We have identified 8 significant sources of marketing and sales waste which - by themselves or in combination - serve to dramatically reduce the customer value created by vendors offering complex, high-value goods and services.
1: Lack of awareness
Without awareness, otherwise compatible vendors and prospects will remain ignorant of each other. As a consequence, vendors fail to be considered in deals they could have won, and prospects fail to investigate what could have been the best solution to a business issue. Faced with today’s media-savvy, highly-networked and well-informed buyers, vendors have to come to terms with the thought that awareness cannot simply be bought - it needs to be earned.
2: Over production
The waste of overproduction stems from implementing more marketing and sales activity (generating large numbers of unqualified leads, for example) than organisations are able to properly follow-up. This is often compounded by a poorly targeted approach that generates a high percentage of low quality contacts. The resulting structural imbalance between “raw materials” and the marketing and sales organisation’s ability to process them is a common contributor to the third waste...
3: Poor qualification
Accurate, timely qualification of prospects is critical to the effective use of marketing and sales resources. The waste of poor qualification prevents vendors from distinguishing between "good" and "bad" deals and responding accordingly. As a consequence, they may fail to allocate enough resources to otherwise winnable deals, while at the same time wasting valuable energy pursuing bad deals that could and should have been discarded far earlier in the sales cycle.
4: Valueless activity
The waste of valueless activity includes any action on the part of the vendor that fails to create customer value or to facilitate the prospect's buying process. The examples are manifest, but include irrelevant marketing campaigns, inappropriate sales tools, collateral that has no impact on the buying process and any sales activity that fails to create meaningful value for the prospect or encourage them to invest more of their time, attention or money.
5: Valueless functionality
The waste of valueless functionality is all-too-common, particularly amongst product and technology-driven companies. It includes all the time and resources spent specifying and developing features, capabilities or functions that prospects ultimately see no value in, and are not prepared to pay for, or which serve to make the vendor’s solution or service appear unnecessarily complex.
6: Unbalanced resources
The waste of unbalanced resources occurs wherever either bottlenecks or over-capacity can be observed in different parts of the organisation or at different times in the business cycle. For example, some specialised resources may be hugely overloaded while others remain under-utilised - or back office teams maxed out at month or quarter end yet under-used at other times.
7: Waiting and delay
The waste of waiting and delay can be seen whenever the actions that a vendor takes - or, just as significantly, fails to take - have the effect of slowing or delaying the prospect's buying process.
8: Unfulfilled potential
The final waste, but the one that most commonly reflects critical cultural shortcomings. It results from the failure to fully harness the workforces' potential to identify and solve problems and to drive systematic performance improvement. If this is not addressed, attempts to eliminate waste will only have a marginal impact.
Conclusion
None of the above 8 wastes exists in a vacuum and as we have seen, each of these wastes interact with and reinforce each other. Dealing with one waste inevitably exposes other constraints, and as we shall see, the progressive elimination of waste requires a value driven mindset and a commitment to continuous improvement.
We can start dealing with waste by asking “what would our prospects be prepared to do in return for this, and why?” of every decision we make and activity we undertake - and by ensuring that our answers are backed up by external evidence of what our prospects and customers truly value, rather than our own internal speculation.
Here's how we might be able to help...
Achieving sales and marketing alignment is particularly important to any organisation that is trying to achieve a step-function improvement in marketing effectiveness or sales productivity, to out-perform strong competitors, or to successfully launch new products or enter new markets.
We've been able to help a growing number of B2B organisations to realise their ambitions by diagnosing and dealing with the constraints that have been holding them back. We may be able to help your company achieve the same. You can learn more about our approach by browsing this website.
When you are ready, please complete our contact form, drop us a line at info@inflexion-point.com or call us on +44 (0) 845 519 0295.
We look forward to finding out more about what you are trying to achieve, to sharing some ideas - and to helping you achieve the benefits of alignment throughout your sales and marketing organisation.