Customer Demand
Customer demand is about mastering the dance, even when the music changes.
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When the music is playing, it is easy to capture new customers and grow with existing ones. But when the melodies start slowing or changing, it can be hard to pivot and protect share. Either way, being caught surprised and ill-prepared risks unrealized growth and damaging churn. Knowing how to move in times of upturn, downturn, or disruption is critical in delighting customers.
Effective customer demand management begins with proper definition of customer segmentation and corresponding contextualization. Its paramount to identify the customers worth winning, the behaviors that drive them, and under what mega-trends they are evolving. Capitalizing means integrating these demand drivers and socio-economic buying patterns. COVID-19 and its aftermath have thrown a wrench into this stream, muddling short-term shifts versus what could be more permanent shifts. Disentangling the two helps us clarify consumption patterns moving forward.
Ultimately, business judgment and industry expertise must be applied to transform these into actionable imperatives. The result is a data-rich customer pursuit strategy. For corporates, this means more targeted category management, more loyal customers, and greater shareholder value. For private equities, this means validated investment theses and clarity on value creation playbooks during hold periods as well as foresight into exit multiples.
How Pointe can help
Pointe enables clients to optimize customer demand. We not only structure the critical data needs and creatively collect critical data needs, but we also make sense of them as they relate to your strategic objectives, performance trajectory, and industry structure. We leverage both advanced quantitative and qualitative techniques to forecast customer demand and help you anticipate customer needs before the competition, complementing the insight with bold recommendations to fully capitalize on. Specifically, we support:
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Customer prioritization – needs-based segmentation of customers to understand archetype profiles and purchasing life cycles, subsequently mapping back results to client capabilities in order to understand lever points, strengths, and gaps
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Economic analysis & demand modeling – forecast of B2C and B2B industry demand via regression-analysis on custom data sets and deep-dive expert interviews
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Key purchasing criteria (KPC) – definition of KPCs for specific accounts or representative buyers as well as their overall weightings to inform internal positioning and go-to-market approach
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Commercial excellence – best practice development around salesforce structuring, pricing strategy, account management, and close-the-deal messaging
Relevant use cases
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Pointe helped a private equity fund understand demand drivers for top-priority customers and model future spend scenarios based on retail data sets, web scrapes, and primary interviews across multiple end market categories, such as outdoor living, home décor, and fitness.
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Pointe disentangled the COVID-19 impact on customer demand for front line patient care devices at hospitals in European markets (e.g., Germany, UK) and evaluated key purchasing criteria to best predict future spend trajectories and recommend positioning strategies to respond to buyer preferences.