At the heart of your improvement plan should be a strategy.  Rendered maps can help you visually represent that strategy.  You need to paint an attractive picture — show a positive future, show the outcome that people will buy into.

We illustrated a strategy of faster turnaround for aircraft overhauls. It was simple. Workers could easily see how the changes being asked of them would result in good outcomes.

We helped an aircraft overhaul facility, or MRO, cut the time required for major service on aircraft overhauls.  Less time in the shop means operators get their planes back in service faster which, in turn, means they make money instead of spending it.  That helped the aircraft overhaul facility garner a competitive advantage.

We mapped process flows and activities throughout the company; for example, how materials were specified, requisitioned, and tracked.  With our process maps, the client saw how small changes would flow through the system and have a big impact.

Had you asked department managers at the time, they would have told you they were already aware of most of the improvement opportunities that we identified. Certainly, the inefficiencies had been there for years, managers would have said. And point solutions had been identified in some cases.

But the eventual impact of small changes was unclear or unknown, so it was hard for them to justify the time and resources needed to effect change.  So, improvement flagged.

Lighting a fire for change meant we had to change minds.  We illustrated an improvement story that showed certain small changes having a big impact.  Using rendered maps, we illustrated the strategy that was easy to buy into.  We also illustrated a number of systemic improvements that would help sustain the improvements.

Show the Positive Future and Give People a Reason to Change

For example, we selected and illustrated how highly skilled mechanics were spending time and many footsteps getting parts.  Everyone understood that if a wrench doesn’t turn, the plane doesn’t move, and turnaround suffers.

This rendered process map shows mechanics' walk and wait times in the current state. Inefficiency and waste are readily apparent.

In the future state, we instead showed parts being delivered to the mechanics:

In contrast to the current state, the future state is much simpler and, therefore, a marked improvement. As a communications device, it leads workers to ask what is required to achieve and sustain the improvement.

It sounds simple, right?  It was simple, and it tied in with the overall strategy of reducing turnaround.  It made it a great story.  Ultimately, it was the story that had been lacking in the past.

The story, told in rendered maps, helped us get the buy-in that was essential to support the many process changes required to sustain change.  How would the runner know what part to deliver to the mechanic?  When would the  part be delivered?  How would chain of custody be maintained?  Many questions arose that, before, simply froze out improvement, but by telling a story for positive change, the hard work of change became tenable.

By virtue of our illustrating specific improvements, people could see exactly how that lofty strategy translated into their daily work lives.  Our story consisted of sufficient current-state and future-state improvement “concrete steps” and examples to show that improvement was, in fact, possible and exactly how the “positive future” of reduced turnaround time could be achieved.

Telling the Improvement Story Is Part of Your Job

Had we stopped at producing the descriptive maps and left it up to the department heads to structure an improvement program, they surely would have made some incremental improvements in their system.  However, their efforts would have lacked urgency and sustainability.  Change would not have happened fast enough to outpace the industry.  Hungry competitors would not have been overtaken, and no sustainable competitive advantage would have been achieved.

But it was achieved.  As we learned, it’s part of our job as leaders to tell the improvement story. Rendered maps are a tool for telling stories of positive change. Fact-based, tangible, visual stories can illustrate a positive future, and should be in your process mapping toolkit. So, tell the story. Complete the improvement journey. Use a map.

Establish credibility

Lead-generation marketing efficiently touches your prospects, creating awareness, establishing credibility and you or your company as a thought-leader. Make your own luck.

Let lead-generation strategic marketing do the prospecting for you.

Strategic marketing helps increase sales when it delivers the right message to prospects at the right time. A strategic marketing service can contact thousands of prospects as easily as one. That leaves your valuable sales team free to work with better leads and spend more time closing sales.  Leave it to marketing tactics to keep in touch with prospects, educate them and prepare them for your sales team. Don’t waste time with locked doors.

