What Market Intelligence can do for your Business
Are you optimizing the use of data in your organization?
When I mention market research or marketing intelligence, many companies immediately think of surveys of all types, particularly customer satisfaction surveys which are everywhere, or focus groups. Many believe they don’t need this kind of specialized research, or if they do, they can take a free online survey tool and just do it themselves.
I will get to the free online survey tool in another post. But for starters, let’s look at what we really mean when we speak about Market Intelligence.
Trial and error is still, unfortunately, a way to gauge customer satisfaction and to make sometimes big investment decisions on new product development, country or regional expansion and to diagnose performance issues within our business. However, with trial and error comes serious risks – of course, the investment made to produce a product or go into a market which does not give you returns, the risk of neglecting your core business and traditional market and the list goes on.
So why are companies still turning to this? One of the reasons is that they are unaware of the gold mine they are sitting on by not exploiting the data they already have at their fingertips.
To what extent are you exploiting your sales data? Are you analyzing it in detail to understand who your customers are? So you did well this month. One month doesn’t make a trend, how did you do the same month last year and how have you been doing this quarter? Which segments of customers and products (regions, product categories, merchandising choices) led to this relative success?
And what about your industry? So you did well, but
How did your industry do this month? Are you just riding a wave of positivity towards your industry that has nothing to do with your particular performance?
What about factors that are not directly related to your company which could make a competitor easily steal that edge you got this month?
Which macro-economic indicators are you tracking?
Statistical modeling could tell you what role each of these factors played and help you predict what to expect in the next months or years to come.
Sounds complicated? It’s much less so than it needs to be. These are not data exploration skills that we all have nor even want to have. We have seen that even large companies are not exploiting their data fully.
That’s why every consultation we make starts with a diagnosis as you might know much more about your customer base than you think. Then we help you seek out additional sources of information, whether it be industry data, macro-economic data or custom marketing research to fill the gaps. One size doesn’t fit all, this kind of deep dive could be a one-off set-up you run yourself, or a quarterly or monthly need you contract out.
We would love to hear from you on how your company is using its sales, CRM and market data to continue to create satisfied customers and grow its customer base.
