Managing the Demand Chain to Maximize Customer Relationships

Predictive Consulting Group also helps companies embrace the Demand Chain from top to bottom. The Demand Chain is the customer-facing corollary to the supply chain. It is an umbrella business philosophy that places the customer at the center of the business and aligns all business activities to develop long-term relationships with customers by proactively creating and delivering solutions that profitably meet continually evolving customer needs. Companies focusing on the demand chain focus on growth potential rather than cost-cutting, know their customers better than anyone else (especially their competitors and perhaps even better than their customers themselves), and integrate customers' thoughts, attitudes, needs, and desires into everything they do. The demand chain encompasses customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, marketing automation, and other activities that will ultimately impact the customer.

Services include:

• Customer insight and analysis as described here
• Analysis/refinement of customer acquisition, retention, and support strategies
• Refinement of organizational structure to more profitably meet customer needs
• Business process reengineering to minimize non-value-add activities and focus more exclusively on customer satisfiers
• Identification of new services or activities that increase both customer acquisition and retention strategies
• Recommendation of technological solutions to aid in customer understanding and associated acquisition/loyalty-building activities

Typical results:

1. Increased ease of customer acquisition and shorter sales cycles leading to increased revenue. When you have the exact solution to problems customers are experiencing, they don’t have to be convinced--they willingly pay money to make their problems go away
2. Decreased time to market and higher probability of successful launch due to the presence of clear objectives, widely understood requirements, established prospect/customer relations, and crisp marketing messages known to resonate with prospects.
3. Processes put in place to continually revise and refine demand, technology, and product roadmap forecasts based on evolving customer needs
4. More impactful marketing to accurately chosen prospects resulting in a more robust pipeline of qualified leads, willing to purchase because their pain-points are clearly understood and solved with products developed to exactly match customer needs.
5. More clearly defined and successful customer centric products, the demand for which is accurately predicted for 2-3 years into the future
6. Establishment of customer-centric development processes based on accurate assessment of market conditions, new technologies, competitive threats and critical customer needs to ensure products are neither over-or under-engineered
7. Streamlined development process resulting in decreased costs, decreased friction between engineering and marketing, development of properly engineered products based on actual customer input, rather than on unsubstantiated opinions
8. Clearly defined marketing focus, targeted marketing messages, and spot-on marketing and sales collateral with universal internal buy-in
9. Political clout fairly obtained based on a sound and complete understanding of the market and proven with successful results

For more information, subscribe now to Customer Strategy, the monthly newsletter describing how to turn customer insight into competitive advantage, use this insight to develop new or refine existing products for increased revenue, as well as many other aspects of Demand Chain Management.