(to avoid any confusion: the experience I share with you in this article is one of a Market Intelligence Manager in a multinational selling Network Technology products, so this article has no commercial purposes whatsoever)
I recently had the opportunity to do a presentation for the Chambers of Commerce of Western Flanders. Given the audience –international Sales Directors of Small and Medium businesses of the West Flanders region- I didn’t give the classical speech showing all the flashy and sophisticated thing we do in the Market Intelligence department at Cisco. With all respect, I doubt that any of the persons in the room had any budget for Market Intelligence activities at all, let alone for Marketing.
So I had to give my message a special twist in order to be relevant to them, and I ended up giving 2 concrete examples of strategic research anyone can perform without any budget and without too much time investment. As a matter of fact, I came to the conclusion that my team has developed quite a bit of this type of costless intelligence over the recent year.
Obviously, our ’intelligence’ budget has been reduced during the crisis (as with many of yours, I suppose), but more importantly it is the fact that my company is getting into so many new and untapped areas, for which virtually no relevant data or market analysis exists, that made us think about new, unprecedented ways of looking at our market potential.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing revolutionary about it, it’s just a matter of using the information that you already have, or can obtain for free, and combining it in order to generate meaningful conclusions.
An example:
A year ago a newly appointed manager of a new division in Cisco –I won’t mention which one for the sake of making this case relevant to more people- asked me in which European countries to invest first in order to maximize his success. The challenge lies in the fact that he had to cover the entire EMEA region with just 5 people. As you will understand, prioritizing the workload on the most promising countries became quite crucial to him.
With half a day of work, and no budget at all, we were able to give him following conclusion:
- X-axis: composite indicator of the ‘business environment’ in European countries (is there room for customers to invest ?);
- Y-axis: composite indicator of how countries have adopted a selection of previously launched new technologies;
- Bubble size: composite indicator of how important the key target industries for this technology are in the given countries.
Again, all these indicators were built on readily available sources (internal Finance; WEF reports; Eurostat reports; professional associations). Admittedly, it sometimes takes experienced knowledge dealing with those databases, but the major point here is that they are freely accessible.
This view can easily translate into which ‘go-to-market’ strategy to use in order to approach the European countries:
The conclusion was clear, the research didn’t cost us a dime, and the time-investment was altogether quite limited… We even standardized this type of analysis into a ‘gap analysis’ which we consistently perform on each of our products now.
Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not saying external analyst reports or primary surveys are obsolete. My key message here is: if you get to the core questions you need an answer to, you might find out that you don’t need primary surveys or external analysts. Nor budget…
There were other key points that I made in this speech –see hereunder.
Don’t forget this advice was given to an audience of SME’s, they would look completely different if I had to do a speech for larger companies.
Obviously I’m happy to start a conversations with you on these…
