Six-Sigma-ize Your Marketing

Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now has an article in ClickZ called 'Six Sigma' Web Marketing.

I personally think Six Sigma is highly under-rated among marketing folks, and is a lot more applicable than most think. Once you've discovered the customer's pain, finding the things to "six-sigma-ize" are pretty easy.

Six Sigma (3.4 defects in 1 million opportunities) isn't an impossible goal. It doesn't mean that you have no defects. Our goal, for example, is that a customer (or internal employee, etc.) can find what they?re looking for in our website in 30 seconds or less, 90% of the time (because what?s most painful is NOT finding what they want). It's not that there are zero defects on our web site.

I was surprised by how relevant this is to marketing planning. I initially signed up to see if I could learn how to better manage improvements in our processes (for example, reducing the number of "errors" in data feeds to our B2B partner site). I learned that this will be valuable to almost any discipline that requires improving an existing program, process, or product. I'd recommend this to other marketers because:

- Six Sigma offers a framework for determining what?s critical to a project, and prioritizing to what has the most impact.
- The entire mindset was entirely focused on addressing things critical to customers
- Underlying this is a disciplined structure of using measurements before, during and after.
- Most Six Sigma projects can be started and completed within four months.
- The approach works for any area where there are problems that impact a customer's perception of quality (even if our customers are channel partners, sales associates, other employees, etc. For example, Canada is running a Six Sigma project to improve forecasting for licensing.).

What is Microsoft?s Six Sigma Vision?
Drive sustained improvements in productivity, customer satisfaction and loyalty in order to reduce cost and increase revenue and profit.

What is Six Sigma?
Six Sigma is a problem solving methodology that helps drive improvement to the bottom line by designing and monitoring business activities in a way that minimizes waste and resources while increasing customer satisfaction. It focuses on driving defects out of the product and/or services provided to our customers as well as the processes used to create these product and services.

Six Sigma originated at Motorola in approximately 1979 and has since been adopted by a number of companies including: General Electric ($2 billion annual savings attributed to Six Sigma), Texas Instruments ($600 million), Johnson and Johnson ($500 million), Honeywell ($1.2 billion) and Sun Microsystems.

The term Six Sigma comes from statistics, and (using standard deviations), measuring defects per million opportunities. By definition, Six Sigma is less than 3.4 defects per million (99.9997% success). Most companies perform at a 2 (69.10%) to 3 (93.5%) sigma level. 4 Sigma is a pretty good goal for most companies, with only 6,210 defects per million (99.38% success).

Where can I find out more?
A good external site: http://isixsigma.com

What is the Six Sigma Philosophy/Mindset
- Identify what is Critical to your Customer
- Understand how well you are performing today
- Leverage facts and data to drive process improvement
- Sustain improvement

What are the major steps in Six Sigma
- Define (D): Zero in on specific problem with defined return on effort
- Measure (M): Determine current performance of process
- Analyze (A): Validate key drivers of performance (root cause of problem)
- Improve (I): Improved performance and validated realized results
- Control (C): Implement controls to ensure continued performance

How could Six Sigma help with Marketing and Sales?
- In Defining our charter, it forces us to be very clear on exactly what we want to improve. For example, with our intranet site, we can think about not just "improving efficiency" or even measuring "number of page hits" to focus on what's critical to quality for the customer. We may choose to improve the amount of time it takes to find a relevant document, contact, or piece of information from 2.3 minutes to less than one minute, in 90% of cases.

- In Measuring, we can then focus on gathering information that leads to better controls and improvements. In asking "5 Why's" using a measurable goal, we can find variables that might not have been obvious. The goal of Six Sigma is to improve quality by eliminating opportunities for failure along the way. Instead of reducing the cost per head of a given online training module, we focus on improving the % of instances of an sales associate recommending a Microsoft product to a customer. We then find all the "opportunities for failure" of that happening, and fix those.

- In Analyzing, we focus on the clear customer outcome, and avoid fixing problems that don't impact the outcome. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of things. Since we don't have any relevant data yet, we shouldn't make guesses at what to improve (unless opportunities are obvious, which often they are).

How long does it take to implement a Six Sigma project?
The goal of the group is to implement projects in 4 months or less. In fact, the team has created a "Rapid DMAIC" process to drive measurable results (with a benchmark of at least $250,000) in a matter of weeks. By involving the right people (and only the right people), a clear charter, strong sponsorship (at a VP level), and following a structured process, key projects can be identified and implemented in a few weeks.

What Resources can the company provide?
We have dedicated Black Belts whose job it is to implement Six Sigma projects. Part of their charter is driving projects, and mentoring Green Belts (part-time project leads). If we have a project, we can involve them early on. In addition, our internal Green Belt training takes place regularly for any interested employee.

How does someone get certified as a Green Belt?
To be eligible to receive your Green Belt certificate you must have completed at least one Six Sigma project, where you were the project manager, that has a value of $250k or greater. The process for applying for your Green Belt certification is as follows;

- Six Sigma GreenBelt workshop completed
- Six Sigma Project completed, documented and approved by sponsor
- Project template completed
- Document tools used
- Submit the completed project template or other project documentation as appropriate to your course instructor.