If marketing is only responsible for communicating the value of a product to customers, it is not operating at full potential. Increasingly, marketing departments are determining if they do not take steps to measure their results and create greater efficiencies; the finance group will be more than willing to do it for them. Since marketing innovative new products and services is a key success factor, making sure the organization’s sales and marketing divisions use the most effective approaches is essential.
Business process improvement techniques apply an organization-wide set of processes, standards, and motivations to improve performance, create efficiencies, decrease defects, and reduce variability. While these principles are traditionally associated with industrial environments, their application can be applied effectively to marketing as well.
Process Value Management methodology obtains successful results in improving marketing performance as well. Consider that there are three sources of revenue for your company: adding new customers and convincing existing customers to buy more or for those customers to buy more frequently. By identifying the processes you perform to sources of revenue and applying various improvement techniques, an organization can quantify, value, and measure your marketing results for each step and the end result.
The primary benefit of integrating business process improvement techniques, such as Six Sigma, into your marketing process is having better information to make better decisions. Using a process-based approach reduces the uncertainty inherent in marketing–a creative, dynamic discipline. Go-to-market projects with process improvements embedded in them can better sustain growth.