Lean in Sales and Marketing

In the world of continuous improvement, there is a variety of opinions about where to start in the organization. Some argue for top-down while others prefer bottom-up. Perhaps we should start with manufacturing and work our way back up to Research and Development? I have never heard, however, anyone suggest starting with Sales and Marketing, and that is too bad. We are part of many problems (note that I am not blaming anyone here) and very well positioned to start creating real solutions. Sales and Marketing is particularly well positioned between customers, strategic planning, product development and operations (supply chain + manufacturing + delivery + service). Apart from the occasional well-positioned CEO, no one else in our company sits at the center of our complicated universe of market and organization. But for the safety of our unprotected cars in the parking lot, we should not yet reveal to our coworkers that the universe really revolves only around Sales and Marketing.

Thinking about it, shouldn't every department in our company be working toward the same purpose and the same overall definition of success? Unfortunately, that definition gets split into batches of small related but disconnected pieces as strategies are deployed to business units, functions, departments and eventually individuals. Who determines what customers value? Who is responsible for the brand? What about customer satisfaction? And who is responsible for profit and growth? Everyone! But as a result of our self-focus (not to mention the occasional self-importance), we suboptimize our own function-specific processes and forget about the biggest and most important opportunities for organizational improvement. Unless “selling” is our real bottleneck, creating a more effective sales process will usually result in fewer happy customers and fewer sales in the long run, because we have now made more promises without having the capacity in other areas (such as order fulfillment) to meet the growing demand.
There are reasons why our customers and coworkers don't like us...

Sometimes it is hard to truly understand a problem, let alone solve it, unless we can see it from multiple perspectives. The fact that 77% of companies report disconnects between the Sales and Marketing functions (Aberdeen Research study) is just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Most people in our companies, including our CEOs, usually do not understand exactly what we do in Sales and Marketing, or even why we do it. We rarely have defined processes they can look at, and we rarely speak in languages that they (not to mention customers) cannot understand. Most of the time they think we act on impulse or that we are stuck in some parallel, artistic, creative, abstract and sensitive universe where logic, science and measurement do not apply. Titles like “Chief Loyalty Architect” don't help much.

Now, from our perspective (or from our interpretation of the customers' perspective), we can't get what we need from anyone. “Why can't we deliver on time?”; “Why can't the customer service reps be friendlier?”; and “Why don't the geniuses in Research and Development design better products at more competitive prices?”. But at the same time, no one seems to get what they need from us. “Why can't we get an accurate sales forecast so we can keep the right amount of inventory?”; “Why did someone promise the customer things we can't deliver?”; “Why can't Marketing tell us what the customer requirements are before we are locked into a specific design?”; and “How do I increase “conversations” and “thought sharing” by 50%? I don't even have a clue what those things are”. All as expected, but not necessarily valid points of view depending on where we stand. And contrary to everyone's belief, few have simple and immediate solutions.

Real customers, on the other hand, couldn't care less that Sales and Marketing are different functions, with different bosses, on different floors. They don't know who makes the decisions about service quality, or why their toasters don't work like in the ad for a Christmas present. They only care about solving their own problems and meeting their own needs with little thought and hassle. Unless they have some personal relationship with us (for example, with a specific salesperson or through exceptional experiences), all customers perceive is an opaque, monolithic company. Despite what we are told, most of us do not maintain deep personal relationships or even have real conversations with the vast majority of brands we interact with, and we really don't want to. Sorry – it's not you, it's me.

Department store magnate and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker is often remembered for the line: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted – the trouble is I don't know which half”. A great insight, but overly optimistic. If we think about creating value for customers to buy and consume, most of what we do during our regular activities of meetings, campaigns, sales calls, creative work, activity reports, etc. is truly wasted effort. In administrative processes, value added is less than 20%, and in management activities less than 10%. Before you turn off your Kindle or iPad in a fit of rage, however, I am not suggesting that we are lazy, stupid or the cause of all evil in the organization. But think specifically about everything we do every day. Is each task truly moving the company toward success? Could things be much simpler to execute? Waste builds up quickly and tends to generate even more waste unless we proactively do something about it. And that brings us back to learning and problem solving.

Waste is a symptom of deeper and more complicated problems. If a multimillion-dollar campaign has no impact on consumer behavior, or if a sales promotion leads to huge inventories and customer complaints, then those are big problems. They generate a lot of waste for our company, our suppliers and our customers (who are now telling all their Facebook friends what a stupid company we are). What led to these problems is what we really need to solve, or these kinds of events will happen again. The benefits of getting our hands dirty and solving our real problems are twofold: 1) creating more value by better meeting our customers' needs with products and services and 2) reducing work, rework, frustration and cost – leaving us more time, resources and mental capacity to focus on item 1. When we find and fix the root causes of problems, we create better organizational alignment, increase our ability to influence our world, improve our understanding of where to invest our resources and improve our ability to evolve faster than our changing world. Change is hard work, but it is impossible to work on unless we know which specific gaps (gaps) we need to close and exactly how we are going to close them. But before we can do all that, we need to learn a little about the deepest cause of most of our problems: people and their often irrational and complicated human brains. In the meantime:

• Do our customers get what they need from us? What about others in our organization? Do we get what we need from them?
• How much of our time is spent on truly value-adding activities? Have we ever shaken our heads and muttered “what...?” about some required task?
• What kinds of problems keep us from being more efficient and effective?
• Does our creative work solve real problems and add value, or is it more about art for art's sake?

Article based on Chapter 6 of the book “The Fluff Cycle”.

Portuguese translation by Tamiris Masetto Manzano.