Posts Tagged ‘market research’

How to Use Cold Calling to Form Business Partnerships that Work

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Cold calling strikes fear in the hearts of small business owners, new and old alike.  But even if you’ve found other ways to generate sales, mastering the art of cold calling can help your business to succeed.  Here are some ways to use cold calling you might not have thought of:

Market Research 

Most people equate cold calling with cold suppers from those bothersome telemarketers that interrupt supper every night, but in actuality, cold calling can be used in a very positive way to succeed in business by getting a lot of research done. 

You can get the answer to any number of questions that might come up simply by calling local businesses that would know the answer.  You may not always get a positive response as people everywhere are busy, but more often than not you do.  And by making more calls or independent research based on those answers, you can fill in the blanks and learn more than you can imagine. 

Strategic Alliances

It’s more important that ever to have strategic partnerships contributing to your business success.  Sure, networking events and meet up groups are a great way to form these alliances, but you are limited to those that attend the event and the people they will ultimately introduce you to.  

Often you have a specific business or person in mind that you’d really like to meet, but so far have not had the opportunity.  While stalking them out is an option, a more direct approach may be to give them a call on the phone.  You can begin with general market research questions, and if you sense a positive reaction move into brainstorming ways your company can help theirs (and vice versa). 

In today’s competitive environment, successful small business owners need to stay open to any technique that will help them understand their industry better and form the partnerships that will make a difference to their bottom line.  One cost effective way to achieve those objectives is to reach out through cold calling.  

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it easy to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

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Track Conversion Rates and Meet Your Sales Goals

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

How many leads do you need to make the amount of money you want to have in a year? While this may seem like an easy question, not a lot of people can come up with the number.

There are two things to consider regarding this question.  First, there are your expenses.  You should make sure to have an online accounting program advanced enough to help you analyze your costs and how they relate to your profitability. 

The second factor is your ability to convert leads to sales (conversion rate).  If you are successful at lead conversion, you will see a significant improvement to your bottom line. 

Let’s take a look at the process more closely:

The first thing you will do is to work out what sales level you want to achieve each month. For our purposes, let’s use $100,000 as your monthly sales goal.

Now you need to figure out your conversion rate. In order to keep this example easy, suppose that all of your leads come from your website. 

Suppose you convert 2 and a half out of 1000 visitors into paying customers. You have a .25% conversion rate.

Here is a formula to calculate the number of visitors your would need to meet your monthly sales goals.  To keep it easy, suppose that each conversion will ultimately result in a sale.

(Desired Sales / Sale Price / Conversion Rate) X 100

The formula would look like this, if you want to achieve $100,000 a month in sales, you have a conversion rate of .25% and your average sales price is $20:

($100,000 / $20 / .25) X 100 = 2,000,000 visitors needed per month to achieve your sales goal.

Wow!  That is a lot of visitation!  Not to worry, there are things that can be adjusted.  The average price can increase. Your can improve your conversion rate or you can multiply visitors.

For most people, the best place to start is conversion rate. If you test a bit, it’s actually quite easy to bring a .25% conversion rate into the 1.5% or even 2% range.

Let’s look at the difference that would make using the formula:

($100,000 / $20 / 2) X 100 = 250,000 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

That’s a nice change! 

You can improve things even more by raising your average sale to $47:

($100,000 / $47 / 2) X 100 = 106,383 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal. 

Today, it’s all about working smarter, not harder.  Hopefully these examples drive home the importance of planning the leads you will need to reach your sales goals, and testing the factors you can change to become more efficient. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your conversion rates.

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How to Benefit From Market Research

Monday, July 20th, 2009

If you conduct effective market research what are the things you can learn?

Know your customers – Market research will help you better understand your customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to fine tune your product or service towards the target market.

Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? Does your product or service appeal to specific age group? Who are your potential customers and where do they live?

Know your competition – Market Research will help you measure your service compared to others. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your organization and are you improving in the right areas?

Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Are your products and services value for money? How do your organization’s products and services compare to those of your competitors? If you have a product can you, do you, should you deliver directly to your customer?

