You already know what you think of your business. So what do your customers think? Do your customers think of you as a value leader or do they buy from you when they need a product or service immediately and there is no other option. Would you rather be thought of first by your customers or somewhere down a long list of suppliers? How about having hundreds or thousands of customers giving out referrals to your business? How do you find out?

The process of market feedback analysis is your answer. This process begins with collecting feedback from actual customers as well as potential customers, then analyzing the data to expose trends. For example, you find a correlation of increased sales when you promote a twwenty-percent off sale and an even bigger jump in sales when you promote a forty-percent off sale. This data suggests that you are competing on price. Your customers are willing to buy from you based solely on your promotion and not on your service.

So what is feedback and how do you collect it? An easy way to collect feedback is to ask your customers. When you provide a quote by phone, ask the caller a few questions about their experience with your company. Jot down the answers. When you make a sale, provide a web address that links to a survey that your customers can respond to. Send out emails to your customers that you just served and provide a simple way for them to answer quantitative questions about their experience. At the bottom of your sales receipts print a survey link for your customers to respond to. Offer a discount on their next sale to help promote more responses. You may use multiple methods including hiring a research firm to ask random people around town about your business.

What information do you want to analyze for greater insight? Market feedback analysis is used to understand your business from the customers perspective on many fronts. The key is to create a campaign that is specific in nature. Do not try to analyze everything about your business at once. First, start with who are your customers? What is the range of their income? Are they college grads or working class? Are they homeowners or majority renters? When it comes to products, what do they care about most? For example: functionality or price? Convenience or experience? The design of the profuct or reliability? When it comes to providing a service, what matters most: information, fairness, transparency, options, or accessibility.

As you think about what information is most important to you at this time, a good place to start your data collection is with the following focus areas:

• Who is your target market?
• What problems do your customers struggle with?
• What solutions are your customers truly looking for?
• Where is the value of your products or services from the viewpoint of your customers?
• How can you attract other similar new customers to buy from you?
• How does the market perceive your brand?
• Once a customer buys from you, do they make the most of the product or service?

Your brand is a living entity. You must remember that it is to evolve as time moves forward. People change, laws change, trends change. Your business must keep up with the current trends of modern time. A good example to think of is a business fifty years ago selling home telephones. I bet they were busy as the population increased which creates demand for phones. For the past ten years and more, people have subscribed to wireless phone plans using a flip phone or smart phone. As wireless subscribers increased, people have closed out their home phones as the necessity is not as high with a mobile substitute. Do you want to be a phone store today selling home phones? Or, would you shift the product offerings of your store to mobile device sales like smart phones?

As a business owner, you should see growth year over year in terms of profits as well as the number of customers you serve. With that said, you need to know what are you doing right as well as what can you do better. Your goal as a business owner is to do better, faster, and cheaper than your competition. In order to execute with success, you must implement a training program for your staff. The training programs that you implement must be from some sort of source. That source is the feedback that you are receiving from the ones that buy from you. The majority, not a single buyer. You do not want to cater to a single buyer.