How You Can Leverage The Theory of Constraints To Improve The Health of Your Pipeline and Your Peace of Mind
The lives of today’s top business leaders, are laced with the exhilaration of significant opportunity, tethered to significant and broad responsibility and risk. There’s nothing new in that reality I suppose… even back in the mid 1500’s William Shakespeare talked about it.. in “King Henry the Fourth, Part Two”:
He said, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”…. And he was right..
And today, as in the 1500’s, the answer to keeping that crown remains, success. What is keeping today’s revenue growth responsible leaders up at night these days? In my experience, it is one or more of the below questions:
- Do we have the volume of pipeline we need?
- Is the pace of pipeline growth fast enough?
- Do I have the pipeline/funnel conversion ratios I need?
- Do we know why our conversion rates are below goal?
- Have we identified what our current constraints are?
- Do we know how to correct our constraints and improve our conversion rates?
- Do we have the team to win?
- What is working today and where is my profit coming from?
- Am I selling deals I can execute profitably with high customer satisfaction?
- How does my current business performance support my bonus or exit plan?
Why does a top exec need to know specifically what the constraints are to pipeline success and how to fix them? Because, like manufacturing, marketing is subject to the same “Theory of Constraints”.
Definition: The theory of constraints is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving its goals by a very small number of constraints.
In other words, one significant constraint, uncorrected, can prevent an entire pipeline generation system to fail to produce results. This leads to marketing and sales investments with little or no return.
What is the solution?
At Frantz Group, after 26 years of tech business growth strategy and pipeline building experience, we have built a series of constraint identification and correction processes which can be combined with financial planning support tools to ensure we develop leads that close and deliver return on investment on your digital marketing and technology lead generation initiatives.
The first step is to dig in and reveal your core pipeline/funnel situation as it is today. In this funnel analysis we uncover pipe volume, pace and conversion pluses and minuses. Then we build a plan to take advantage of your strength’s and correct your weaknesses/constraints.
Next, during a “Marketing Growth Initiative Workshop”, we develop a reasonable financial plan/basis to pursue, which we call a marketing objectives calendar. This information, sample above, becomes a roadmap for goals month by month.
The purpose of the funnel analysis and marketing objectives calendar is to give a top exec a comprehensive view of what needs to be done to achieve your financial goals.
Our objective is to give the top exec a realistic view of their world so that they can set realistic plans and goals. Which is a basis for success for those who have the courage to wear the crown every day.
Contact us for more information on this approach to drive successful growth from your marketing efforts.
John