Ease of doing business – Do your customers find it easy to deal with you and when they visit your store and/or website do they find what they want? Is there enough good advice and assistance on hand? Do you make it easy for your customers to buy? Are all your employees properly trained, knowledgeable, helpful and available?

Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. What are the marketing channels that are available to you, which ones should you concentrate on and which, if any, should you consider dropping?

Is your marketing message understood? Does your marketing properly embody your brand? Do you advertise and promote using the right channels? Are you reaching your target audience?

With the power of the Internet it is now very easy to conduct market research using one of the many online survey software sites that make conducting surveys and collating good market research intelligence quick, easy and extremely cost effective.

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Understanding Why Market Research is Important

Monday, July 20th, 2009

For any business that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted market research is essential. Business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-

 

  • Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By consulting with the customer you not only show them that you care you also take the guesswork out of customer services.
  • Market research helps you identify opportunities – If a new service is planned and you want to know the attitudes people have then market research can help, not only by evaluating the potential for the new idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to be fine tuned.
  • Market research will minimise risk – Market research can help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the development of a product is highly focused towards demand.
  • Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – By establishing a benchmark you then have a useful reference to allow you to measure your progress – If you do not measure you will not be able to properly gauge how well your business is performing. Preliminary research may be able to identify problems in the service you intend to offer or in your product, regular market research will show if progress is being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.

Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few organizations invest sufficient resources to enable them to gather good intelligence that will help them improve their business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.

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20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

How to create a survey using Survey Galaxy

Writing surveys is easy; or is it? The truth is that creating surveys is easy but creating effective surveys is more difficult. The following are twenty tips that if followed will help you with your survey questionnaire design and help you write effective surveys.

1. What is the purpose of the survey?

There are many reasons for conducting surveys and questionnaires. By correctly phrasing the questions and structuring the answers surveys can be used in many ways and for a variety of reasons. When designing a survey don’t lose sight of its purpose.

2. Give the survey a good title

The survey title represents an opportunity to instantly summarise a survey’s objective and encourage respondents to participate. Respondents need to invest time in completing the survey so encourage them that the investment they make will be worthwhile.

3. Keep the length of the survey as short as possible

Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Limit asking questions that will provide you with ‘nice to know’ information and instead concentrate on the ‘need to know’ questions.

4. Use plain English, avoid jargon and acronyms, maintain consistency and don’t ask questions that may result in ambiguous answers

Be careful when wording the question. If a question can be interpreted in more ways than one then there is a risk that any analysis of the survey results will be worthless or at the very least misleading.

5. Avoid having long questions

Use concise sentences wherever possible. Long questions can cause a respondent discomfort and lead to them abandoning the survey.

6. Ask only one question at a time

Avoid confusing the respondent with a question like ‘Do you like tennis and football?’

7. Avoid influencing the answer

Avoid loading the question. ‘Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell tobacco to children be prosecuted?’ is unlikely to have any value.

8. Make sure that the selected answer format allows the respondent to answer the question being asked

Ensure that the respondent is able to answer how they really feel or they may be less inclined to complete the survey. As a last resort consider the benefit of including a “No comment”, “Don’t know” or similar response option.

9. When you are compiling your survey consider how you will analyse the results once the survey has been published

If a question is asked that allows a free text open ended response appreciate that such information is likely to be difficult to score and/or summarised. Consider how answers can be grouped. For example “Indicate your length of service?” – ‘less than 1 year’, ‘between 1 and 6 years’ and ‘more than 6′.

10. Try and ensure that the questionnaire flows

Group questions into clear categories as this will make it easier for the participants completing the survey.

11. Target your respondents

Sometimes you will want to target a specific group, in others a cross section. If you can’t control who responds to your survey consider including questions/answers that will allow you to filter out respondents who don’t fit your target profile.

12. Provide a channel for your respondents to expand on their answers or make comments

Allowing the respondent to make additional comments will increase their satisfaction level and will also give valuable feedback on the specific questions and/or the survey as a whole. Remember that for large sample collections it may be difficult to analyze free text open ended responses.

