Sales and marketing as flows

That is a flow, and the chain does not stop at the sale: orders become demand on production and on people's hours. This part follows three everyday cases from outreach to the shop floor or the oven: cold calls, events and advertising. Every figure is a plan you would enter, not something measured. The tables show a way of looking. They do not say which channel is worth it, and you decide what you read in them.

Maple Street Bakery and Northline Fabrication are invented for illustration. The numbers are not data, and the currency is dollars only to keep the examples concrete.

One chain, from outreach to operations

Picture the whole thing as one line. Effort goes into outreach. Outreach produces conversations, then deals or orders. Orders land on operations as demand for production or fulfilment, which draws on people's hours and on materials. At each step a share continues and the rest drops out, or a quantity is converted into another unit, such as a deal into gates or an order into batches.

Three ideas from Part 2 apply.

• Each stage can carry a flow figure. "1,000 calls a quarter" is a rate. So is "30 deals a quarter". The share between two stages is a ratio of two rates.
• Stocks sit between stages. Conversations awaiting follow-up, quotes sent, orders waiting to be baked or welded. Each fills from the stage before and drains into the next.
• Delay is part of the chain. A deal signed this month may come from a conversation last month, and its work may land the month after.

Cost works the same way. You can attach a cost to each stage and divide it by whatever you want to count: per call, per conversation, per deal. Same money, different denominators, different questions.

Here is the smallest possible version of the whole chain, as a process on the map, running from top to bottom like every process on the canvas: advertising (marketing), then orders (the units sold, the sales made), then production (operations). Each block is a real canvas card with invented figures: the Advertising card carries the ad spend of about 2,000 a month, the Orders card the 5,000 jars sold a month, and the Production card the 20 batches those orders turn into. Flip a card to see more of it, and drag the cards to rearrange them.

Invented figures. Nothing here is calculated live or saved.

Three examples

Example 1: cold calls, then the shop floor

Northline Fabrication phones property managers and contractors to open trade accounts. The plan for one quarter is about 1,000 calls.

1,000 becomes 150, then 60, then 30. Thirty deals out of 1,000 calls is 3%. Divide the 14,800 by calls and you get about 15 each. By conversations, about 99. By meetings, about 247. By deals, about 493. All four are true of this plan. Only the denominator changed.

Now follow the deals into operations. Say each new account is planned to order about four gates in the quarter, so 30 deals become 120 gates.

Sam might state a capacity of 400 hours for the quarter. Against 480 hours of welding demand, that is a gap to look at. Whether the gap is a concern, a reason to adjust the plan, or an artefact of the estimates is for the owner to say. Note too the delay: a conversation turns into a meeting about two weeks later, so some of this quarter's welding comes from last quarter's calls.

Example 2: events, then catering orders

Maple Street Bakery takes a table at local fairs and markets, about 30 a year. Plan figures for one event:

Thirty events cost about 30,000 a year. If the plan expects about 1.5 deals per event, that is about 45 deals, and about 667 per deal. Inside one event, the chain might be 150 people at the table, 25 contact cards, 8 follow-up conversations, 1.5 deals.

The 1.5 is a point estimate for an average event. It hides spread: one event might produce nothing and another four. It also hides timing, since follow-ups from the last events of the year may close after the year ends.

Hand-off to the bakery: say each deal is a standing catering account placing about 12 orders a year. That is 540 orders. At about 1 oven hour and 1 baker hour per order, the plan carries 540 oven hours and 540 baker hours across the year, about 10 of each per week, on top of the counter and special orders already there.

Example 3: advertising, then batches

Here the unit is one jar of Maple Street Bakery's packaged granola, sold online and in a few shops, and the currency is dollars. Both are assumptions for the illustration. Over a month, the plan is about 2,000 in ad spend leading to about 5,000 jars sold.

The 2,000 is spent once, and each row shows what it is divided over. Impressions, visits and orders are counts of events. The last row converts orders into units, because an order can hold several jars.

Then the jars reach the kitchen. If a batch makes 250 jars:

Two stocks make the picture whole. The flour shelf takes the 60 bags, so a good month draws it down faster than deliveries fill it. And cash: the ad money leaves before the sales money arrives. Spend per jar covers advertising only. Ingredients, packaging and delivery are other costs, elsewhere on the map.

Reading the tables

• They are plans. A reader who sees "3%" may take it as a measurement. It is an estimate you typed.
• Averages smooth things. One typical event, one average call. Real weeks vary.
• Delay moves the credit. Spend in one period and work in another are linked only by your reading. You might read a deal as coming from last quarter's calls. A colleague might read it as a referral.
• No table says what to do. A high cost per deal in one channel and a low one in another does not tell you which to keep. The tables give the shape of each chain so you can ask your own questions.