Archive for the ‘Nick Hague’ Category

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BIG – The Inaugural Northern Forum

Join B2B International along with other key business to business figures based in the North for a Q&A session tonight.

The topics we will be discussing are:

1. How’s business – thoughts on the effect of the recession on business, whether things in the North are any different to the rest of the country, sectors and techniques (which ones are growing, which ones not)

2. What’s happening in b2b research – is b2b research different to consumer research, how is b2b research faring in the current climate compared to consumer research, which techniques are being used more

3. The future – what does the future hold for b2b research, in the North in particular

So why don’t you come along? Admission is free and drinks and nibbles will be served from 6pm in advance of a 6.30pm start.

Venue – Aspect In The City, 3 Canal Street, The Village, Manchester M1 3HE

See you there!

Posted in B2B News, Focus Groups, Market Research, Nick Hague |
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The Three Steps To Powerful Market Intelligence Part 2

STEP 2: CHOOSE YOUR BATTLEGROUND

Desk research can be very fruitful. However, it has its limits and it may only provide part of the information sought in a project. Where a mix of desk and primary research is used it therefore means that more expensive primary research techniques are used only where essential.

The next step is to clearly state what your key objective is for your business plan and the actions you will take as a result of gathering the market intelligence. In figure 1 below you can see the different types of information that can be gathered to deliver different types of market insight:

Figure 1 – Examples Of Market Intelligence Studies

Information can be gathered from speaking with many different respondents including:

– Interviews with customers – these are arguably the most important interviews of all as they are the lifeblood of your company. There is no more effective, reliable or valuable source of competitor intelligence than customers. Buyers have never been so willing to say exactly what they want, and how they want it, nor so willing to complain or take their business elsewhere if their requirements are not fulfilled. Customers often display a remarkable level of candor when talking about their suppliers, even those with whom they have a close and collaborative relationship. Issues as diverse as price, service, contractual details and technical information can be discussed, as well as information on the competition and future needs.

– Interviews with potential customers – these interviews are often very important to see what market perceptions are like ‘on the other side of the fence’. Potential customer interviews can be used to ascertain brand perceptions in the marketplace, why they choose the supplier they do and what could make them switch to another supplier. These interviews are also useful to ascertain how much demand there is for a product/service so market sizing estimations can be made

– Competitor interviews – Competitor interviews are a difficult, but valuable means of gaining competitor intelligence. Clearly senior management such as Marketing VPs are particularly useful sources of information, if they can be persuaded to talk. Gaining co-operation with such groups is one of the most difficult tasks carried out by research and intelligence agencies. If the agency can avoid revealing the sponsor of the survey (this is very rare), a financial incentive may gain co-operation. Far more commonly, the respondent is happy to take part in an ‘information exchange’. This usually results in the respondent receiving a synopsis of the overall market research findings in return for a face-to-face or telephone interview. It should be highlighted that a competitor interview does not necessarily need to target a high-level respondent in order to be useful. Mid-management employees such as Sales Managers can be an extremely useful source of information on products, innovations, overall strategies and a host of other topics. These employees are trained to talk and persuade and tend to be less circumspect than their colleagues in other departments.

– Interviews with suppliers, distributors and industry experts – In every industry it is worth mapping out the supply chain in order to assess who might be able to provide valuable market intelligence. Those at the centre of the supply-chain – intermediaries such as distributors, agents and importers – are often those that know most about the market, as they are in frequent contact with manufacturers and sellers alike. Most markets have a number of ‘experts’ of some kind who are independent and willing to share the information they possess. Industry associations and journalists at industry publications are typical examples.

The means of gathering market information varies according to the objectives of the intelligence – are you looking for insight and understanding or are you looking for robust quantification of market size and segments, brand shares or purchase frequencies? Also, the type of methodology depends on who your target audience is. For example, it is easier to use e-surveys when speaking to customers due to the already existing relationship you have with your customers and therefore the response rates of completion are greater but also the fact that you have at your disposal an accurate e-mail list. However, even from customers, the depth that is gathered through e-surveys is often not as detailed as an administered interview over the telephone or face to face. Focus groups (both online and face to face) are still used in abundance in business to business research to capture qualitative insight but other methodologies are also utilized that call on different skills such as observational skills in ethnographic research.

Clearly scoping out who you are looking to target very much dictates what methodology is chosen. However, there are few real methodological differences when it comes to obtaining market intelligence in different countries. When it comes to data collection, it is true that Asian markets, for both cultural and logistical reasons, often require more face-to-face data collection than Western markets. It is also true that market intelligence can be more difficult to obtain in developing countries. A key reason for this is that economic records tend to be less well-established. However, a market intelligence provider with well-educated employees and a multilingual capability should be capable of obtaining intelligence across different markets. Indeed, this skill is increasingly essential as the requirement for multi-country intelligence increases.

