Cutting the cost of knowing your customers

Customers are the foundation of any business.

Without customers you have nothing. The need to attract new ones and keep existing ones happy is a primary concern for all organizations. Gaining insights about them and taking action on those insights is the foundation of marketing. But how do businesses gain this type of market intelligence?

The largest multinational corporations hire armies of people and buy millions of dollars worth of market research, conduct focus groups, and survey their customers and markets. They spend an estimated $22 billion each year in North America just to convert this data into something business people can understand and act on.

But for all of the small- and medium-sized businesses and not-for-profit organizations, spending $100,000 on a market research project is simply out of the question.

In most cases, these relatively smaller organizations rely on piecemeal information they collect while surfing the web. Realistically, many of them just plain guess.

Enter Quant Interpretations, a Hamilton-based startup founded late last year by Brad Ross, the inventor, and Michael Saniga, the president (see www.quantinc.com). Quant invented an online software tool that simplifies the process of market intelligence — in seconds at a price point that is reasonable for most businesses.

This online marketing tool delivers business decision makers and marketers fully interpreted and actionable insights about customers and markets that they can turn into better decisions and in turn, better performance.

Ross describes the process as follows: “For almost six years I worked with a team to help clients understand their customers. It was a manual process requiring weeks or months of number-crunching, expensive market research data and a dozen or so software tools. We invented a provisionally-patented process that automates and simplifies this entire process. We do all the number crunching so our clients have all the tools they need to make better business decisions.”

The product of Quant’s hard work is a flexible online portal that delivers presentation-ready reporting, insights that you likely never knew about your customers that go well beyond age and income.

Users can predict what customers will buy in the future based on what they are interested in, their attitudes and behaviours, where they prefer to shop, and how they prefer to collect information (i.e., newspaper, TV, radio, or the internet).

“Determining what your best customers look like — and more importantly how to find more of them — will have a significant impact on your bottom line,” says Saniga. “You can be more efficient with your marketing efforts, focusing on the people who want to hear from you. One thing for sure is that you’ll be more in tune with your customers, making your relationships stronger and longer lasting.”

Getting your hands on this type of intelligence may have seemed like magic in the past, but the experts at Quant Interpretations have harnessed the power of 10,000-plus variables and billions of market research data points to allow organizations to use this in both their most important strategic decisions and their everyday decision-making processes.

If your small- to medium-sized business is looking to spend some money on a marketing campaign, or if you want to learn where to find more clients like the ones you already have, ask Brad and Michael for a demo of their software solution. You will be as shocked as I was when they showed me how much they know about potential customers that you have not tapped into yet.