Fact finding

It is a fact that pursuing unqualified business is one of the most common reasons companies fail to reach their revenue targets

Introduction to Fact find your way to success

Fact finding is also known as Intelligence Gathering and Market/Marketing Research. But, and this tends to be largely ignored, it also presents a fabulous alternative approach for those who hate telephone cold calling. We'll come on to that in a moment, but for now let's just put the whole general activity into context.

It's important to make a couple of distinctions between the fact finding that you are likely to undertake and the role of Market Research companies right from the off:

• Market/Marketing Research is a vast subject and companies that specialise in providing it as an independent service in all of its many forms employ people who spend years training to provide that service in a professional way. Therefore much of the work they do is beyond the capabilities of most small businesses.
  
  However, if you take a sensible and realistic approach to what you want to find out, there's a lot you can do yourself provided you don't do it under the guise of independent Market Research
• There are strict rules that govern Market Research companies and prohibit them giving their clients information or results that are linked to respondent names without the full consent of the respondent (in some countries, not even then). As market researchers they have a responsibility to protect respondents and preserve their anonymity.
  
  You are not bound by those rules. You will be talking directly to your market and your activities will be squarely and openly focused on fact finding in order to facilitate your sales efforts
• You cannot apply the ace card of independence to your fact finding activities so it is imperative that you are straightforward and honest with your interviewees right from the outset to encourage them to open up.
  
  However, you do understand your business better than you could expect any research company to, so you could pick up on valuable nuances that they might well miss.
  
  You just need to learn and follow a few simple rules and you can get the information you need

Many companies regard research as an expense which should only be indulged when times are good or, even worse, use it in a tactical way to prove a point. What a waste! Take a look at the definition of research by the Chartered Institute of Marketing:

"The means used by those who provide goods and services to keep themselves in touch with the needs and wants of those who buy and use those goods and services... is basically a fact finding activity and services management by decreasing the field of uncertainty within which often vital business decisions are taken."

Desk research

In Market Research terminology this is the systematic examination of all available secondary data (information that is already published and available) in the context of a particular marketing research problem.

What do you know about your potential prospects?

You can use

• Trade journals
• Trade bodies
• Exhibitors at specific events you have attended
• Financial and business pages in the national press
• And what about the Internet? Never before has so much information been available so easily and immediately

Qualitative research

In pukka Market Research speak this involves the use of unstructured exploratory techniques such as

• Focus group discussions
• Face-to-face depth interviews
• Immersion in customer environment

that are based on small samples in order to understand a problem further.

• Easily
• Cost- and time-effectively
• And with often incredibly impressive and useful results

and that is:

Exploratory telephone research

a. Free-form telephone research

If you offer a product or service which, let's say for simplicity, regardless of the size of the prospect company

• Requires substantial investment (from the prospect's point of view)
  
  and/or
• Would have a substantial impact on the company, or the way certain tasks are currently performed and results achieved, if purchased

And you want to evaluate an unexplored or previously failed target market that you believe to be of limited size, or explore new ways of doing business in an existing market, this is a relatively quick and cost effective way of doing so.

Be absolutely straightforward with your interviewees, approach the project in a problem-solving frame of mind rather than as a sales person, ask intelligent questions and listen to the answers. You will soon start to

• Build a picture of how the buying process for your solution works or would work in this selected market
• Discover Decision Critical Factors, drivers and constraints
• Discover Decision Critical Factors, drivers and constraints
• Uncover hidden influences/influencers
• And establish what opportunities exist - quietly and without alerting any potential competitors

You will be striving for in-depth, meaningful conversations with the participants, leading to meetings with those who express an interest. All it costs is your time, some thought and common sense and your telephone bill.

If you decide to undertake this kind of research, the nature of your plan, the number of hours, timing of activities, etc. will depend on many elements - whether you have a dedicated sales person or team, or are doing it yourself not least. But plan a routine that can be accommodated within the current workload and have a realistic date by which you aim to have a good, solid overview of your offering's strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities and threats in this new market.

b. Structured telephone research

is more applicable to larger surveys; often lower unit value (closer to the commodity end of the scale) but repeat or ongoing business. You can use this type of research to test assumptions about a market in which you are already active - in a more structured way, relatively quickly and obtain reasonably robust results.

A classic use for this type of research is Customer Satisfaction Surveys. If you provide any kind of service that

• Has a wide appeal
• Fulfils an essential need and
• Is in a very competitive market

You should be incorporating this type of research into your sales and marketing activities. You ask both your customers and prospects the same questions, adapting the phraseology to suit each target market

• Your customers: If you offer a good service you should get some nice testimonials from your own customers and, on the converse side, if you get any negative feedback from your customers you're in a prime position to stop the rot, put whatever's wrong right and salvage the situation before that relationship is irrevocably damaged
• Your competitors' customers (a.k.a. your prospects): The purpose here is to get them thinking about just how satisfied they are with their current supplier and explore any openings to introduce your service. Many will, at the very least, be happy for you to continue contact by post or email and you may uncover a few that are extremely unhappy with their current service provider and are prepared to meet with you sooner rather than later

A word of warning
These surveys can be seen as a bit of an interruption, so you keep them as short as is possible whilst covering all the points you need answers to.

There's a fair amount of work involved in the planning and preparation as well as the execution of this kind of research and it should have set deadlines for completion. So think hard about it before you commit to it - you probably only want to go down this route if you're planning on conducting at least 50 interviews per research project (100 is even better) or multiples of those numbers. But then you'd have some pretty robust and useful information.

Fact find your way to success - the amazing soft sell approach for those who hate selling...

Fact Find Your Way To Success is a part of our full course "Selling For Business", course but we have also made it available as a separate course. Please go to our Products page for more information.