Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way

The job of marketing and sales is to engage in that conversation as it relates to their company’s products and services.

By improving the marketing and selling “production system” so that it truly assists customers on their buyer’s journey. Improvement occurs when you design a sales process that adds value for customers in and of itself.
By moving from solution selling to what I call Six Sigma selling. This extends the arc that sales professionals have been following as they have moved from selling product features to selling product benefits to selling solutions. Six Sigma selling focuses on helping customers achieve the business results they seek when they buy a product or service.
By providing on-site Six Sigma teams to customers to partner with them in achieving the business results they seek. This is truly the cutting edge of Six Sigma selling, and a number of companies are already there.

Others, such as fishbone diagrams, SIPOC, data tables, and process control charts, require minimal technical background.

What actions are we trying to prompt the customer to take?” and “What specific results are we trying to achieve?” If you cannot identify the action or result you are trying to create, ask what result the activity actually is creating. For instance, recall the telecom salespeople who asked prospects

Second, the buyer’s journey, as described in Hugh Macfarlane’s book The Leaky Funnel, is the process the customer goes through in making a purchase.

As noted, in the sales process, each activity that adds value to customers and prompts an action is also a point where a prospect can drop out or be qualified out. That’s why we must identify every phase of the process and measure each phase’s results. Examining the process in this way produces yields. These yields can point to the location of the problem. That, in turn, can point toward the kind of solution that’s required. For instance, the international bank mentioned earlier discovered that customers were dropping out at the account-opening procedure. The telecom company found that it lost prospects at the point where it requested copies of past phone bills. The software company learned that it lost potential prospects at the point where it asked for contact data without providing anything of value in return.

ed States, so many of us pump our own gasoline. When demand is high, selling is easy.

conomics 101 know, in a free market the interaction of supply and demand sets the price of a product

Two basic forces drive free markets: supply and demand. I

Indeed, sigma (σ) is the 18th letter in the Greek alphabet. Six Sigma is a statistical measure. It’s also a five-step approach to problem solving. The term is often used to designate an organizational initiative to improve a company’s business processes, as in, “We’re a Six Sigma company now.” In some circles, Six Sigma has become a catchall term for management and problem-solving approaches that employ certain tools to improve business processes and results.
At its best, Six Sigma improves the way managers manage by establishing the context in which, and the means by which, they can decide what is important and what isn’t, what requires attention and resources and what doesn’t. Six Sigma is the systematic alternative to managing by the seat of the pants, by the way it’s always been done, or by assumption, opinion, table pounding, or wishful thinking. In marketing and sales, it is also the alternative to the numbers game. Process improvement doesn’t do away with management principles such as responsibility, authority, chain of command, and span of control. Nor does it ignore management practices such as goal setting, planning, delegating, and controlling to plan. Instead, it enables managers at all levels to adhere to those principles and employ those practices. It does this by keeping them focused on the customer, on the