When I was 6 years old, each week I would go and see my grandparents. They lived about 15 minutes from my house and each week I eagerly anticipated my score on the drive there, wandering if I had got all of the answers right. You see during the week I would receive a letter, it had 20 questions on it relating to football, questions like “Who won the Premier League’s Manager of the month award in January 1994?” or there would be an image of Ian Wright and a question “How much did Arsenal pay for him back in 1991?”. I then had to go and research the answers by looking through all of the books, annuals and magazines that my granddad had given to me to find the answers.
Once all the questions were answered I would mail the letter back to him on Friday, making sure that he had enough time to mark it before my arrival on Saturday morning. If I managed to get all 20 correct then I won what at the time seemed greater than any trophy, a chocolate éclair and a can of pop! I didn’t realise it at the time but it was teaching me not just about relatively unimportant facts on football, it was teaching me the skill of research, of fact finding.
The skill of good research is crucial to any business and it doesn’t matter how big you are. Good research is priceless but doesn’t need to cost millions of pounds. Take Toyota for example, last year their spending on research and development was, wait for it...$9.9.....Billion! Now you’re sat their reading this thinking “hmmmm, I probably can’t quite stretched to that right now” well don’t worry you won’t have to spend to get results.
If you’re a small or medium sized business then you have something the big dogs don’t. You have the ability to communicate directly with your customers on a personal level via emails and calls. You have the ability to know everything about your business and your customers. Any information you have about your business whether it’s a bad review or website statistics will help you.
Gather Data
Gather data on your business, your entire business, products, customers, external and internal factors that affect your business, past and present trends and then identify your strengths and weaknesses. This will give you a clear view of the direction your business is taking allowing you to act and begin to steer it in the direction you want.
Test Everything
Test everything you do from your phone call scripts to your email subject lines and landing pages. If you test, test and test some more you’ll begin to develop efficient successful strategies that work every time. Using an email manager that allows you to schedule and automate response emails will give you the time to create multiple campaigns to see which performs best. Creating scheduled and prompted follow ups from this will help you discover more about how each campaign is being received with your customers and help build relationships with customers and leads making a good CRM (customer relationship manager) crucial.
Take Action
Take action on the information you have. Don’t be lazy and sit there with information that is clearly showing issues with your business and ignore it hoping it will pass, it won’t! Finding problems is much more beneficial than only looking at glowing reviews and good sales figures. If you are a small to medium sized business you are far more likely to be able to get valuable information from your customers on your products and services because you’ve built a relationship they will be open and honest. Take suggestions on board and implement changes to benefit not just your customer but your business.
Repeat
Repeat the process. If you can keep engaged in constant research by making it part of your daily duties then you will find that you quickly become more in tune with your business, customers and market. You will start to notice patterns, habits, trends and gaps that you can exploit. No matter what it is you’re doing whether it’s changing images on your twitter page or deciding on a good pricing strategy for a new products it doesn’t matter, get online, get reading and get gathering that data. The more knowledge you have the better. It sounds obvious but so many small companies simply neglect research.
It’s all about knowing more than your competition. If your goal is to reach a certain number of customers, sales or move into new markets then research will not only help you get there but it will ensure that you are prepared for the next stage once you achieve your goal.
It doesn’t matter how hard you work, practice doesn’t always make perfect, but it certainly makes permanent. So research and learn the best methods for everything you do before you do it. Visualise your goal and think “What do I need to know?” and if you do this then you’ll be eating éclairs and sipping pop for a long time!