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Customer Manufacturing Update |  |
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Dear Mitchell, Here is your August Customer Manufacturing Update. Many years ago, Ichiro Ishikawa taught that 90% of all business problems can be solved with the Seven Tools of Quality. We believe that is still true today. And if you can solve 90% of your problems, you are going to be far ahead of the competition. This month's Update focuses on one of those tools, The Histogram.
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There are many process improvement tools available to help companies manage and improve business processes. New ones are created regularly, and many are adapted or modified as a way to try to sell you something "new." There are seven tools of quality that work. Master them for the right circumstances and you are unlikely to need much of anything else. In this month's white paper, we look at how to use the Histogram as a tool to improve marketing/sales.
The June 8th issue of Forbes has as its cover story the new breed of American car companies. Unlike the old days, in which car companies were vertically integrated manufacturing enterprises, the new breed is more akin to a fabless semiconductor firm. The fabless semiconductor company doesn't own any manufacturing capacity; rather it designs semiconductors to fill a market need and outsources the manufacturing to a manufacturing specialist. The capital advantages to this approach are obvious and so are the market speed advantages. What seemed so unusual about the fabless semiconductor companies when they appeared years ago was that semiconductor manufacturing had always seemed like the perfect example of an industry that had to remain vertically integrated, since the manufacturing of semiconductors was so critical a competence. Well, fabless semiconductor companies are now abundant, and now plant-less car companies are proving that the auto industry too can pare its essence down to design and Marketing (with a big "M") as so many other industries have. As we've said so many times, Marketing is the one essential, core, non-outsourceable function of any company ... its sine qua non. In the case of the new car companies, for good reason, they have elected to also keep design in-house, although the design function is really more of an integrating engineering function that pure design-from-scratch. Take a proven engine from GM, drive train from another supplier, integrate them with some lesser unique elements and outsource the manufacturing to spare auto manufacturing capacity somewhere in the world, and you have a late 20th century company, in a turn of the century industry, finally appearing in the early 21st century. The essence of the new American car company will be the forward-looking identification of profitable market needs, the financially and technically competent specification of a product to fill that need, the management to drive it all to happen, and the delivery of those products to the market with appropriately designed channels. In other words, the new American car company will be a Marketing company ... and not a whole lot else.
Experts run around promoting the lastest and greatest ways for people to spread the word about their product or service. We all know that people talking about us and our products or services helps. The Internet has added a new twist to how to leverage all that. Much has been written over the last few years of another new trend, which is to have "paid" endorsers ask for the product in a public setting. This has been used with alcoholic beverages in bars. Getting the "cool" people to order a specific brand creates buzz, and, ultimately, sales. Turns out this idea is not even close to new. In the new book, The King of Vodka, author Linda Himelstein tells the story of Pyotr Smirnov. In the later part of the 1800s, Smirnov used this exact same idea to help grow Smirnov into the leading vodka. Well, not exactly the same idea, but close. Turns out Smirnov didn't bother with cool people. He hired panhandlers and paid them to fan out and "demand Smirnov vodka" at Moscow bars. Sales boomed. Within eight years Smirnov was selling over $7M (in today's currency) in vodka. There's an old expression that says there is "nothing new under the sun." And perhaps we all best remember that as we look hard for something new, a great old idea may be overlooked.
In our office park, we are visited almost daily by cold calling sales people who stop in to see if we might be in the market for whatever they are offering. We usually are not, but they are overly persistent and usually spend way too much time in our office for any return they are going to get. A refreshing change occurred last month. A young sales person dropped in to sell us shipping services. He asked if we used Fed Ex or UPS to which we said yes. We told him our office manager was out, but he could take his card and check back with him. Rather than do that, he asked a qualifying question: Do we ship every day? We said not even close. He then replied that he would not waste anyone's time since they would not be a fit for us. Fantastic. A sales person who knows WHO to target and may even know WHAT (not sure on that since we didn't talk with him about his services.) In today's economy (and really in any economy) are you flogging your sales team to make calls because it's a numbers game and if they produce the efforts, results are sure to follow? If they just work harder... Or are you helping your sales team work smarter by knowing who to target and what your company offers that makes it a great fit for those people? If you do that your sales people can make the time to help the right customer buy right.
We appreciate any feedback you can provide to help us make sure these Updates give you value each month. Feel free to respond to this e-mail with any comments or suggestions for future topics or ways we can make these Customer Manufacturing Updates more valuable to you.
Thank you for your interest, and if we can provide
any
additional assistance in sales, marketing, strategy, or
innovation to help you increase your sales,
let us know.
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