STEP 3: DON’T STOP DIGGING

One of the most important things to remember is that the gathering of market intelligence is delivering insight into a market at that specific moment in time. Many of the issues that affect a customers buying decision today will most likely evolve in the future. Also, in this global marketplace in which we all play change is constant and so not only will needs change but suppliers, prices and products will also change. Therefore, it is important that intelligence is acted upon when it is collected but that also a constant review (or feedback loop) is put in place so that a continuous review of market intelligence is at the centre of all business decisions made.

IN CONCLUSION…

For many companies, the first place to look for more sales and therefore growth is amongst existing customers. Current customers have already made the ultimate gesture of approval and paid money to buy your products. A bit more persuasion and they may buy more. Also, existing customers know and trust the company sufficiently well to do business. So much so, they may give serious consideration to buying a new product or service from the company. However, every company has a product that can travel. New markets wherever they are – new countries or new segments – carry risk and the gathering of accurate market intelligence is a must in making all these decisions.

Posted in Articles, Market Intelligence, Market Research, Nick Hague |
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The Three Steps To Powerful Market Intelligence Part 1

In this first part of Nick Hague’s latest dive in to a world of knowledge, he comes to the surface with three steps towards powerful market intelligence.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

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 formalise 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 customers. As Sun Tzu stated in the Art of War:

“So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles.”

Having intelligence on your enemy is a key to winning military battles and so it is in business. Having the competitive edge can be the difference between winning and losing. No matter what the size of your business, there are two key questions that unlock the door for any strategic plan independent of whether you are delivering a product, service or what industry sector you work in. The two important questions are:

• Where are we going?
• How are we going to get there?

The only option for businesses is to grow because staying still is not an option as others will pass you by, while decline is a sure movement towards extinction. Knowledge is power but only through the collection of accurate market intelligence will any business be able to move forward with confidence in the decisions they make.

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 – £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 knowing where to start. The purposes of this paper 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.

The best starting point for any project is to get key personnel from different backgrounds of the business to take part in a workshop type format (from board level down encompassing marketing, sales, operations, HR, technical, logistics – the whole business). This type of meeting can be very rewarding to assemble knowledge on customers, potential customers and competitors that otherwise would be held in individuals heads. Using this workshop format also helps clarify what external information has been collected previously and therefore obviates the need to spend money on collecting the information again (gone are the days of Market Research Managers within large corporates who used to know what primary research had been commissioned in the past). A huge amount of learnings can be gathered using workshops, especially if guided by a skilled external moderator.

Following this workshop output there will no doubt still be gaps in intelligence but there is no need to spend vast amounts of money on primary research. The expert desk researcher can quickly and inexpensively dig out data from a wide variety of sources to answer many of the questions that have already been asked. With the recent explosion of social networking, this too has resulted in a lot of information that can be quickly gathered inexpensively. This is not to say that it will definitely be correct, but information that is in the public domain has at least been subjected to the test of public scrutiny and it can be then challenged internally to help judge its accuracy.

Part 2 will be published Wednesday 29th September.

Posted in Articles, Market Intelligence, Nick Hague |
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Meet The Boss

From visionary entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 CEOs, MeetTheBoss TV interviews focus on the business challenges that matter today, clearly explaining the solutions, competitive strategies, people, and thinking around them.

All this week, B2B International is sponsoring the latest thoughts from business leaders around the world:

• Vinton Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google – the so-called “Father of the Internet”, discusses the power of Google, the impact the recession has had on the Internet and what the future holds for how we use the Web
• Ozwald Boateng, OBE, talks about the business of fashion and how to bring something unique to the world of business
• Eric Ryan, Founder, Method, explains how to create a solid corporate culture and discusses how culture drives leadership
• Anne Sweeney, Co-Chairman, Disney talks about being ‘The Most Powerful Woman In Television’ and how to sustain success in a cut-throat industry
• Don Knauss, CEO of Clorox, explains why effective communication is critical to business success
• Nick Hague, Director of B2B International, talks about the importance of market intelligence, how to build your market position and how to target your customers more effectively

Here are just 10 of the many key skills explained on Meet The Boss TV:

1. How leaders interpret situations and what they learn
2. How to develop the next generation of business leader
3. Proven, key strategies to improve innovative thinking
4. How to keep energy levels high in your sales team
5. How to deliver an effective marketing message
6. What companies want from today’s technology leaders
7. How to win hearts and minds during company-wide transformation
8. How to kill projects AND win internal battles
9. Proven, key strategies to make social media work for you
10. Personal management systems and what really gets results

Click on the following link – Meet The Boss TV to listen to this week’s business leaders

Posted in Leadership, Market Intelligence, Nick Hague, Television |
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Back to School

This week, Nick Hague looks at personal development and how focusing on your strengths, over your weaknesses, can lead to a greater return on investment.