Click on the graphic to learn about lead-generation marketing

Thought-leadership on tough business issues

In recent articles, we explored how to complement your sales efforts by keeping in touch with prospects with valuable, relevant information. Check out the introduction to our Sales & Marketing Manual, and learn how to grow sales without adding sales staff. Learn how a content and communications service can keep your company top-of-mind with buyers and increase the speed and number of deals.  Or call our sales and marketing group, at tel. (314) 863-5079 x23.

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For a deeper understanding of process improvement programs for your organization, attend the next Implementing Lean Thinking or How to Align a System of People and Processes for Results class. If you are eager to learn more about creating more order out of the chaos you are feeling at work, then the How to Create Well-Defined Processes class is right for you.

One way that business people find goods and services is to search the web. It’s up to you to optimize your site to make it easy for search engines to serve up your site when prospects go searching.

Think you can get people to contact you by just writing about your new technology, great ideas, or by giving away white papers? If what you do is new, what makes you think prospects are searching for it? Rather, consider what prospects are thinking, and typing, when they are in a frame of mind to care about what you offer. You need a strategy. Otherwise, your site will become just one more dark corner on the Internet.

Search engine optimization: Your competitors aren’t doing this!

Now that you’ve got a website with great marketing content, how is anyone going to find it? What exactly are your prospects searching for? How can you get search engines to show links to your website in the first few results pages? Find out how you can get ahead of your competitors in search results.

Search engine optimization is part of a managed lead-generation program.

Getting noticed on the web takes know-how, and work. The fifty-cent term for it is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Your competitors may not be using SEO, which presents you with an opportunity for competitive advantage. This article gives you a few tips to help your site be found before competitors’, the first step if your web site is going to generate sales leads.

Learn more about search engine optimization as part of a lead-generation program

You need execution. Structuring pages and documents correctly, eliminating common mistakes and getting links on related sites is all part of a managed lead-generation program that includes search engine optimization.

Contact us if you want to learn more

Want leads from your web site? Learn how to get noticed!

Each of your pages has an opportunity to attract prospects. To assign relevance and give your pages top position, search engines look for frequent keywords and phrases, textual patterns, how much competition there is for keywords, length of copy, links from similar sites, among other factors. Here are a couple ways to optimize your web site:

Develop relationships with organizations relating to what you do. Ask them to add links pointing to your site. This is called off-page search engine optimization.

Find out what words and phrases your prospects are searching for, and use them liberally throughout your site. Keep in mind that the name or description of your product may be unknown to prospects. So do some research to find out what prospects are thinking before they know about you. This is called on-page search engine optimization.

Meta Tags
Not nearly as important as they once were, search engines still examine these index terms associated with your pages.

Page Titles
Most search engines assign extra weight to page titles, which can help your pages land on top.

Navigation
Good navigation helps the search engine find the information you placed in the site, and efficiently pass it to searchers.

Effective use of search engine optimization can greatly enhance the performance of your sales and marketing process, and provide you a competitive advantage. Better lead generation, in turn, also means an improved sales and marketing pipeline.

For a deeper understanding of process improvement programs for your organization, attend the next Implementing Lean Thinking or How to Align a System of People and Processes for Results class. If you are eager to learn more about creating more order out of the chaos you are feeling at work, then the How to Create Well-Defined Processes class is right for you.

St. Louis, MO– March 7, 2007. Bizmanualz, Inc., a business publications and consulting company based in Clayton, Missouri, today announced the release of a new Sales & Marketing Manual (www.bizmanualz.com/sales_and_marketing) for sales and marketing executives, customer service managers, customer relationship (customer experience) managers and sales and marketing departments of small and midsize businesses (SMB).

Pressure is on sales departments to produce more with less – to be lean – to use limited resources wisely and effectively. Marketing departments are required to monitor and measure their activities and show, in detail, how and where those activities will benefit the company. A more measured, disciplined, and coordinated approach is demanded.

