Lean Sales & Marketing (2 Day Class)
Sign up to be notified when this workshop is available in your area.
Description
In our journey to create a truly lean enterprise, we have saved the best (and to some, the hardest) functions for last – Sales & Marketing. Applying lean in this area really isn’t that difficult, but it is different than simply translating our typical manufacturing lean tools and techniques into a different language. Lean in Sales & Marketing goes beyond improving internal transactional activities like processing sales orders and creating ad copy to include integrating customer and enterprise value streams, enhancing market knowledge capture and dissemination, and actually creating "customer pull" through influence. The results are not just better Sales & Marketing processes, but greater overall achievement of an organization’s strategy and fulfillment of its purpose.
This workshop is designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Sales, Marketing, and related enterprise-wide activities through the introduction of lean thinking and structured problem solving to these areas. Participants will learn to apply these skills through hands-on application of the course material to their own specific organizational problems as well as cross-organizational activities and discussion.
Attendees should come prepared by having thought about their company’s overall strategies and the related Sales & Marketing problems their businesses are currently facing (and are ready to solve). Participants will not be expected to share any proprietary information they are not comfortable revealing.
Also, in preparation for the workshop, we recommend that you read the book The Fluff Cycle (And How To End It By Solving REAL Sales & Marketing Problems ) >> www.fluffcycle.com authored by Brent Wahba who teaches this program.
Learning Objectives / Benefits
- Create an understanding of lean principles in the language and context of Sales & Marketing to facilitate better customer-level and enterprise-wide problem solving.
- Create a stronger linkage between delivering customer value and increasing organizational success to uncover higher leverage problem solving points and set improvement priorities.
- Demonstrate how the work done in Sales & Marketing is part of a larger overall business system that includes Customers, Strategy, R&D, Product Development, Operations, and Service to create better overall solutions.
- Create a deep, emotional understanding of why "fluff, gut feel, and blanket solutions" do not solve root cause problems so that more efficient and effective methods will be utilized.
- Teach Strategy Deployment, A3 Problem Solving, and Value Stream Mapping in a hands-on manner to enhance learning and solve important, real-world problems.
- Provide opportunities for cross-organizational discussion and learning to enrich understanding.
- Initiate well-defined problem solving projects to promote further post-class application and learning.
Outline
- Lean 101 in the Context of Sales & Marketing
- Systems, Processes, & Value Streams
- Managing Complexity
- The 2 Intertwined Layers of Problems: Our Customers’ and Our Own
- Similarities and Differences Between Lean Manufacturing and Lean Sales & Marketing
- Organizational Purpose
- Value and Profit / Organizational Success
- Strategy Deployment
- Structured Problem Solving Using the A3 Method
- Sales & Marketing Problem Types Including Interface with Customers, Strategy, R&D, Product Development, Operations, and Service
- Value Stream Mapping Customer and Sales & Marketing processes
- Creating New Lean Value Streams
We have paired this workshop with the Lean for a Creative Mind: How to Develop Products your Customers Want to Buy class due to the creative nature of work in both value streams and strong interdependence of an effective R&D process and a successful sales and marketing organization.
We highly recommend that you attend both workshops to better understand how you can accelerate organizational change by introducing lean thinking in these two functions.
Who Should Attend?
Sales & Marketing practitioners and management- Senior business leaders with enterprise-wide responsibilities
- Manufacturing / Operations / Service personnel who interface with Sales & Marketing
- R&D / Product Development personnel who interface with Sales & Marketing
- Quality organization personnel and others responsible for delivering customer satisfaction
- Purchasing managers who want to better understand the "other side of the table"