We all know it is that time of year again when the dark nights are drawing in and travelling on the roads takes twice as long as it did during the month of August – yes, the summer break is over!

With my eldest son starting in year 1 at primary school in the last week, breakfast discussions with the family have changed in there tone somewhat with stories more likely to be about playground fun and new learnings in class rather than the unequivocal “what are we going to do today?”

Just this week my son was recalling about some of the activities from the day before at school and I asked him what his favourite subject was? “Maths” he said without hesitation. Now this answer didn’t surprise me one bit (although it might to many for a 5 year old to mention such a thing) since he has always been obsessed by numbers since a very early age.

“And what do you like doing least at school?” I followed up; “painting” he said. Again, this didn’t come as a surprise as when visiting his school on parents evening last year his paintings definitely stood out but not for artistic talent! My immediate reaction was ‘I must get my mum (an artist) to give him a few pointers about art’, but then I thought about this some more; shouldn’t I think more along the lines of building his strengths rather than rectifying his weaknesses ie ‘let’s keep a tab on his maths ability and how we can channel that more in the future?’

On reflection in my own personal life I can very much harmonise with this. I always struggled at Economics at A-level and so my parents spent much money on my tutoring. However, with all the time spent on improving my weakness it just made me a little bit better economist rather than focusing on my strengths and helping me shine in a more creative subject.

I think this is very typical of how we, as humans, think and act in life. Think about how we act in our daily business lives. When looking to better ourselves in our working environment; we are always looking to concentrate on improving our weaknesses to make ourselves a more rounded individual. However, my question to you is ‘why not ignore trying to improve our weaknesses and focus all our attention on building our strengths?’ – if Gordon Brown had not tried to remould himself as a smiling, more personable individual and concentrated on his strengths during the last election he may still be in power today.

By another way of example, I was watching football on TV this week and as time slipped away between Man United and Rangers I put myself in Sir Alex Ferguson’s shoes on how he would best enhance his team’s performance. Paul Scholes is one of the best players in the world when asked to deliver a 60 yard pass to precision but he cannot tackle to save his life. Would Sir Alex put Paul Scholes through his paces in training to improve his tackling so he can deploy him as a defensive midfielder, I don’t think so! Of course, he could practice some more on fixing his poorly timed tackles but as a result, he wouldn’t be concentrating on his strengths that could be used to unlock a tight defence. In other words, to fix weaknesses is not to lose but you definitely don’t win with that strategy!

As any inquisitive researcher would, I then went onto the internet to see if anything had been published to back my thoughts up? I came across an interesting study that asked people the following question:

Q. “Which do you think will help you be most successful in business?”
A. Build on strengths?
B. Fix your weaknesses?

Looking at some country findings from 2009 these are the interesting results:

• In the USA – 45% of people said build on strengths, 55% said fix weaknesses
• In Australia – 50% of people said build on strengths, 50% said fix weaknesses
• In the UK – 54% of people said build on strengths, 46% said fix weaknesses
• In China – 73% of people said build on strengths, 27% said fix weaknesses

From the above, is it any wonder that the new world order has shifted towards the East! I was curious to why this was so and so in speaking to some of my Chinese colleagues they rationalised that maybe it’s because there is over 1 billion people and if you want to stand out you need to win and not just compete.
So my argument to you in this week’s Thursday Night Insight is this – If you want to get a greater return on investment from either your staff or your customers, focus on what they/you do best. Then understand why that is so and then focusing more attention on these strengths will only act as a multiplier and deliver exponential growth and value to your organisation.

Therefore, the next time your boss questions you to find out the reasons why you have the level of customer churn you do, think before you act. Is it not best to speak with your loyal customers, ‘those that are likely to recommend your company and services to another colleague’ and find out what the reasons are these people are such ‘promoters’ to your company? I reason that this will deliver your organisaiton far more insight and result in greater change in the future than carrying out lapsed customer research.

Isn’t it time you went back to school and re-evaluated your way of thinking?

Posted in Articles, Market Research, Nick Hague, Thursday Night Insight |
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