Chapter Four

Market/Commercial Analysis of
Project
 4.1 Product description

• The project product description is a special form of product description

that defines what the project must deliver in order to gain acceptance.
• It is used to:
 gain agreement from the user on the project’s scope and requirements
 define the customer’s quality expectations
 define the acceptance criteria, method and responsibilities for the
project.
• The product description for the project product is created in the starting
up a project process as part of the initial scoping activity, and is refined
during the initiating a project process when creating the project plan.
• It is subject to formal change control and should be checked at
management stage boundaries (during managing a stage boundary) to
see if any changes are required.
• It is used by the closing a project process as part of the verification that
the project has delivered what was expected of it, and that the
acceptance criteria have been met.
• The project product description defines how the users and
the operational and maintenance organizations will assess
the acceptability of the finished product(s). It should ensure
that:
 all criteria are measurable
 each individual criterion is realistic
 the criteria are consistent as a set. For example, high
quality, early delivery and low cost may not go together
 all criteria can be proven within the project life (e.g. the
maximum throughput of a water pump) or by proxy
measures that provide reasonable indicators as to
whether acceptance criteria will be achieved post-project
(e.g. a water pump that complies with design and
manufacturing standards of reliability)
 4.2 Characterization of potential customers & demand forecasting

• Understanding your customers is the key to success in

business. However, for many organizations, real
customer analysis is easier said than done.
• Sometimes, customer research only scratches the
surface and focuses on unnecessary information.
• Other times, teams work in silos, and the research
they’ve worked so hard to produce isn’t actually used
across the organization or in their marketing campaigns.
• Effective customer analysis is based on in-depth
research, shared with the entire team, and focused on
what really matters: customer pain points and goals
and insights on what influences their buying
decisions
What Is Customer Analysis?
• Customer analysis is the practice of using qualitative and
quantitative data to gain insight into your customers.
• The goal is to understand their wants, needs, pain points, and
objectives. At the same time, customer analysis helps us
understand what drives people to make a purchase, how and
when these purchases happen, the frequency of these
purchases, and other relevant information. 
• Organizations that conduct customer-centric data analysis use
research methods like focus groups, in-depth interviews,
social media analytics, existing customer feedback — and
more — to understand their customer base.
• In turn, this allows them to adapt their business processes to
meet their customers’ real needs. 
Why Is Customer Analysis Important?
Here are a few concrete reasons why you need to implement
customer analysis, it: 
 Enables you to shape your communications and marketing to
address customers’ goals (and really speak their ‘language’).
 Lets you better target customers through segmentation and
increase ROI (otherwise known as targeted marketing).
 Helps you to define what marketing channels will reach
customers best, and where to invest ad dollars. 
 Helps you understand how to improve your products or
services.
 Lets you build better relationships with clients and improve
customer loyalty overall.
 How can we run an effective customer analysis?
• 1. Segment the Customers You Already Have: When you
know what clients you already have, you can better
understand what clients you would like to have. That’s why
one of the first steps in your customer research involves
customer-based segmentation (i.e. grouping your clients by
certain characteristics). 
• Segmentation depends on the goals you have as a company.
• 2. Talk to Customers to Find Out what Makes Them Tick
• We can invest hours researching online. However, it’s not
until you speak to customers that you’ll understand their true
sentiments. 
• To conduct effective customer analysis, you need to invest
the time in carrying out focus groups, surveys and in-depth
interviews with clients and potential customers. 
• 3. Use Existing Customer Feedback
• Customers already reach out to you when they need
help, are happy with your product, or want to make a
complaint. Paying attention to all this existing
customer feedback and customer support requests can
be incredibly valuable when it comes to
understanding client pain points and goals. This is
also called Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis. 
• Voice of Customer programs can help you analyze
customer reviews on Google, Facebook, Twitter, the
App Store, Google Play or any other public source
will enable you to see where your brand goes right
and wrong.
• 4. Communicate with Your Team
Everyone on your team may work for the same organization, but not
everyone sees the same side of clients — and therefore what makes
them tick. For example: 
 The marketing team might understand what style of copy leads
clients to book an initial call.
 While the sales team might understand what makes customers
