ReeHart – Blogging from the Heart

Posts Tagged ‘client’

Market research is an essential element of any organization that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted. Business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-

• Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By communicating with the customer you not only demonstrate to them that you actually care but you also take any guesswork out of customer services.
• Market research helps you identify opportunities – If you are planning to launch a new product and want to know how people will react then market research will help, not only in predicting how well the product will be received, but also by testing the marketing message to see if that needs to be adjusted.
• Market research will minimise risk – Market research can help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the development of a product is highly focused towards demand.
• Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – You need to be able to measure so that you can ensure that your organization is always improving. Early research can identify where improvements need to be made to a new service or where there are flaws in a product, by conducting regular market research it will identify if improvements are being made and, if positive, will in turn help motivate a development team.

Considering the benefits that market research will bring to any organization it is perhaps surprising how few businesses invest sufficient resources to gather good intelligence that will help them improve business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.

What will conducting effective market research teach you?

Know your customers – Market research will help you better understand your customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to fine tune your product or service towards the target market.

Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? Does your product or service appeal to specific age groups? Do you know who your potential customers are and where they live?

Know your competition – Market Research will help you measure your service compared to others. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and are you improving in the right areas?

Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Does your business represent value for money? How do your products and services match up to that of your competitors? If you have a product can you, do you, should you deliver directly to your customer?

Ease of doing business – Do your customers find it easy to deal with you and when they visit your store and/or website do they find what they want? Is there adequate advice and assistance on hand? Do people find it easy to buy from you? Are all your staff properly trained, knowledgeable, helpful and available?

Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. Which marketing channels are effective and which ones are ineffective?

Do people correctly understand your marketing message? Does your marketing material accurately reflect your brand? Do you use the right advertising and promotion channels? Are you reaching the right people?

With the power of the Internet it is now very easy to conduct market research using one of the many online survey software sites that make conducting surveys and collating good market research intelligence quick, easy and extremely cost effective.

Before answering the all important question “who uses independent consultants?”, it is worth establishing the definition of a consultant. It is widely agreed that a consultant is a person who gives expert advice in a professional capacity.

In business-survival language, a person determined to become an independent consultant has to approach his search for clients with some kind of presumption that he will be able to establish good business relationships with enough people (especially business decision-makers) who will be prepared to consider hiring him (or her) for the expert advice he will be able to offer them and the style and manner with which he will offer it.

Then there are two other questions to be considered: who hires established independent consultants who have built-up a good reputations over several years and who already have a network of regular clients? And who might be likely to hire a new independent consultant?

Assuming established consultants have been newcomers to their market at some stage, the reality will be that they will have established a reputation and will have proven themselves to be very valuable to the clients they have served since they set-up their consulting business. They will be hired because of these attributes: the services they provide will have become reliable and well-suited to their client base; they will have developed an understanding of the businesses and have a mature professional relationship with the individuals they communicate with.

The independent consultant should provide them with easy access to his or her expertise when they need it. They do not need to employ an expert member of staff and find other work for the employee to fill up their day. The client will also not need to pay for holidays or sick-leave. Savings like these will matter especially to small businesses interested in lower operating costs wherever possible.

An independent consultant will want to be well respected in their niche. They should be known to reinforce their existing expertise by buying relevant trade publications and keeping up their memberships of the professional bodies that will help keep them up to date on professional matters, and even to spend money on important training courses. This also spares clients the need to include any of these in their own budgets for employees.

But perhaps the most fundamental reason why an established consultant will be consistently hired is that most old-fashioned ingredient: reliability. He will be going out of his way to make sure that his clients can feel confident he will always be there for them, ready to help them sort out their problems. Quite often they can’t be confident their own staff would be that diligent.

It has to be said that a newcomer looking to establish himself in any type of consultancy will have a tougher job these days than ever before. At the same time as there is more awareness among business managers of the valuable role of consulting support, more and more employees are being exposed to the work that the consultants are doing for their bosses and think to themselves, “I could do that.”

If these employees decide to leave the safety of their employers to become independent consultants, some might survive for a time on work passed to them by former managers who they shared a mutual respect with when they worked together. But nowadays it takes a determined person with an entrepreneurial spirit to find and set themselves up as an independent consultant where they will survive and prosper without any corporate cotton wool to protect them.

Market research is an essential part of the aspiring independent’s business planning. This period also provides an excellent opportunity to ask for meetings with business managers who do not yet use consultancy services – planting a seed that can be nurtured in the months ahead, so that a portfolio of prospects can be developed.

Who will actually hire him? It will depend on how good he can market himself and what expertise he has to offer. “Mr Company Director, we have met before and you have explained why your company doesn’t employ consultants. I have thought more about our conversation and it occurred to me …