Knowledge of your market is power. If you’re new to the space, looking to grow, or simply asking what you could be doing differently to meet your goals, getting insights into your customers, market opportunities, or the competition can be helpful in your endeavors.

Market research is a sliding scale and there's no one right answer regarding how much of it you should do as a business. It's both fundamental to making smart sales and marketing decisions, but also something that never ends as process. As your market changes, you need to understand how it's changing the ground you're standing on as a business.

GRAYBOX embarks on some degree of market research in every new engagement to ensure we have an understanding of the marketplace your company lives within. We have client-partners in a wide variety of industries and gaining expertise on each is necessary in order for us to be great partners of the companies we work with. In addition to a more inward-focused understanding of your overall brand strategy and position within the marketplace <>, we need a sound understanding of the world that you live in every day.

As part of our market research initiatives, GRAYBOX always starts with secondary research to get a sense of what the market is like, trends people are seeing, and the opportunities for growth within it. This also affords us the opportunity to validate what we're hearing from you with what we're seeing in the market, which helps drill down in potential gaps in knowledge that can be filled.

The qualitative data gathered in talking directly with your customers or potential customers is unmatched in putting a face and name to market research. GRAYBOX can be an objective third party in teasing out what your customers think of where you are as a company and/or the areas that you should focus on more. Are there opportunities you're missing? Is there a new competitive player that has started to go after your customers? They may not tell you because you haven't asked, but we can gather the information and feed it back to you to help drive decisions around new opportunities for the business.

Additionally, if a client-partner is entering a new market, we can seek out potential customers and engage them in a dialog that serves to both gain knowledge about the kinds of things they value, but also establish potential contacts to support future research or testing efforts. Paired with a core of current customers you've solicited some feedback from, these folks can act as a core group of influencers and/or beta testers that act as a sounding board going forward.

The end deliverable in a market research effort can take many forms, including long-form written documentation, tabulated and categorized quantitative customer feedback data, and summarized deck for your C-suite or ownership. It's about knowing the intended audience and delivering something that will be valuable for your team and ours.