“Sales and Marketing are two of the core processes of every business,” Chris Anderson, Managing Director of Bizmanualz, said. “If those operations are not in sync, a lot of what they do will be a wasted effort. Everyone thinks of manufacturing when ‘lean’ is mentioned, but lean concepts apply equally well to sales and marketing operations.”

Officially entitled the Bizmanualz Sales & Marketing Policies, Procedures, and Forms Manual, the new manual not only provides an operational and planning framework for the organization’s Sales and Marketing functions – it also allows those two key departments to coordinate better and leverage each other’s strengths.

“If your marketing plan isn’t designed to fulfill your sales objectives or if your sales force isn’t sharing its experience and insights with marketing, then you’re not getting the most value from your sales and marketing investment,” Mr. Anderson added. “If you’re not incorporating the voice of the customer in your operations, your company is at risk of falling behind and becoming irrelevant to the marketplace. Companies are demanding greater participation in their suppliers’ operations, and rightly so.”

Smart companies have been listening to their customers for years. Now, more customers are demanding an active role in shaping company products and how companies conduct their business.

Many small and medium sized companies do not have access to – or cannot afford – Chief Marketing Officers or Sales Directors who could lead the way by building on best practices, industry standards, and their own extensive experience to establish formal Sales and Marketing policies and processes. This publication provides the guidance and tools many SMBs need to identify and serve their target markets.

“The Sales and Marketing Policies and Procedures Manual applies a process approach to strategic and tactical sales and marketing management issues,” said Steve Flick, Product Director at Bizmanualz. “It can help companies bring order and discipline to these critical operations. They get a wealth of information that we brought together and put into a series of Microsoft Word files that they can easily tailor to their unique circumstances.”

The Sales and Marketing Policies and Procedures Manual comes with over 700 pages of practical documentation. It includes 32 pre-written procedures for Marketing Planning, Marketing Tactics, Sales, Sales & Marketing Administration and Product Management. Plus, it includes a Sales and Marketing Executive’s Manual and an Internet Marketing Guide.

Bizmanualz, Inc., also offers policies and procedures manuals (www.bizmanualz.com/products) for developing accounting controls, human resources management, computer and network management, ISO 9001 quality management systems, disaster preparedness, security planning and ISO 22000 food safety management systems. All Bizmanualz policies and procedures products consist of a set of printed documents, accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the same documents in easily editable MS-Word format.

Bizmanualz Sales & Marketing Policies, Procedures, and Forms: How to Drive Your Customer Satisfaction with Improved Strategies and Tactics (702 pages/trade binder/ISBN 1-931591-03-2 / $595.00) is a Knowledge Management title from Bizmanualz, Inc., and is available from the publisher by calling 800.466.9953 (1-314-863-5079 for international customers), by e-mailing sales @ bizmanualz.com, or by visiting the company web site, http://www.bizmanualz.com.

The highlight of this month was the formal launch of our newest procedure manual – the Sales and Marketing Policies, Procedures and Forms. For the past several weeks, we have talked about using the process approach to manage your sales and marketing activities. The new Sales and Marketing Procedures Manual lets you do just that.

Marketing Tactics – The Medium or the Message

While crafting a message is important, focusing too much on the message can cause you to lose sight of priorities. A lot of expense and creative effort are put into crafting eye-catching visuals accompanied by just the right phrase or slogan. But does it really matter how great your message is if it doesn’t reach the right people?

Read more about marketing tactics;

The Key[word] to Internet Marketing

Internet marketing can be divided into two very distinct areas, and any business that is serious about success should be making efforts to effectively employ both of them. Essentially, one is a natural or unpaid campaign, while the other is a paid one. Although there will be a significant amount of overlap between the two, how you apply keywords in Internet marketing for the two approaches will be different.

