Can Six Sigma Work in a Sales and Marketing Environment?

by Paul Selden Originally published in the ASQ Six Sigma Forum, 2001 William Latzko, a professor at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business and a colleague of W.E. Deming, remarked to me not long ago that the great opportunity for quality in the twenty-first century lies in sales process improvement. Indeed, quality thinking offers a perspective that can help launch sales, marketing, and customer service into a new frontier of systematic, long-term improvement. Likewise, Six Sigma has come to represent something of a new frontier for many companies wanting to achieve bottom-line benefits through quality improvement. Its success in capturing attention stems from highly visible proponents like GE s Jack Welch, along with its focus on achieving tangible financial results and application to a broad range of situations. Combining these two realities the opportunity to improve sales and the momentum of Six Sigma would seem to guarantee a wealth of possibilities for successful improvement projects tied to increasing revenue. Through the lens of Six Sigma, the same types of improvement opportunities found in manufacturing can be found in arenas involving more direct person-to-person and customer interchange. Marketing program yields can be improved, sales cycle times can be reduced, and service can produce fewer defects (for example, customer defections). The table below lists a veritable smorgasbord of tangible opportunities for improvement in the world of sales, marketing, and customer service framed in terms that are more engineering-like. Selected Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service Improvement Opportunities Mistake-proofing customer needs analysis Improving ROI on existing customer feedback Increasing convenience to the customer Systematic improvement of conversion ratios Pricing policy and system simplification Order entry/processing error reduction Reduce gaps between commitments and execution Shorten concept-to-customer cycle time The range of genuine opportunity makes Six Sigma sound promising for sales and marketing. In spite of the promise, those experienced with the standard approach to Six Sigma often conclude that delivering it as is to an audience of sales and marketing personnel is far too risky. Why?

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Four of the most common causes for failure when a Six Sigma program is presented to sales and marketing can be attributed to its inherent production-centric bias. Having remedied some of Six Sigma s own defects when Read more

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“With your experience in sales management, who do you consider to be the best sales training company?  (Miller-Heiman, etc.)  I want to think down-field about the best company to partner with as I’m building my sales team.” John Siwgard

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