Lean Marketing = Business Process Re-engineering

Marketing is a lot like the weather. We complain about it, but we never seem to do anything to change it. (Climate is another story.) CEOs frequently complain that they can't see the ROI from their marketing budget, but they don't seem willing or able to do anything about it.

It's strange too, because some of these CEOs are the same visionaries who have overseen the implementation of lean manufacturing and lean design principles to eliminate waste and create competitive advantage for their companies.

But sales and marketing are business processes like any others, so if your sales and marketing programs are not achieving their objectives, why not consider re-engineering those processes, just as you would a manufacturing or design process?

Are sales and marketing art or science? In truth, they are a bit of both. But to the extent that they are measurable, they are science, even if your methodology is trial and error. After all, mistakes should be learning experiences, but if you don't understand the dollars-and-cents aspect of your mistakes, you will never learn from them.

You're a high-tech manufacturer boasting the latest and greatest manufacturing technologies and techniques. You use technology to create competitive advantage in your manufacturing products and processes. So why are your sales and marketing people using the 21st Century equivalent of goose quills, ink wells and parchment to market and sell your products?

Business process re-engineering is not about reducing head count. It's about turning those heads into centres of profit. It's about reaching goals more efficiently.

Where is the greatest waste in marketing processes? To identify waste, you first have to define processes. A project plan for a marketing project may contain a hundred tasks divided into the following stages:

• Scheduling
• Discovery
• Project Planning
• Research
• Design
• Implementation
• Support -- Review, Revise, Repeat

For each stage in a project, what are the continuous improvement questions we are asking?

Even though marketers are professional communicators, communication is generally where the greatest waste occurs in any marketing project. Bad communication is usually responsible for work flow breakdowns. Nowhere is this more apparent than in approvals.

Approvals are binary milestones: they are the bottlenecks in marketing processes, because they are Go/No Go moments in the project lifecycle. What can be done to smooth the path for approvals?

Lots:

• Communicate the importance of approvals to the process clearly. Discovery and Approvals are the most critical nodes in the project lifecycle, and the most frequent source of delays and outright project failure. (This is something good to say -- say it well and say it often.)
• Communicate review requirements and objectives clearly. (Why am I reading this document? What is expected of me?)
• Agree on a timeframe, and communicate clearly the impact of tardiness on the project plan. (If you don't review this document this week, we will be at least a week late in delivering your website.

In my experience, some marketing deliverables can require up to 3 iterations before approval is achieved. If more than 3 iterations are required, then there are issues besides the deliverable itself that need to be resolved. Are the consultant and client on the same page? Is the customer making decisions? Is the customer postponing decisions? All of these scenarios lead to waste.