B2B Marketing Consulting Agency Blog

Custom Market Research vs. Analyst Reports

- April 29, 2023 5:49 am

Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Frost & Sullivan – all of these analyst firms do good work, giving us a good handle on macro trends in the market.

However, what happens when you need to size the market, your brand share, and growth for, say, the market opportunity for selling handheld induction heating tools to repair farming equipment? Or how many production document scanners sold through enterprise content management (ECM) resellers? Or how many miles of trenchless sewer rehabilitation technology have been used in the last 10 years? No analyst report on the planet contains this information.

How Analyst Firms Obtain Data

Analyst firms rarely size the market by interviewing resellers, distributors and other channel partners but instead interview many of the same vendors to whom they sell their marketing reports, which risks being a conflict of interest. If you rely only on manufacturing data, you will have little understanding of how these products go to market. And how do we know this data is accurate, especially for privately held firms if we don’t have the channel data to model up and compare with what the manufacturers report? Either the analyst has to take an educated guess or pray that someone within the firm will share this information.

Example Custom B2B Market Research

Here are some other studies we’ve done for clients:

  • Market opportunity for handheld induction heating tools in agriculture, trucking and marine markets
  • How a construction document management vendor’s competitor was “stealing” their business and how to turn the tables on them
  • Market sizing for plug-on transmitters, thermal barcode printers, pro audio signal processing and floor tile
  • How a co-packer could generate additional revenues for both current and prospective customers
  • Accounts payable automation opportunity with county government in the Southeastern U.S.
  • Pricing analysis of document capture software and powder actuated tools
  • Sales compensation of a competitor’s copier reps
  • Competitive intelligence of a privately held software vendor
  • M&A due diligence of an acquisition target identifying market size, brand share and growth prospects for all six of the company’s divisions

Get Started Today

Share with us what you’d like to learn and how you will use it and we will share potential custom market research methodologies to obtain that information.

Contact us to learn more about B2B market research