Supply & Demand

Making a Demand Engine 

Competitive Landscape Mapping

Customers don't need perfection to make a decision. Like water, people tend to follow the path of least resistance. That means choosing the best option out of available options, which is a comparative method of selection, not qualitative. To create the best comparative option, you need to know two things:

1. The factors that contribute to how they calculate "best"

2. What other options are available to them (and which comparative factors exist in those other options)

That means the first step in demand generation is not “running ads” or getting in front of more people. It's Competitive Landscape Mapping:

• What options do customers have?

• What do they love about each option?

• What do they hate or tolerate about each option?

Market Fit

When companies talk about market fit, they're mostly talking about the product-market fit. I.e., how well their product solves the customer's pain point. But that's only the beginning of true market fit. 

The complete picture addresses every part of the customer's experience including:

• Placing ads where customers are looking

• Speaking in terms they understand

• Providing a process they're familiar with and prefer

• Using tools they're familiar with

• Removing friction at every stage of the customer journey

• Maintaining what they love

• Removing what they hate or tolerate

• Creating visible support channels

• and even Pricing where the value they expect matches the money they pay.

Market Fit is the first thing I rebuild within an organization. Sometimes without ever touching the product or service. But we're still no where close to being ready to run ads.

Market Messaging

With your Competitive Landscape Map bringing full awareness to you of what options your customers have at their fingertips, and with your entire customer journey fit to your audience's preferences making you irrefutably the best option in every category that you can control, the next step is to craft a message around this truth. 

The market message should do two things. 

1. Tell your audience about the positives you still provide

2. Tell your audience about the highest impact negatives that you no longer force them to tolerate, but your competitors do. 

This is a deadly combo for your competition. 

• By comparing your new market-fit directly to the other options customers have...

• By pointing out specific annoyances, friction points, and points of contention that consumers despise having to tolerate about those other options... 

• Then by stating you have gone to great lengths to remove those from your customer experience...

...Your message will simultaneously offer emotional relief to your target audience while repositioning your competitors into a negative light.

Market Test

Once the message has been crafted, it needs to be tested. 

• Add it to your website and other online channels

• Give it to your sales team to add to their inbound leads. 

• Run it by some of your best clients in the form of a survey or one-on-one conversation next time they are in the store. 

Pay attention to their voice inflection and honest reactions when they hear about what you've done. And if it seems to be hitting the bulls eye, go to the final step: Broadcast that message to the world.

Free vs. Paid Broadcasting

Broadcasting doesn't have to cost money. If you're a business with a significant list of past customers, it is as simple as crafting an email announcement. Same for social media. Summarize the new message and tell the customer what you want them to do with this new information; typically referrals or more frequent use.

When those channels have reached their limit, the last step is finally paid advertising. With the exception of website SEO, this is where my work ends and I typically partner with an ad agency to do the heavy lifting. Even with paid ads, though, this is usually far less expensive than going straight to an ad agency first because all of the research is already done, the message has been crafted, and their only service is to broadcast what I have already created.

Conclusion

Advertising is not effective just because it gets you in front of more people. It's effective because a message that resonates with your audience is being broadcast at scale to the right people, and an appealing customer journey with an effective product makes them easy to convert. That is the demand engine, and broadcasting is the throttle.

Before putting the pedal to the metal, though, be sure to have the capacity to support the flood of demand that will follow. So lets's take a look at Optimizing Supply.

Optimizing Supply

Optimize First, Hire Last

Increasing supply is not always about increasing labor or materials. That's actually the last step, not the first. 

Supply-side optimization is about creating an operational environment where:

• work flows smoothly

• decisions happen faster

• employees spend less time confused

• and output increases without chaos

Before hiring or lowering your standards for vendors so you can work with more of them, let's improve the operation itself.

Task Coupling

Often times a task, such as onboarding a customer or signing documents, requires multiple steps or multiple simultaneous overlapping tasks. These can be sped up considerably with technology. Unfortunately, most organizational tools are not designed for speed, and often don't have the customized functionality many organizations need. 

Technology should reduce friction — not create more of it. If you have a devloper, or have thought about hiring an engineer to create custom software for you, I can manage that process from design, UI/UX workflow, writing requirements, managing sprints, ensuring clear communication and so on. But if that's not in your budget, I can also create simple productivity apps on my own without outside help.

I design:

• internal productivity tools

• lightweight operational systems

• automations

• and task-coupling workflows

that reduce repetitive work and keep information moving. 

Once your business starts getting flooded with demand, these are the types of tools you'll be glad are already in place to handle the influx without extra labor cost. 

Process Uncertainty

Many employees love to be busy. Being able to sit down and knock out a task in 2 hours of continuous focus can be satisfying. But many times employees finish the day exhausted. Not because they worked too hard, but because they had to chase down answers, troubleshoot where to look for those answers, and experience the stress of being delayed by hours or longer by having to discover or locate the missing pieces that are preventing them from starting the next task. In a given day, many manager-level employees do 1-3 hours of actual work. The rest of the time is spent doing mental labor; 90% of which could be eliminated by a written and documented SOP or process that brings access to their dependencies right to their fingertips. 

Employees lose massive amounts of time:

• searching for information

• waiting for clarification

• asking repetitive questions

• looking for the right person with tribal knowledge

• or improvising inconsistent solutions

Good operational systems reduce:

• hesitation

• confusion

• dependency

• and execution inconsistency

To prepare for scaling a business, I eliminate as much downtime due to confusion or uncertainty as possible by documenting processes, SOPs and most importantly, answer pathways.

Ready to Hire

Once this is done, scaling should be easy. Start by launching the demand engine. Now supply should be linear to labor and materials. So go ahead and hire to keep up with demand, and I will be right there with you to run product-ops and continue making adjustments as the business grows.