Marketing Tips - Client-Focused, Easy and Effective: Six Sigma Marketing

He’s that smart and GE is that good. OK—Jack’s not running GE anymore, but the infrastructure of what Jack built remains. And what GE has done with Six Sigma is something you can do easily, quickly and with tremendous results for your customers.

Let’s start with what GE Six Sigma isn’t. It’s not a flavor of the month program; it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. And although fully implemented it requires a tremendous commitment to achieving nearly zero defects, you don’t need a squadron of Six Sigma gurus to start to leverage it in your business. It’s not something you do once and it’s not something that once done is a cure-all for fundamental ailments within your business. It’s not something done in islands; it’s best done holistically across your enterprise.

GE Six Sigma is an organizing mechanism that starts with customers’ needs and wants. It’s a way to get everyone in your business on the same page—the customer’s page—and then to use that data as a baseline to organize the rest of your business. As strategic planning models go, it’s one of the best. Like many other quantitative tools, in consumer businesses and larger business to business and professional services environments, it’s something that can be rooted in primary and secondary research. And, just like many other quantitative tools, the spirit of GE Six Sigma can be used successfully when anchored in careful qualitative research, too. That’s what makes it a great business to business tool, no matter the size of your business.

The GE six Sigma process for defining customer value is the acronym SIPOCR, as identified in the graphic below. Reading from right to left, the diagram below explains the core components in the baseline GE Six Sigma process.

Now, here’s a simple example in a professional services organization context.

To protect their businesses, legal clients want to know about changes in the law as soon as possible. Yet, attorneys can spend hours and days debating and perfecting language—it’s just part of their training. Marketing departments fight to protect the brand and editorial integrity and the entire process can drag out well past the point in time when the news is news. While the law firm is certainly providing information, they may not be basing that data on the things that matter most to the client. With few exceptions, clients just don’t care about perfect English—they care about how the change makes their life better/worse and how much time and money that’s going to cost them. In fact, the more bottom-line the better, and that means fewer words with clearer impact.

By starting with the customers’ requirements, the law firm might have created a very different communication vehicle, one that could go out within minutes, not days. The marketing department would create a best practices template, then spend their time on more important things and get out of the way of the attorneys, who best understand the impact of the changes. Marketing could have had proofreaders on standby and have been prepared with distribution lists organized by delivery preference (fax, email, hard copy). The entire system would have been based on what matters to the client. And it would operate seamlessly and quickly.

Not relevant to you? OK here’s another example. A creative services firm spends time and energy sending a newsletter so that they can stay in touch with their clients. The newsletter frequently discusses such things as the economy and the business climate. The recipients, people managing the day to day communications deliverables in their company, already know times are tough and they also know that the budget is the budget. They’re not going to get any additional money and they don’t have time to read the newsletter, anyway. What they really need is information to help them do their jobs better, because in this climate, they’re worried about demonstrating growing value. They need to protect their jobs.

Here’s how that looks in GE Six Sigma terms. First—the mismatch with the newsletter. Read from right to left, it’s clear why the publication—although well written, visually interesting and consistently high quality, isn’t really delivering relevant value.

Starting with what clients value, another agency is offering free best practices templates to the marcom managers, their end clients. The agency stays top of mind, but in this case, creates value in the clients’ terms. That generates loyalty. These two examples are easy to visualize, and just imagine it if your company/firm rolled this example out across all the functions in your marketing department—your finance, accounting, sales and operations departments; then you’d have a real mechanism for organizing around client preferences. Tying everything you do, every decision you make, every resource at your disposal into things that customers value. That’s results-based strategic planning at its best.

That’s what GE Six Sigma can do for you, and that’s why even without it’s full power, it’s still a valuable strategic planning tool that is easily applied to nearly every situation. Simply put, GE Six Sigma is marketing at its core.

I don’t just believe this—I know this. While at a division of GE, I created an in-house employee communications program using this same principle. We surveyed our employees to understand how they wanted to receive information, how frequently, in what format and who they expected to originate the communiqué. We used the results to completely change our employee communications plan and deliverables, and as a result, we raised our employee satisfaction scores by double digits in only six months.

We used the same concept with clients, as well. By using primary research to understand what our clients valued, we prioritized our quality department projects, created task forces to improve our product and in general, used GE Six Sigma to create a market-focused organization across every department. At the time, it was a GE Capital best practice.

GE didn’t originate six sigma quality, and other organizations use similar processes, with different names. Disney uses a process that they call Everything Speaks; in fact, there are scores of variations of quality processes. The process isn’t the point—knowing what to use and when with your limited resources is the point. That’s where the rubber really hits the road, because any process you use will be most effective tied to a short and long term strategic plan that is linked to your mission, values and revenue objectives.

As processes go, GE Six Sigma is proven, easy to apply in any situation. It may just be the right tool for you, too.

A former senior executive for a division of GE Capital, Cheryl Gidley is a management consultant offering strategic planning and performance improvement strategies to professional services providers, nonprofits and entrepreneurs. A Kellogg MBA, she is a Director and sits on the Strategic Planning Committee, Education Committee and Chairs the Governance Committee of the Board of the Chicago BMA. Cheryl can be reached at cheryl. gidley@ gidleyconsulting.com  or by calling 847-526-9790.