Market Research: A Key Competitive Advantage

Author Dave Kohl, provides executives, managers, and entrepreneurs with effective ways to help secure more clients or customers and grow your business through market research. Kohl, once selected as "Business Person of the Year" by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, brings his 30+ years of sales, marketing, advertising, and teaching experience to this fascinating book. He has averaged more than $1,000,000 per year in advertising sales since 2005, crediting the exact methods he profiles for increasing his income. He shares his secrets on the importance of "keeping track of everything" and knowing how to use it. "The better you are at monitoring your competition, the more you learn about your business", says Kohl. "Knowing when you have a better price or your biggest competitor has made an error while having a ready database of potential customers is huge for increasing business!" It features numerous ways to secure information about your competitors, in any industry, which you can quickly use to your advantage. Readers also learn how to better perform their own tracking of sales, inventory, and trends without spending anything on software or personnel. Among Dave's examples is a "follow up" survey conducted within the neighborhood of a new restaurant. The results provided solid feedback, positive and negative, from people who had recently visited, along with reasons why others in the area had not yet gone to try it. However, Kohl focuses on how it was an established competitor which actually sponsored the survey and gained a wealth of information the new place did not have. Other examples include ways to research similar businesses to your in far away cities and how to find their strong points, while examining your direct competitors to find their weaknesses. More importantly, learn how to maintain this data for months and years to come.