13. If the survey you are conducting is to be confidential ensure that your pledge is upheld

If you have assured the respondents that the survey is confidential ensure that the individual data is not to be shared with anyone and the information is not going to be used for any other purpose. Confidentiality must be maintained and any contact information deleted after the survey is complete.

14. Weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of allowing respondents to be anonymous or identifiable

If your respondents are to be anonymous then you will be unable to follow up specific complaints or match “pre” or “post” surveys. There are advantages to allowing people to remain anonymous for example it would allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.

15. Carefully consider what the best response format will be

Maintaining a consistency in the format used for responses is good practice. Keep in mind that when analyzing the data radio buttons are easier to analyze than check boxes that offer the respondent multiple responses. Do not use a check box format if a radio response format would do.

16. Give the respondent an idea of how much time the survey will take

Respondent drop out can increase if the survey appears to be a stream of never ending questions. It is good practice to give an indication as to how long the survey is likely to take so the respondents can choose the best time to complete the survey.

17. Inform respondents of the survey end date

Encourage your invited respondents to complete the survey as soon as possible but advise the respondents of the survey’s end date so that they have the opportunity to schedule the necessary time.

18. Pilot the survey

Before publishing a live survey publish the survey as a trial to check for questions that are ambiguous or confusing and to ensure that the survey is aesthetically pleasing.

19. Before publishing the survey proof read the survey carefully

Check and check again that the survey is grammatically correct and makes sense. If practical get a colleague to check the survey before you publish, if no one else is available then take a break before checking again.

20. Remember to thank the respondent

Respondents invest their time when completing surveys and should therefore be thanked at the end of completing the survey or in a follow up letter. You may even want to consider incentives such as a prize draw or reward.

To get started there are numerous survey software websites to choose from.

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Market Research Will Help Make a Good Company Better

Monday, July 13th, 2009

If you conduct effective market research what are the things you can learn?

Know your customers – Market research will help you better understand your customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to target your marketing and fine tune your product or service.

Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? What age group does your product or service appeal to? Do you know who your potential customers are and where they live?

Know your competition – Market Research will help you measure your service compared to others. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your business and are you improving in the areas that customers demand?

Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Does your business represent value for money? How do your products and services compare to those of your competitors? Can you, do you, should you deliver directly to your customer?

Ease of doing business – Do your customers find it easy to deal with you and when they visit your store and/or website do they find what they want? Is there sufficient advice and assistance on hand be it in the form of notices, leaflets or human assistance? Do you make it easy for your customers to buy? Are all your employees properly trained, knowledgeable, helpful and available?

Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. Which of the marketing channels that are available to you are effective and which ones are proving ineffective?

Is the marketing message understood? Does your marketing properly represent your brand? Do you advertise through the right channels? Are you reaching the right people?

With the power of the Internet it is now very easy to conduct market research using one of the many online survey software sites that make conducting surveys and collating good market research intelligence quick, easy and extremely cost effective.

Related Blogs

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Market Research – Why Do it?

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

For any organization that wants to offer products or services that are highly focused and well targeted market research is important. Business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-

 

  • Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By asking you take the guesswork out of customer services and demonstrate to the customer that you care.
  • Market research helps you identify opportunities – If you are planning to launch a new product and want to know how people will react then market research will help, not only in predicting how well the product will be received, but also by testing the marketing message to see if that needs to be adjusted.
  • Market research will minimise risk – Market research can help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the development of a product is highly focused towards demand.
  • Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – By establishing a benchmark you then have a useful reference to allow you to measure your progress – If you do not measure you will not be able to properly gauge how well your business is performing. Early research can identify where improvements need to be made to a new service or where there are flaws in a product, by conducting regular market research it will identify if improvements are being made and, if positive, will in turn help motivate a development team.

Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few organizations invest sufficient resources to enable them to gather good intelligence that will help them improve their business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.

Related Blogs

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Writing Effective Surveys Top Tips

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

How to create a survey using Survey Galaxy

Writing surveys is considered easy; but is it? The reality is that writing surveys is easy but writing effective surveys is more difficult. The following twenty tips will help you with your survey questionnaire design.

