High-Yield Methods - Customer aligning business strategies, process and technology

High-Yield Methods
Minneapolis-based boutique consultancy that delivers a
very high level of expertise to
a limited number of clients.

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UNIQUE CAPABILITES

High-Yield Methods (HYM) is a boutique consulting firm that works with select clients that are committed to achieving outstanding growth and profitability through alignment with customers. Our clients understand that the only sustainable means of creating new value for the company is creating new value for customers

Dick Lee is founder and principal of High-Yield Methods, a trend-setting consulting firm focused on helping clients achieve external alignment with customers and internal alignment around customers. To deliver these outcomes, HYM’s innovative consultants employ a range of proprietary tools—including a customer-centric approach to strategic planning; a field-tested, collaborative approach to implementing customer relationship management; and VISUAL WORKFLOW, the first formal approach to business process improvement designed specifically for use in highly variable front office and service sector environments..

Dick was among the pioneers of the relationship marketing movement—starting his customer-centric work in corporate sales in the late 1970s and progressing through field sales and call center process management, database marketing and strategic planning roles before founding HYM (originally High-Yield Marketing) in 1994. During the 1980s, he also developed the first university course in customer-centric business planning, which he taught for 10 years at the Graduate School of Business, University of St. Thomas

Over the years, HYM’s consulting approach has produced outstanding returns for clients including 3M Company, American Express, H.B. Fuller, Honeywell International, Microsoft Corporation, the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Standard Register, United Way and U.S. Banks.

In addition to consulting, Dick Lee has also shared his experiences in books and journal columns. In 1997, he wrote The Sales Automation Survival Guide, which gave theREDUCING OFFICE COST | DESIGNING OFFICE PROCESS | VISUAL WORKFLOW | CRM | FREE DOWNLOADS | PARTNERS | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | HOMEmovement a major shove in a strategic direction. In 1999 he followed up with the industry best-seller, The Customer Relationship Management Survival Guide, which broke more new ground by linkingREDUCING OFFICE COST | DESIGNING OFFICE PROCESS | VISUAL WORKFLOW | CRM | FREE DOWNLOADS | PARTNERS | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | HOMEto fundamental economic changes years before these changes were widely recognized. Most recently, Dick has put his entire consulting methodology into the public domain with the 2001 release of Strategic CRM, now in its second release. And he continues as a featured columnist and Guru panel-member for the e-publication CRMGuru.com.

As an outgrowth of his work and his writing, Dick travels internationally delivering conference keynote addresses andREDUCING OFFICE COST | DESIGNING OFFICE PROCESS | VISUAL WORKFLOW | CRM | FREE DOWNLOADS | PARTNERS | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | HOMEworkshops. His work and perspectives have been featured in “Business Week,” National Public Radio’s “MarketPlace,” “Newsweek,” “The Wall Street Journal” and numerous other print and web-based publications. He holds a BA from Reed College, Portland, Oregon and an MBA from Suffolk University, Boston.

Click Here to view Dick Lee's resume.

UNIQUE TOOLS

Despite the firm’s small size, HYM is know globally for developing a unique tool set for helping clients achieve external alignment with customers and internal alignment around customers. HYM’s “home-grown” approaches, which are widely used today by other consulting firms, include:

Visual Planning: a structured, highly visual approach to developing customer-centric business strategies. The core principles of this planning approach evolved from years of field experience with clients including 3M Company, American Express, Microsoft, United Way and U.S. Bank—plus many mid-size and small organizations. Lee formalized them as part of the first graduate business course offered in development of customer-centric strategies. And he’s taught these principles in workshops and classes worldwide.

Visual Planning is based on three principles:

Breakthrough planning is far more intuitive than intellectual.
Visualization feeds intuition; words feed intellect.
Visual communication wields far more power than verbal communication in cutting the dissonance created by differing and competing agendas.

Considering the advantages of keeping as much of the strategic planning process verbal rather than verbal, it’s a wonder that more companies aren’t adopting visual planning techniques.

VISUAL WORKFLOW: the first, business process improvement methodology designed for non-production environments. VW differs from production-environment methods such as Six Sigma and Lean Business in two critical respects: first, VW decouples workflow (how work moves from function to function and stakeholder to stakeholder) from work process (how work is accomplished within functions or departments); second, VW couples workflow and information flow, which are inseparable in non-production environment, and analyzes and redesigns them as a single unit. The combined effect of these two changes from other process improvement methods—plus use of a “common language” mapping approach that’s equally accessible to the business and technical/operations sides of companies—produces process improvement

The Four Steps toREDUCING OFFICE COST | DESIGNING OFFICE PROCESS | VISUAL WORKFLOW | CRM | FREE DOWNLOADS | PARTNERS | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | HOMESuccess: a holistic approach to planning and implementing customer relationship management. The “Four Steps” methodology starts with development of customer-centric business strategies; progresses to redesign of workflow and information flow to support these strategies (including redefinition of departmental roles and responsibilities); then drills down to the work process level to reengineer processes in alignment with new workflow; and completes the implementation design phase by developing technology support requirements for new strategies, workflow and work process. A similarly structured deployment phase takes companies through change management, training, and technology implementation steps.

OUTSTANDING RESULTS

HYM’s unique approach to supporting growth and profitability produces outstanding results for clients in areas including:

Reducing customer attrition
Increasing customer satisfaction
Maximizing share-of-customer
Reducing cycle times
Eliminating non-value adding work
Maximizing process throughput
Scanning workflow enterprise-wide to identify sources of quality defects
Scanning information flow enterprise-wide to identify systems issues
Recognizing organizational impediments to customer-centricity
Identifying change management opportunities and obstacles

A typical HYM engagement will yield significant benefits in not just one or two—but the majority of these categories.