The growing business handbook : inspiration and advice ... - Sparkler

79
Market
intelligence
3.2
Nick Hague, managing director of B2B International, discusses three steps to
powerful market intelligence
Take a minute to think what it would be like if you had just a handful of customers
and you intimately knew everything there was to know about them from their
names and personal background through to their differing business needs. Just like a
market trader who has a continuous finger on the pulse of customer preference, direct
contact with customers allows a business owner to quickly evaluate what he is doing
right or where he is going wrong. Such informal feedback is valuable in any company,
but hard to formalize and control in anything much larger than a corner shop.
However, it is also just as important to have information on your competitors and
potential customers as it is to have information on your existing customers. Having
intelligence on your enemy is a key to winning military battles and so it is in business.
Market intelligence can be used to assist with more or less every decision faced by
a company (whether they are operating on a local, regional, national or international
level). The overriding purpose of most market intelligence is to help the company
grow – to increase revenue, profit, or market share. Good market intelligence can
therefore have a huge return on investment; just £20,000 to £100,000 spent on
intelligence can generate or save many times that amount in extra customer revenue
or the avoidance of a bad investment decision.
The problem is that with the advent of the Internet and so much information at
our fingertips, sometimes the difficulty is in knowing where to start. The purposes of
this chapter are to hopefully make your life easier in knowing how to go about
gathering market intelligence and what types of market intelligence will deliver useful
insight.
Step 1: Don’t reinvent the wheel
There is no point reinventing the wheel if the information we are after is already
under our noses. However, the problem normally is that very often people either
don’t know the information exists or they don’t know how to locate the information
in the particular format they are looking for.