ultimately convert.
 Account managers might understand what makes customers happy
day in, day out.
 But customer success managers (CSMs) might know how to go the
extra mile to retain them. 
• 5. Create Buyer Personas
• Now, it’s time to put these research findings into action. So, what
should the persona look like? We recommend including the following:
• Demographic information, such as:
 Age
 Location
 Gender identity (optional)
 Family status
 Education level
 Income level
• 6. Use the Customer Analysis Results and Your Personas across the
Entire Company
• Your customer analysis and buyer personas won’t be very valuable if only
used by a few select people at your organization. They need to be leveraged
across the entire company, and this will enable you to keep your messaging
consistent and effective.
• We recommend getting buy-in and collaboration from every strategic and
customer-facing department when creating these personas. Once completed,
it’s worth holding an all-hands meeting — or individual department
workshops — to share the personas, describing how they can be used. 
• 7. Based on the Research, Decide which Segments and
Personas Should Be Your Focus
• Now, the big question is: how should you decide which
personas your brand should focus on? 
• Perhaps the most important metric to focus on is Customer
Lifetime Value (LTV) — which is the average value a
customer brings to your organization throughout the entire
relationship. The buyer personas that increase your LTV,
over time, are ones that would be smart to focus on. 
• It can also help to have a unique customer journey map for
each persona. This map will determine how to attract,
engage, convert and upsell specific personas and segments
based on their challenges, questions, preferred platforms,
and types of content at every step of the way. 
• 8. Remember that this is an Evolving Environment
• Customers are constantly changing. Since the start of the
pandemic, many people’s preferred communication platforms
have changed. Their demographics have changed, too; lots of
people have moved out of cities and into the suburbs.
• Even more, people’s values have changed. For many, spending
time with family and friends has become more important than
working long hours or going after a big promotion.
• In this evolving environment, collecting customer feedback is
key. And you should undertake customer segmentation analysis
and voice of customer analysis periodically to ensure your
research and buyer personas are up to date. Otherwise, your
messaging, marketing, pitches, and (even worse) products risk
becoming stale
 What Is Demand Forecasting?
• Demand forecasting is the process of predicting what customers’ appetite
will be for existing products or services, determining what adjustment you
should make and what new offerings will spark interest.
• Demand forecasters use a variety of techniques to make their
prognostications; which is best depends on the case or scope, as we’ll
discuss. We’ll also touch on the underlying principles that make for success.
Key Takeaways
• Demand forecasting is used to predict what customer demand will be for a
product or service, with varying levels of specificity.
• Accurate, timely forecasts are invaluable for both businesses and their
customers.
• There are many different methods, both qualitative and quantitative, for
creating and improving forecasts.
• Data, software and analytics are increasingly crucial to get demand forecasts
right.
• It’s not enough to produce solid forecasts; the best forecasters also
communicate the strengths, assumptions and limitations of their predictions.
 Importance of demand forecasting for business
• Demand forecasting plays an important role for businesses in different
industries, particularly in reducing risk in business activities.
• With more detail, some of the reasons as to why businesses need
demand forecasting include:
• Meeting goals - Most successful organizations will have pre-
determined growth trajectories and long-term plans to ensure the
business is operating at optimal abilities. By having an understanding
of future demand markets, businesses can be proactive in ensuring their
meeting goals are in line with industry growth trends.
• Business decisions - In reference to meeting goals, by having a
thorough understanding of future industry demand, management and
key board members can make strategic business decisions that can
achieve higher profitability and business growth. These decisions are
generally associated with the concepts of capacity, market targeting,
raw materials and understanding vendor contract direction.
• Growth - By having an accurate understanding of future
forecasts, companies can gauge the need for expansion
within a timeframe that allows them to do so cost
effectively.
• Human capital Management- Given demand forecasting
will generally discloses information surrounding
technology growth and production, businesses can benefit
from planning employee training to ensure staff are well
equipped for new technology trends. This will assist in
ensuring an organization can operate optimally.
•  Financial planning- It is crucial to understand demand
forecasts in order to efficiently budget for future
operations. A strong demand forecast will assist to disclose
potential future costs and revenues.
 4.3. Characterization of Competitors

• What is a competitive market analysis?

