(2.4) Myth 4: You need external agencies to collect Market Intelligence data

Of course, you already realize that this myth is inaccurate. After all, you are likely to collect a huge amount of information by yourself already, through your CRM or Business Intelligence systems, through your contacts on trade shows and conferences, or through your yearly customer satisfaction surveys.

But what about information of a different nature? Where do you find information about the near-term prospects of the retail market in your home country? About the level of digitalization in the education system in each European country? About the investment plans in alternative energy worldwide? The penetration of mobile phones with the youth in Africa? Surely, if this type of information is related to the market you are serving, you would be willing to pay for it, wouldn’t you?

You shouldn’t. At least not after checking the vast amount of freely available –and reliable!- sources at your disposal. A short overview:

1. Supranational organizations

Admittedly, you will have to spend a considerable amount of time getting acquainted with the databases of supranational institutions before you can use them efficiently. But once you do, you will find a wealth of information on virtually any topic, in virtually every industry.

Take the database of the European Commission, Eurostat, as an example. This database contains valuable statistics on topics like transport, energy, health, sustainability investments, to name just a few. It also contains a number of regularly updated indexes that might prove invaluable to assess your market conditions, like the monthly, survey based Economic Sentiment Indicator, broken down into industry, services, construction, retail and consumers. If you are serving one of these markets you might find out that this Indicator provides a fairly accurate early warning signal for where your own business is heading, as we will explain in chapter 2.

While you are at it, you might as well check the databases of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Worldbank, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), where loads of information are available at no cost at all.

2. Consultants

Consultancy companies, big and small, also provide a wealth of information through industry specific reports. Of course, these reports are meant to showcase their expertise in these markets, and most of the time you will have to leave your contact details behind before accessing these reports. But these reports are well worth the efforts, and would have cost you a couple of thousand dollars if you would have them performed for you.

The best known source for these type of reports is consultancy McKinsey, through its McKinsey Quarterly website, but also through its McKinsey Global Institute. The other big consultancies like Accenture, PWC, Deloitte, Arthur D Little etc also provide valuable industry insights. Not to mention the vast amount of smaller, specialized consultancies.

3. Professional federations

Each industry is likely to have a professional federation of some kind, itself a member of a larger international federation. These federations gather loads of information about your industry, even if they not always share all of it through official communications. You should not hesitate to check the information available (also with industry federations outside of your home country), or try to obtain specific information you need from the employees of these federations.

4. Social media

This will sound like the most obvious statement in history: in recent years social media became an invaluable source of information about markets and competitors. But do you use it to its full potential? Facebook and Twitter are quite obvious sources, and I mentioned earlier about the possibilities to use Youtube or LinkedIn as a competitive information source. But you could use these sources –especially LinkedIn- as a mean to detect market trends, sizes and shifts as well, through its discussion forums for instance. Some bright people even use LinkedIn as a kind of qualitative (but non commercial) survey tool !

5. Internal sources

Of course, you retrieve a lot of business information from your CRM or Business Intelligence tools already. However, these will mostly be internally-driven, and very data-focused. But how do you collect the anecdotal information, the insights your employees (all of them) obtain through discussions with external contacts and that might be of tremendous value to your market insights efforts? Organizing some form of bottom-up market discussions, as we will advocate in the second chapter, might prove to be more accurate than any external view you would obtain, provided that you find way to collect them structurally in order to scale them to a level where valuable insights emerge.

What these short examples attempt to demonstrate is that you don’t necessarily have to invest any money to collect and digest a sufficient amount of relevant market data to build your insights on. However, dependent on the amount of information you will be using, you might go through a steep learning curve in order to use these sources efficiently, or you  might need some internal resources to collect the information and translate it into a usable format. We will get back to this point in the third chapter.