Processes lend themselves to measurement. If you treat your marketing as a process, then you should be able to measure your marketing. The define stage answers the question: What is important? The measure stage will answer that question by asking: How are we doing? I stated in a previous post that the purpose of the Measure stage was to quantify process performance and deliverable was to determine baseline process performance. Without these facts, you will be very ineffective in improving per... Read Full Story

Six Sigma or Lean practitioners would view what I say about DMAIC as hardly revolutionary. Marketers may view it as just a way for a Black Belt to find a way to maneuver themselves into some of their market share. I happen to be more of a marketing guy, than a Lean or Six Sigma technician. But I believe that Marketing should be a process and when viewed that way, many of the principles and tools of Lean and Six Sigma start making a lot of sense. Marketing people view their role as a series of... Read Full Story

If you search Google, there are 88,800 thousand images for the marketing funnel and 38,100 for the marketing hourglass depicted. All having a little different twist going from the Duct Tape Marketing Know, Like and Trust to the Awareness, Consider, Prefer and more. All of them depicting a systematic way to go from initial contact to buy and many of them adding the referral and repeat stages. I believe a systematic way to manage your marketing should not be an option but a fundamental of marke... Read Full Story

From the NPT Times: Marketing …Differentiated value of customers/donors There are donors, and then there are donors. It’s a fact, you love your donors — where would you be without them — but they are not all the same, and some can even require what almost amounts to Tough Love. At the recent Direct Marketing Association’s DMA 09 Conference and Exhibition in San Diego, during a session called “The Global Event for Integrated Marketing,” the differentia... Read Full Story

Jim Lewis was the guest on the Business901 Podcast and the last half of the podcast was a Lean Transformation in itself. It is one of the best 15 minutes that I have hosted (the 1st half is not that bad). Our discussion centered on how to begin with Lean and the development of a Value Stream Mapping process. Jim is an authority in the Lean business philosophy and is one of the principals of The Center for Lean Learning, LLC. The Center is dedicated to working with business and industry to dev... Read Full Story

The key issue for most organizations are increasing revenue or decreasing cost. At the present time, most companies are in the decreasing cost mode. Training events are getting canceled or postponed in the effort to decrease cost. Training budgets are often the first to get cut when business takes a downturn. Time is also scarce. With cutbacks in practically all departments there is little time to participate in training events. So, how do we correct this and train our workforce. Maybe, we ha... Read Full Story

Have you ever forgotten the obvious? I do not believe that I have ever featured Duct Tape Marketing: (The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide) Book on my blog. It has sold over 50,000 copies in hardback, paperback and Kindle editions and has been translated into Croat, Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish and never once appeared in the Business901 blog. Since this writing, John Jantsch has been at the forefront of Social Media and Referral Marketing. Hi... Read Full Story

From the NPT Times: Direct mail or email. Direct response television or YouTube. Twitter or Facebook. The number of channels to reach donors is growing, but it’s still all about clear communication, according to Geoff Peters, president and CEO of CDR Fundraising Group in Bowie, Md. Peters talked about multi-channel fundraising, from snail mail to PURLs (personalized URLs), during the recent National Catholic Development Conference in Arlington, Va. The sheer volume of channels available... Read Full Story

Do you know what that means! If you don’t you should seriously consider taking the Social Media Training that I have been hyping the last few days. The other day in a tweet I saw this statement: “I showed my Dad how to turn on the computer. I wonder what my kids will be showing me.” It was in a Duct Tape Marketing thread but I don’t remember if John said it or not. However, are you ready for where Social Media will take you next year? Are you ready to participate? Do y... Read Full Story

Wikpedia: Lean is basically about doing the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity while minimizing waste and being flexible and open to change. Lean actually got its name from the best selling book, The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production– Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota’s lean production system th... Read Full Story