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a corporate decision taker you undoubtedly have to deal with tough decisions.
You are most likely to rely on your experience and your gut feel in making
these decisions. This makes sense. After all you often don’t have the time, the
resources or the budget to look for market insights to support your critical
decisions. Market insights, at least reliable ones, might not even be
available.
But
how does this influence the outcome of your decision? Wouldn’t it make you feel
more comfortable to have at least some neutral proof points? Wouldn’t it make
it easier for you to communicate your decisions, or have them accepted, if they
were based on clear and undisputable facts?
While
this is not always achievable (especially the ‘undisputable’ part), in many
cases the most obvious and freely available sources are disregarded. With a
little additional effort, more sophisticated insights can be obtained that
enrich your decision processes in very profound ways. This book aims to give
you some concrete examples on how to do this.
For
instance, how often do you search your competitors on Youtube? You would be
surprised to see how many employees, both senior and junior, post critical
business information on this media. From loose interviews with sales managers
at trade fairs, to footages from keynote speeches at the yearly sales meetings,
you are likely to discover new insights from your competitor more quickly than
if you would wait for your competitor’s quarterly analyst calls.
Or
take another example. Let’s say you are a provider of medical devices, actively
looking to expand to new geographical markets. You would be surprised to find
out how much freely available information you can retrieve from the databases
of the OECD, the IMF, the Worldbank or the World Economic Forum, with which you
can prioritize your next expansion investments. Surely, these databases take a
little effort to learn how to use them efficiently, but once you do a valuable
stream of frequently updated and reliable information is at your service to
base a huge amount of critical business decisions on.
This
book aims to show you how.
Through
many examples and practical advice, we will show that building a market
intelligence practice should be neither time or budget consuming, nor should it
be complicated or cumbersome. At any rate, it should form a valuable
contribution to the majority of decisions you have to take.
The
first chapter of this book will demonstrate that many of the ideas –let us call
them preconceptions- we have about market intelligence are flawed. We will, in
other words, demystify certain myths some decision takers might still have with
regard of using market intelligence for their decisions.
In
the second chapter, we will use some of the conclusions of the first, and apply
them on specific business practices such as competitive analyses, long-range
planning, business environment assessments and account planning. The aim of
this chapter is to demonstrate that building market insights is well within the
capabilities of any decision taker that cares to invest some time in collecting
data and translate it into a usable, conclusion-driven form.
In
the third chapter we will briefly elaborate on setting up a market intelligence
practice within a business organization. I am well aware that this is a risky
task. There is by no means a ‘one size fits all’ answer to this type of
questions. Furthermore, dependent on your industry and company size you might
very well already have a performing
market intelligence team in place, so you might find the recommendations in
this chapter very futile and light. Or, on the other side of the spectrum, you
might be a startup with very little budget to spend on market intelligence, let
alone build a team for that matter, so the advice in this chapter might come to
you as an inaccessible dream. Each situation will require a different approach,
for sure. But my hope with this chapter is to at least provide an idea of how a
‘standard’ market intelligence practice might look like, say, in an average
sized company with limited resources to spend on market intelligence. We will
discuss the structure and responsibilities linked to such a practice, as well
as how the people performing it should be measured, in other words: which Key
Performance Indicators should your market intelligence resources aim for.
Many
of the insights I present in this book are inspired by my own professional
experience, more specifically in the ten years I served in a market and
business intelligence position for a global American technology company. In
these years I have initiated and led a huge and varied number of research
missions as a contribution to strategic decision making at EMEA level (Europe,
Middle East and Africa). These projects ranged from strategic planning,
competitive assessments, strategic account programs, balanced scorecards,
investment prioritization and go-to-market optimization, to name just a few.
The target audience for these projects was extremely diverse, ranging from
senior corporate decision takers to local business developers and sales teams.
It
is this huge and varied number of market intelligence missions that inspired me
to write this short book. Due to time or budget constraints I was very often
pressured to focus on the most relevant pieces of insight to support a
decision, or to make sure the information I spread was useful to as many
stakeholders as possible. On the other hand I needed to make sure the insights
I produced generated a tangible impact, which was particularly challenging due
to the very diverse nature of my stakeholder base. However, these challenges
inspired me to break loose from ‘traditional’ ways of obtaining market
insights, be creative with finding and utilizing market sources, and build
automated processes to turn data into decision improving intelligence.
The
fact that so many of the insights and ideas in this book originate from my own
professional experience, also forms one of its major shortcomings. After all,
the majority of my professional experience was situated in a
business-to-business environment. I can only hope the thoughts expressed in
this book will be of use to professionals in a business-to-consumer
environment, but I can offer no guarantee they will. Also, while I will provide
loads of examples of different industries in this book, the variety of business
functions I will use for these examples will be limited. After all, there are
some business functions I know nothing of, like logistics or supply chain
management, so I will not fake any knowledge in these fields. Rather, the
examples I will use will mostly align with the marketing, operations, finance
and corporate strategy aspect of businesses. Lastly, since the main source of
inspiration of this book is my actual professional experience, it has no
academic aspirations whatsoever. No academic work has been consulted while
writing it, and even in its structure and form this book will come nothing
close to an academic paper. But then, neither is it intended to be one.
Despite
these shortcomings I trust that this book can be of use to any professional
dealing with difficult decision making, be it as a source of inspiration, or
–if nothing else- as a showcase of how a little creativity and a little
time-investment can be sufficient to make decision taking more insight-driven,
and hence more successful.
A
final word to close this introduction: this book contains a fair deal of tables
and graphics. I do realize some readers might get a feeling of repulsion at the
thought of it. Indeed, some parts of this book will require some attention,
even some thinking from its readers, in order for them to comprehend the
precise meaning of the ideas and thoughts expressed in it. On the other hand,
this book is aimed at professionals that shape the strategy of their business,
which is hardly ever done without numbers and graphics, so I expect the
majority of the readers will already be comfortable using them. The aim of this
‘pictural’ approach is also to demonstrate how visuals can truly help decision
taking, much more than numbers, and hence can contribute tremendously to better
decision making. I guess no decision taker will be reluctant to this prospect.
Frederic De
Meyer
October
2013
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