1. What is the purpose of the survey?

Surveys are conducted for many reasons. By correctly phrasing the questions and structuring the answers surveys can be used in many ways and for a variety of reasons. When designing a survey don’t lose sight of its purpose.

2. Title the survey

The survey title is a golden opportunity to instantly summarise a survey’s objective and encourage respondents to participate. Respondents are going to invest time in completing the survey so make them feel that their investment is worthwhile.

3. Keep the length of the survey as short as possible

Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Limit asking questions that will provide you with ‘nice to know’ information and instead concentrate on the ‘need to know’ questions.

4. Use plain English, maintain consistency, avoid jargon and acronyms and don’t ask questions that may result in ambiguous answers

Word the question carefully. If a question can be interpreted in more ways than one then there is a risk that any analysis of the survey results will be meaningless or at the very least misleading.

5. Avoid having long questions

Use concise sentences wherever possible. Long questions can lead to a higher level of incidents where respondents abandon a survey.

6. Ask only one question at a time

Avoid confusing the respondent with a question like ‘Do you like football and athletics?’

7. Do not influence the answer

Do not load the question. ‘Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell alcohol to minors be prosecuted?’ is unlikely to have any value.

8. Ensure that the chosen answer format allows the respondent to answer the question being asked

Allow the respondent to answer how they really feel or they may be less inclined to complete the survey. As a last resort consider the benefit of including a “Don’t know”, “Can’t say” or similar response option.

9. While compiling your survey consider how you will analyse the results once the survey has been published

When asking questions that allow for a free text open ended response, such as when asking the respondent for their comments, appreciate that such information is likely to be difficult to score and/or summarised. Consider how the answers could be grouped. For example “How long have you worked here?” – ‘less than 3 year’, ‘between 3 and 8 years’ and ‘more than 8′.

10. Try and ensure that the questionnaire flows

Group questions into clear categories as this will make it easier for the participants completing the survey.

11. Target your respondents

Sometimes you will want to target a specific group, in others a cross section. If you can’t easily control the respondents consider including questions/answers that will allow you to filter out respondents that don’t match your target profile.

12. Allow the respondent to expand on their answer or make comments

Allowing the respondent to make additional comments will increase their satisfaction level and will also give valuable feedback on the specific questions and/or the survey as a whole. Remember that for large sample collections that free text open ended responses may be difficult to analyse.

13. If you are conducting a confidential survey ensure that your pledge for confidentiality is upheld

If you have guaranteed the respondents that the survey is confidential ensure that the individual data is not to be shared with anyone and the information is not going to be used for any other purpose. Confidentiality must be maintained at all times and any contact information destroyed after the survey is complete.

14. Weigh up the benefits and disadvantages of allowing respondents to be anonymous or identifiable

If your respondents are to be anonymous then you will be unable to follow up specific complaints or match “pre” or “post” surveys. Allowing people to remain anonymous will however allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.

15. Consideration carefully the best response format

Being consistent with the format used for responses is good practice. When creating your survey keep in mind that when analyzing the data radio buttons are easier to analyze than check boxes that offer the respondent multiple responses. Do not use a check box if a radio response would do.

16. Give the respondent an idea of how much time the survey will take

Respondent drop out can increase if the survey appears to be a stream of never ending questions. It is a good idea to give an indication as to how long the survey is likely to take so the respondents can choose the best time to complete the survey.

17. Advise the respondents of the survey end date

Encourage your invited respondents to complete the survey as soon as possible but advise the respondents of the survey’s end date so that they have the opportunity to schedule the necessary time.

18. Trial the survey

Before publishing a live survey publish a pilot survey to check for questions that are ambiguous or confusing and to confirm that the survey is aesthetically pleasing.

19. Before publishing the survey proof read the survey carefully

Check more than once that the survey is grammatically correct and makes sense. If possible ask a colleague to check the survey before you publish, if you are unable to do this then take a break before checking again.

20. Remember to thank the respondent

Respondents invest their time when completing surveys and should therefore be thanked at the end of completing the survey or in a follow up letter. You may even want to consider an incentive such as a reward of some sort.

Getting started is easy and there are many survey software websites to choose from.

Related Blogs

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