Six Sigma

Six Sigma For Marketing

What is Marketing and can Six Sigma can be adopted to Marketing?

In simple terms, marketing is the end process of advertising your product to the customers which in turn is responsible for fusing the buyers and sellers. Marketing is indeed a part of any business whether new or existing because marketing efforts of a company would be in a way responsible for the sales and the revenue of the company. Marketing in itself is a business which has processes. And since it has processes, it will also have metrics. And this is where a Six Sigma approach can be implemented on processes which are managed by metrics to improve the results of marketing efforts of a company which will in turn be responsible for impacting the revenues of the company.

How is it possible?

Marketing, extrinsically is a very subjective domain. With the involvement of factors like 7 Ps and 4 Cs and so on, marketing efforts is all about strategy and planning. That does not alleviate the fact that marketing can also be metrics-intensive. With Key indicators like Revenue per call, Call Sales rate, Advertising Response Rate, Revenue per Advertisement etc impacting marketing efforts in much the same way as strategy does, Six Sigma for Marketing can be used as an effective approach to meet and exceed objectives that the company has of the marketing domain.

An example of Six Sigma for Marketing:

A company does 20,000 cold calls a month from which it generates 2000 leads of which 200 people end up buying the product of the company which is priced at $100 per unit. The total sales due to the marketing efforts is $20,000 but the effective revenue per call is $1. The company can target sales due to the marketing efforts to increase to $40,000 and maintain that number for almost every month.

This could be the scoping statement for the Six Sigma project and analysis could be carried out on the cold calling strategy and various other factors. The company could focus on increasing the Revenue per call to $2 keeping the number of cold calls constant which could eventually meet the marketing target. That would mean that the sales conversion ratio must increase from 200 to 400 customers. There could be many possibilities which could be considered by the company when freezing on the scope of the Six Sigma process improvement plan.

The above example is just one in the case for me to explain that Six Sigma approach could be applied to Marketing to achieve higher company revenues. There are other marketing metrics which the company could focus on to achieve optimum results of its marketing efforts.