small business? I am sure that you undoubtedly have the goal to build your
business growing bigger. The requirement of growing your business is to have greater profit and positive
cash flow. To get a positive cash flow, you must have a lot of sales. In order
to get a lot of sales, you have to understand the customer's needs. To
understand the needs of customers, you have to do some activities which is
called marketing intelligence activities.
Consequently, understanding the customer's needs is a very
important thing. Failure to understand and provide products which are needed by
customer will result customer disappointment. It makes your business get
failure.
Therefore, I will explain best practices in conducting marketing
intelligence activities. There are several best practice, they are:
– Creating an agenda to meet with customers.
To meet with customers, keep in the same time interval. For example, go meeting every three weeks. The goal is to find out the products and services they need now and in the future. You have to directly
interact with customers informally to learn how to
serve their needs well. In this case, you have to put yourself as a fellow
consumer. Why? usually talks will be open as a fellow consumer of a product, so
you can dig deeper into the information that you need.
– Evaluating data obtained from the activities above.
Perform analysis and make conclusions. From these results, you will get early detection of the customer desires alteration so that you can formulate a product / service innovation to
customers. From the above activities, you will also know the quality of your
product and service offers from customer side.
– Creating an agenda to meet with retailers and distributors of
your products.
In addition to meet with the consumer, meet with retailers and
distributors are very important because they are a chain of your products
towards the end consumers. In this meeting, you have to dig up information such
as the difficulties they face in marketing your products, their needs, and so
on. From this data you can determine an appropriate reward for their success to
market your product and proper act to inspire them.
– Creating an agenda to meet with competitors.
In this meeting, of course you have to put yourself as a consumer
product. List of questions you would ask, and ask through all available media
such as the telephone to customer service, officers in the front office, informal
meet and chat to fellow users of these products or even the manager. You can
also view your competitors’ public information in their website.
By doing the above marketing intelligence activities, the research
team can do the analysis intensely, so you can comprehend what steps should be
done to make innovative products and
services.