Read more about Internet marketing;

The New Sales and Marketing Procedures Manual

The Sales & Marketing Procedures Manual addresses strategic sales and marketing issues through a process approach. It not only provides an operational and planning framework for the organization’s sales and marketing functions – it also allows those two key departments to coordinate better to leverage each other’s strengths and manage the sales and marketing pipeline.

Read more about the new Sales and Marketing Procedures Manual;

You may notice a recurring theme in the above discussions. It is the concept of making a plan, executing the plan while measuring key performance indicators, then reflecting on what the measurements mean and using them to find ways to improve. This is the continuous process improvement philosophy that Bizmanualz uses as a lynch pin for all of its business improvement line of products. The new Sales and Marketing Procedures Manual is no exception!

On That Note

Answer to this month’s question:

Surprise, surprise! The answer is – you need to balance both! If your goal is purely brand recall and name buzz, then the message may seem more important. But what good is the message if it doesn’t reach the right audience? Similarly, if your goal is to reach a specific demographic group, then the medium may be more important. But, then again, what good is the medium if the message is not crafted right? So, ultimately, you have to create the right mix. If your target demographic is college students, then the Internet may be a more effective medium for you. So, no matter how good your message is, if you use the evening news, then you are not going to reach your college students.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments. Also, please let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed in our future articles.

Sales & Marketing
Policies & Procedures

Managing your sales and marketing processes is now easier with the new Sales & Marketing Policies, Procedures and Forms Manual from Bizmanualz. The Sales & Marketing Manual is a valuable resource for sales and marketing executives, customer service managers, customer relationship (customer experience) managers and sales and marketing departments of small and midsize businesses (SMB).

The Sales & Marketing Procedures Manual addresses strategic sales and marketing issues through a process approach. It not only provides an operational and planning framework for the organization’s sales and marketing functions – it also allows those two key departments to coordinate better to leverage each other’s strengths and manage the sales and marketing pipeline.

Voice of the Customer in Sales and Marketing

Sales and Marketing are two of the core processes of every business. If those operations are not in sync, a lot of what they do will be wasted effort.  If your marketing plan isn’t designed to fulfill your sales objectives or if your sales force isn’t sharing its experience and insights with marketing, then you’re not getting the most value from your sales and marketing investment.

Smart companies have been listening to their customers for years.  Now, more customers are demanding an active role in shaping company products and how companies conduct their business. If you’re not incorporating the voice of the customer in your operations, your company is at risk of falling behind and becoming irrelevant to the marketplace.

Prewritten Procedures for Sales and Marketing Departments

• Three-ring binder with over 700 pages of printed materials.
• CD-ROM with all contents in MS-Word format for easy editing and customization.

The Sales and Marketing Policies and Procedures Manual comes with over 700 pages of practical guidance and documentation. It includes 32 prewritten procedures for Marketing Planning, Marketing Tactics, Sales, Sales & Marketing Administration and Product Management, along with associated forms.

You will also receive a Sales and Marketing Executives Manual and a free Internet Marketing Guide.

Process Approach to Strategic Sales & Marketing

The Sales and Marketing Policies and Procedures Manual applies a process approach to strategic and tactical issues relevant to sales and marketing management. It can help companies bring order and discipline to these critical operations.  We brought together a wealth of information and placed it into a series of Microsoft Word files that you can easily tailor to fit your company’s unique circumstances.

To learn more about establishing effective sales and marketing processes and align your strategic sales and marketing objectives to the strategic vision of your organization, order the Bizmanualz Sales & Marketing Policies, Procedures and Forms manual. Or, to download the complete table of contents and a sample sales and marketing procedure, visit the sample page.

We’re sprinting toward that $1,000,000 mark…and we’re only a couple strides away;

Decreasing inventory carried us over the first hurdle, and last week reducing Accounts Receivable sped us through the half-way mark. We’re making great time, so let’s bring on the next mile marker – marketing and sales.

