry Vieira, CMC and The QMP Group, Inc. 2015 All Rights Reserved
*****
For more discussion on lean in Marketing & Sales, read our sister post entitled “Six Targets for Lean in Your Marketing & Sales Function”
To discuss Lean concepts with Jerry, call 503.318.2696 or email to Jerry @qmpassociates.com. Visit the QMP website at www.theqmpgroup.com