• A competitive analysis is a strategy that involves
researching major competitors to gain insight into their
products, sales, and marketing tactics.
• Implementing stronger business strategies, warding off
competitors, and capturing market share are just a few
benefits of conducting a competitive market analysis.
• A competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and
outs of how your competition works, and identify
potential opportunities where you can out-perform them.
• It also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and
ensure your product is consistently meeting — and
exceeding — industry standards.
 Benefits of conducting competitive analyses
• Helps you identify your product's unique value proposition and
what makes your product different from the competitors', which
can inform future marketing efforts.
• Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This
information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your
product and your marketing campaigns are outperforming
industry standards.
• Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps
you identify areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out
new, unique marketing strategies they haven't taken advantage of.
• Learn through customer reviews what's missing in a competitor's
product, and consider how you might add features to your own
product to meet those needs.
• Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure
your growth.
How to do a Competitive Analysis
 Determine who your competitors are.
 Determine what products your competitors offer
 Research your competitors' sales tactics and results
 Take a look at your competitors' pricing, as well as
any perks they offer
 Ensure you're meeting competitive shipping costs
 Take note of your competition's content strategy
 Learn what technology stack your competitors' use.
 Analyze the level of engagement on your
competitor's content
 Observe how they promote their marketing
content
 Look at their social media presence, strategies,
and go-to platforms
 Perform a SWOT Analysis to learn their
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats
 4.4 Marketing strategy
• Marketing strategy is the comprehensive plan
formulated particularly for achieving the
marketing objectives of the organization.
• It provides a blueprint for attaining these
marketing objectives. It is the building block of a
marketing plan.
• It is designed after detailed marketing research.
• A marketing strategy helps an organization to
concentrate its scarce resources on the best
possible opportunities so as to increase the sales.
• A marketing strategy is designed by:
• Choosing the target market: By target market we
mean to whom the organization wants to sell its
products. Not all the market segments are fruitful to an
organization.
• There are certain market segments which guarantee
quick profits, there are certain segments which may be
having great potential but there may be high barriers to
entry. A careful choice has to be made by the
organization.
• An in-depth marketing research has to be done of the
traits of the buyers and the particular needs of the
buyers in the target market.
• Gathering the marketing mix: By marketing mix
we mean how the organization proposes to sell its
products. The organization has to gather the four P’s
of marketing in appropriate combination. Gathering
the marketing mix is a crucial part of marketing
task. Various decisions have to be made such as -
1. What is the most appropriate mix of the four P’s in a
given situation
2. What distribution channels are available and which one
should be used
3. What developmental strategy should be used in the
target market
4. How should the price structure be designed
Importance of Marketing Strategy
• Marketing strategy provides an organization an edge over it’s
competitors.
• Strategy helps in developing goods and services with best profit
making potential.
• Marketing strategy helps in discovering the areas affected by
organizational growth and thereby helps in creating an organizational
plan to cater to the customer needs.
• It helps in fixing the right price for organization’s goods and services
based on information collected by market research.
• Strategy ensures effective departmental co-ordination.
• It helps an organization to make optimum utilization of its resources
so as to provide a sales message to it’s target market.
• A marketing strategy helps to fix the advertising budget in advance,
and it also develops a method which determines the scope of the plan,
i.e., it determines the revenue generated by the advertising plan.
• In short, a marketing strategy clearly explains how
an organization reaches its predetermined objectives.
• Marketing strategy of a company revolves around
4Ps - Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
• Companies devise a strategy by mixing the four. The
most important among is the product.
• All the marketing push and promotion will go waste
if the product is not able to deliver.
• To come out with winner product, companies have to
understand target customers’ needs and
requirements.
 4.5 Revenue and Marketing Cost Forecasting
• What is Revenue Forecasting?
• Revenue forecasting is a predictive business process that helps you
estimate future company revenue based on your past performance and
current trends.
• The forecast tells you the projection of overall business income over a
specific period.
• Even though it’s called a revenue forecast, it’s important to remember
that you’re not just looking at the efforts of the sales team.
• Revenue forecasting looks at numbers from across your business in
areas like marketing, HR, outreach, philanthropy, and other areas that
contribute to your income, besides direct sales.
• Though forecasting is a highly mathematical process, revenue
forecasting incorporates a combination of qualitative and quantitative
factors to create models and help your company learn more about what
it’s likely to earn.
Why Does Revenue Forecasting Matter for a
project?
 No matter the industry or size of your company,
here are a few advantages to doing revenue
forecasting for our project:
 It helps create a realistic financial plan
 It allows you to predict your hiring capacity
 It helps you set revenue goals
 It gives you an idea of how you can scale your
brand
THANK YOU!