Increasing Overall Sales and Marketing Effectiveness

Sales and Marketing Policy and Procedures

If you are an organization spending $500,000 or more on marketing expenses (e.g. advertising, trade shows, print materials, direct mail, etc.) then STOP! We found it again. Why you ask? Because marketing has the greatest potential of being very unproductive.

In fact, many marketing programs struggle to break even, and actually frequently lose money. So if we increase the overall effectiveness, then we can eliminate 50% or more of your wasted marketing efforts, which translates into $250,000 in cash.

So now, let’s see how this actually works in a real-life scenario.

Sales and Marketing Case Study

An organization with $500,000 in marketing expenses needed assistance. We examined their sales and marketing process to understand and quantify the lead flow, follow-up, and demand forecasting issues. Then we designed and implemented a process to improve their sales cycle efficiency and tie it closer to their customer’s buying cycles. After the marketing reductions, we then reinvested $100,000 back into new processes for public relations and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), both of which were suffering badly.

The metrics we developed reduced their marketing expenses by 60% overall and increased their sales cycle efficiency from 40% to 60% within 6 months of implementing the new procedures. With these new processes and reports, the company now tracks sales cycle efficiency and life-time value rather than just sales quota achievement, as the measure of their sales & marketing effectiveness. The result: an extra $300,000 in cash plus a 50% increase in process capability (capacity).

As we have seen time and time again, time can be our best friend, if only we let it.

Methods to Design the New Sales & Marketing Process

1. Improve Follow-up. Only about two percent (2%) of sales occur on the first contact. Eighty percent (80%) of sales will require five to eight contacts before the sale closes. This means that if you are contacting the prospect less than five times or more than eight times, then you could have a problem with follow-up.
2. Sales Cycle Efficiency. Time kills deals. The speed at which a prospect is converted into a customer and the number of prospects required to make that conversion determines your sales cycle efficiency. So ask yourself, are you taking the right steps to measure and reduce lost sales?
3. Life-Time Value. How profitable a given customer is over time defines your LTV or Life-Time Value. Companies spend ten times more to acquire a customer than to keep a customer. However, existing customers are more likely to purchase again, spend more money, and therefore become more profitable. If you don’t know your LTV, then how do you know how much money to spend and on which customer segment?
4. Demand Forecasting. Every customer buys on a cycle. So this means that you should track cycle times and variance to increase the accuracy of your forecasting and the loyalty of the customer. Do you know when your customers need to reorder?
5. Improve Lead Quality. Do you have methods in place to measure the conversion potential of each lead? Lead generation activities (i.e. forms) should pre-qualify every new lead so that you can take the right follow-up actions for the marketing offer. Strong leads produce strong sales.
6. Increase Awareness. To keep the sales pipeline full of good quality leads you must continuously increase the awareness of your company and the solutions that it provides. Public relations is more efficient at building awareness than advertising, yet many companies spend wildly on advertising and trade shows while neglecting to fund public relations efforts much at all. Increase your name recognition, not your budget.
7. Reduce Discounting. Discounts represent deficiencies in the sales & marketing processes, which means that you should use them sparingly. Instead, determine the root cause and then fix the process that’s causing the need to discount. Show customers the added value, and they won’t focus on price.
8. Train Personnel. Provide your sales & marketing personnel with regular formal training. This will arm them with better product knowledge, as well as presentation, negotiating and selling skills that will improve effectiveness. This will boost both employee morale and the bottom line – a win-win.

Take control, Take control, Take control

Improve your sales cycle efficiency. Reduce your marketing expenses. Tie it closer to your customer’s buying cycles. And take control of your sales and marketing procedures to let them work for you.

With well-defined processes and procedures in place, you will increase efficiency by reducing ineffective sales and marketing programs. And, again, we make such improvements to create more cash on hand – all toward that $1,000,000 goal and to cross the finish line.

Next part, we will hurdle the final $250,000 mark with the Accounting Payable function – so close you can see it.

Part One: Inventory
Part Two: Accounts Receivable
Next in Series: Accounts Payable