Turning Customer Insight into Competitive Advantage

The Predictive Consulting Group helps companies turn customer insight into competitive advantage. We help companies obtain in-depth customer insight from every possible channel and translate this insight into refinements to existing products and services or new products/services that more effectively and profitably solve customer problems.

Specific services include:

• Consulting to help develop a custom-tailored and unified process to gather customer insight from multiple channels
• Training of customer-facing employees (ie. marketers, product managers, sales, services, and support staff) in gathering customer insight and processing transforming insight into products/services and the requirements for such
• Aid or independently conduct interviews to gain the insight and transform it as above
• Leverage customer insight to refine or reposition existing products
• Direct the identification and definition of new products or services to capitalize on unmet needs discovered through customer sensing process
• Consulting in development of a company's long term product roadmap
• Help refine or develop marketing and sales strategy based on results of customer sensing activiites

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 convincedthey willingly pay money to make their problems go away
2. 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
3. More clearly defined and successful customer centric products, the demand for which is accurately predicted for 2-3 years into the future
4. 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
5. 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
6. Processes put in place to continually revise and refine demand, technology, and product roadmap forecasts based on evolving customer needs
7. Clearly defined marketing focus, targeted marketing messages, and spot-on marketing and sales collateral with universal internal buy-in
8. Political clout fairly obtained based on a sound and complete understanding of the market and proven with successful results
9. 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.

Curtis Bingham presently teaches these principles Bentley College where he is an adjunct professor in the MBA program.

An intensive 1-day seminar, "True Customer Advantage: Customer Insight for Survival", available here, discusses how to glean customer insight from all possible channels, how to translate it into actionable information, and how to adapt products/services/business processes to best satisfy customers.

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.