Six Sigma in the Operational Marketing Process
The commercialization team has completed its preparation to launch a new offering. Its deliverables have met the process requirements and have passed the final launch phase-gate review. The transition from inbound to outbound marketing marks the start of this next process areaoperations. Marketing now may execute the plans developed during the commercialization processincluding the launch plan, control plans, communication plans, marketing communications (marcom) plans, and training plans. This activity triggers outbound marketing's go-to-market partners to incorporate the new offering into their day-to-day processes: sales channel distribution, services, customer support, public relations, and administration (order-to-collection).
The market's perception of your firm's value forms from experience with your offerings and communications. Presenting a united front along the value chain and aligning and integrating both your tangible and intangible assets constructs a powerful proposition. The culmination of this work occurs in this Operational process arena. How well you execute the prior commercialization process and manage your go-to-market resources often determines your enterprise's successboth financially and with your brand equity. The commercialization process, if done well, provides the planning to execute right the first time, with few to no recalls or rework in the field. Sales data will tell you if the mix of product, promotion, and place justifies the asking price. Missed sales targets, product recalls and patches, and high customer support costs often result from poor commercialization planning. Poorly communicated expectations and the critical parameters to be managed can cause your value chain partners to incur waste in cycle time and cost. Mismanaged go-to-market resources alone also can be a significant drain on a business. When the eventual marketplace change (or shift) happens, it only compounds the inefficiencies of poor planning and a poorly managed operational team.
The Six Sigma for Growth discipline can strengthen your current management approaches and provide tools to give your field management better information so that they can make better decisions. Although this chapter suggests a unique operational set of tools-tasks-deliverables to add to your current marketing and sales arsenal, these should supplement and bolster your current methods, tools, and best practices.
While conducting the work required for meeting sales and market share objectives, it is easy to get caught up in a sea of unexpected variation. Plans are made, and then suddenly everything changes. Teams can go off-plan fast. With Six Sigma, this means that assignable causes of variation (noise) cause the marketing and sales processes to go out of control. This is one reason why some marketing and sales professionals may choose to restrain their investment in developing detailed launch plansthey know how quickly their plan has to change. It is tempting to react to whatever comes along. Significant levels of planning might seem like a waste of time. More often than not, something triggers a change in the plan, so why bother planning? Becoming good at reacting to change is not the end goal. Aim to focus on the vital few (the verified critical) parameters and proactive preventive plans to keep your operations on target to sustain growth.
Change, in the operational environment of post-launch marketing and sales, is normal. If you are surprised by it, you probably haven't been doing product launches or managing field operations for very long. To be good at sustaining growth, you have to anticipate changes by learning to measure things that help your team adjust the flow and nature of your marketing and sales tasks. You want to anticipate positive and negative variation within your marketing and sales processes so that your team can make adjustments that result in the desired outcomes. You need to be able to design a plan that is adaptive by design so that you rarely have to go off-plan.
What does it mean to anticipate change? It means you have to measure leading indicators of market, competitive, and customer behavioral dynamics that prepare your team to make preplanned changes in your tasks and tools, not your plan ! You can frame this proactive measurement approach by stating, "Measure the probability of impending failures."
A simple analogy helps illustrate this point. Heart attacks are a leading cause of death in the adult population (a "failure" you can count). Obesity (body mass index) is a measurable attribute that is a proven link to causing a heart attack (a "quality attribute" you can measure). Too much food and too little exercise are measurable attributes linked to the root causes of obesity (gross fundamental measures of causes of obesity). The specific kinds of food one eats and how much and the time and type of exercise one gets are basic, fundamental measures. They lie at the root of controllable, adjustable factors that can prevent the onset of obesity and ultimately control the risk of a heart attack. If you carefully plan a diet-and-exercise regime, you can adaptively control your lifestyle to lower your risk of a heart attack, even if you are genetically predisposed to heart problems. Of course, this requires discipline. You have to measure the fundamentals that directly cause a functional, traceable dynamic that leads to "failure." Obesity and heart attacks are lagging indicators . You can react to them only after they are detected. Food and exercise are leading indicators that can tell you when to make changes to help avoid obesity and heart attacks.
Don't wait for lagging indicators to scare you into action once they have developed to the point where you can detect them. Measuring the fundamentals of human behavior, decision-making, and purchasing behavior will set you on a course of action that lets you prevent marketing and sales process failures. To become good at this approach, you have to be a student of post-launch marketing and sales "noises."
A noise is any source of variation. They often precede an outright failure in a process. They are changes that affect the mechanicsthe fundamental cause-and-effect relationships inside marketing and sales processes. Processes contain tasks or steps that you carry out to produce a targeted result. Noises alter the targeted results you are attempting to achieve. They disrupt the fundamental functions that control results. There are three general sources of noise:
• External variation noise coming from outside the system or process, such as competition, politics, economy, or environment
• Unit-to-unit variation the ability to reproduce a unit or process the same way each time, often due to either production or assembly (a type of internal noise)
• Deterioration noise caused by wearing down or degrading a product or process over time (another type of inner noise)
If a sale didn't close, perhaps an attractive competitive offering was introduced that day (an external variation). Perhaps a computer virus infected your systems such that the sales proposal process took too long to approve an exception to the terms and conditions of a major new sales contract, and the customer couldn't wait any longer (an external variation). Perhaps a salesperson failed to mention appropriate and critical benefits to the prospective customers (a unit-to-unit variation). Or perhaps the marketing collaterals were outdated and failed to address critical customer concerns about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO, a deterioration variation). This chapter explores how to apply Six Sigma discipline in the presence of noise during the launch, management, adaptation, and final discontinuance so that you know when to make the necessary adjustments to stay on plan. Figure 6.1 shows the various kinds of noise on a process or system.
Continue reading here: Define Step Tools Tasks and Deliverables
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