Six Sigma strategies seek to improve manufacturing quality by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes.

Most programs attempt to reach 3.4 defects per million opportunities, or Five Nine Uptime. Six Sigma also borrows from Edward Deming and Japanese production tools like Kaizen.

And you can use them for ANY process, especially GTM funnels and systems.

Process Charts

Process charts are an operations team’s best friend. Make sure that your process charts run at the Executive level and a level down to specifications where you can engineer real solutions.

Know your key shapes, swim lanes, but you don’t have to make it more complicated than this.

• Square=a step or process
• Diamond=decision point – you can chain these!
• Page=web page
• terminator=End of Process

One mistake I see teams make is to assume a step or decision happens. It’s easy to do this because you want to go fast, but it does hide people and systems that should be exposed and looped into changes.

5 Whys

Five Whys is one of the most familiar tools for any troubleshooting or process analysis. It aims to get to a Root Cause of the situation so you can develop a solution.

The caveat to Five Whys is sometimes you need six Whys, especially if the answers weren’t very clear.

DMAIC

• Define – what’s the problem and scope?
• Measure – how do we know this?
• Analyze – what tools or ways do we know?
• Improve – what can be improved?
• Control – how do we monitor going forward?

Here’s a quick example:

• Define – what’s the problem and scope?
  Direct Opps are changing to Direct Opps which impacts budget and bonuses.
• Measure – how do we know this?
  Our control variance chart shows this.
• Analyze – what tools or ways do we know?
  We have reports and data in our CRM. We spoke with salespeople as part of 5 Whys to understand the root cause.
• Improve – what can be improved?
  We can modify the compensation plan to ensure Salespeople are no longer doing this then create a new process with Deal Desk.
• Control – how do we monitor going forward?
  Update and monitor our control chart.

Variance Analysis

Variance analysis is a key part of developing a strong uptime culture as well as building better revenue forecasts. The lower the variation to reality, the better your forecast model, and therefore better the “predictability” of revenue.

Variance analysis is a critical tool in monitoring not just your system uptime also the funnel rates and revenue reports. In this example for API Calls, we can see:

• Upper Limit (UCL) when alerts go off.
• Lower Limit (LCL) when it’s too low we should be alerted.
• Mean – about where it has been, sometimes use Trailing Twelve Months (TTM).
• Actual (red) – what’s happening over time.

In this, very contrived case, we can see calls were quite low over several hours then rapidly spiked. Unless this was expected, we should be concerned and begin looking into this for a root cause.

Kaizen & Continuous Improvement

Kaizen comes from the Toyota Production System. The goal is continuous improvement of a process such as building a defect free car, or a defect free email campaign.

What it is

• Optimize everything
• No Waste
• Minimize Process Drift
• Empower the Line Worker

Kaizen in Action

Kaizen is a powerful tool to activate right now in your Campaign Operations motion.

• Monitor variation of the funnel and system health
• Quality Control and Checklists
• Empowered to Pull the Cord – see something say something.

As part of a No Blame culture, it’s important to emphasize that if a staff member sees a mistake during QA or an error before deployment that they speak up and Pull the Cord – halting deployment. Then the team or original builder fixes it and is approved to restart the line.

And if a mistake does impact others? Notify and escalate! Come to your manager with a solution option and work to get it fixed. Own it and the solution and people will want to keep working with you.

Stakeholders appreciate it when you care about the outcome and perfection. I’ve never had any complaints about delaying a campaign or project when we knew an error would cause problems. It is very acceptable to stop work until errors are resolved.

It is not acceptable to hide mistakes or let mistakes escape when you could have stopped them.

No Blame Culture in Action

Put your new ship in action right now. You don’t need fancy docs just yet. Incorporate these three items into your team’s DNA.

• No Blame Culture
• Pull the Cord
• Transparency

Proving Value

How do you know any of this is working? You can monitor and commit to certain KPIs as well as monitoring funnel health with your Revenue Analytics team.

Tactical Team KPIs

These are around operational or system processes that executives assume work.

• Production Error Rate
  You can define this in a variety of ways. What works for many teams is an Error that would impact a customer or stakeholder beyond a simple typo. The goal is to reduce errors within a time period such as Under 5 Defects per Quarter in 1000 deployments (.05%) or Three Nines.
• System Uptime
  How many hours was a system or stack “down”? Or not delivering to agreed expectations. Make sure your vendors agree to an Uptime Commit.
• Lead Flow Or User Uptime
  Some large volume companies or ecommerce firms will look at Lead Flow and Speed To Lead as a metric. Every second may count in certain competitive scenarios. If Leads stop, Sales stops. This can be measured as Time a Lead takes to get between systems; time to first call; time leads aren’t delivered.
• SLA Attainment
  Are you delivering campaigns or projects against the original agreed SLA? Take caveats such as not being held to an SLA if stakeholders don’t approve or other mitigating circumstances.
• Hours to Build
  In Campaign Operations, templating and automation can compress the people hours required to build something, allowing you to produce more, or compress SLAs. For example, Templating Event in a Box better reduced hours from 15 to 5 and allowed SLA from 5 days to 2 days.

Strategic KPIs

Strategic KPIs are focused on revenue, costs, and ROI. And funnel metrics that impact the business. It’s perfectly fine to build and monitor these, just be careful when committing to owning a number as GTM Operations may not always directly impact revenue, for example.

• Cost or Revenue of a Process
  What’s the cost to maintain funnel visibility or ABM?
  Is the Click to Calendar process delivering any revenue?
• Cost of an Error
  If Lead Flow goes down, what’s the opportunity cost per hour?
• Revenue Velocity
  GTM Operations can impact velocity through Nurture programs as well as bringing on tools (like click to calendar) that reduce process time or communications.
• ROI of a Project or Tool Deployment
  The ROI of a Project is crucial to getting approval from executives as well as a key step in pruning your stack.

Remember, GTM Operations is a repeatable process that is monitored and optimized over time across teams and customers. The processes should serve the outcomes and strategy. And to do this effectively you need to leverage process and Six Sigma tools.