So much of the conversation around ‘lean’ focuses its attention on waste reduction. Generally, it means that businesses use fewer resources without sacrificing efficiency. This is a crucial conversation to have because you have to ensure that your company is not doing unnecessary work or producing waste without gaining significant returns.
The Key Focus Areas
The major departments where you should apply lean principles involve customer acquisition. Shifting to lean sales and marketing can help you maximize your resources while ensuring that you reach your target audience.
To yield the best results, you need to:
- Identify with Precision Who Your Customer Is
Part of this identification process will involve pinpointing the types of problems your business is best positioned to solve. This will help you identify the market segment with these particular issues.
This means you will not waste your efforts and money on chasing clients outside of this target market. You may even identify which platforms your target market is mostly found and develop a strong presence there. The secret here is simple. Focus on the people whose problems you are likely to solve. They’re the ones who’ll most likely purchase your merchandise and add to your business’s profit.
- Identify What Your Clients Value
Determine the things that your clients value. This helps ensure that you’re spending on the suitable modes of engagement that give them what they need and prefer. Doing this will streamline your business’s engagement process and align it with the customer’s buying process.
Once you have done the proper analysis and alignment, you may now refresh your sales process to ensure that it is in-sync with what you have found to be most important to your client. That way, you prevent wasting resources on something unfruitful, such as investing in areas that are least prioritized by the customer. It helps you improve profits by focusing on the areas most likely to produce the best results.
- Use The 5 S’s
The lean production 5S strategy allows you to streamline your process to fully implement the principle in your business. Using this tactic can help you identify what factors are necessary and effective for your company.
These are the 5 S’s that you should know about:
- Sort – Classify the things that your company uses each day, month, and year. This helps you create a budget for replacing and maintaining these items.
- Straighten – Organize your files and make sure to label them for easier access and retrieval.
- Shine – Keep your work environment sparkly clean so that you can maintain efficiency.
- Standardize – Policies should be disseminated to your employees and implemented accordingly.
- Sustain – Maintain your lean system by scheduling internal audits to check on the processes regularly.
Refresh your approach to sales and enjoy a results-oriented, cleaner method that will help your business achieve a higher closing rate.
- Nurture Your Leads
Even though your end goal is to close sales, being aggressive in your approach is not always the best way to go about it. This is especially true when handling first-time clients.
You want to separate your lead generation from your sales process and focus primarily on nurturing your leads. This means when a client shows interest in your product or service by clicking on any of your platforms, you relax and step back a little bit instead of immediately trying to sell.
Going straight from lead generation to sales can be a bit much and might overwhelm a first-time client if you are not careful.
By limiting your pressure, you create a more relaxed environment for your prospect. This strategy no doubt depends on you not losing any lead that your business gains. One way to do it is to start creating a mailing list and directing your future ads to everyone who has visited your website or social media platforms.
Conclusion
Applying lean principles to your sales and marketing is one of the best ways to strategically prepare your business’s revenue for growth.
By cutting all your losses, you make sure you are spending your money only on what is necessary. Your business will likely realize more profits as a result of how effective lean principles are at cleaning the clatter around sales and marketing resulting in a highly effective strategy.