Even small esnterprises cannot neglect to make periodic market analyses to guide their exports. These are necessary to answer two important questions:

• In which markets are my products most appreciated?
• How are my competitors moving on the international markets?

According to the traditional rules, however, a market analysis requires a lot of time and resources. There are companies that perform these types of activities exclusively and a market analysis carried out by them can cost tens of thousands of Euros. But a small business cannot think of spending so many resources and a long amount of time for a study like this.

The approach that I recommend, then, is the following: every time I start collaborating with a small business and I begin laying the groundwork for this analysis, I imagine that I have to put together a 2,500 piece puzzle. Over the course of the first few days at the company my aim is to find the largest number of pieces to a picture that not only do I not know but that, additionally, changes constantly. But to understand which picture I am trying to identify, I do not set myself the goal of finding and putting all the pieces in their proper place. Once I understand what we are looking at it’s not necessary to spend any more time on it, even if the puzzle is not complete. If the image of the market is clear enough to allow us to make our decisions and take our first steps on the path towards developing our exports then this is enough.

Also because no matter how much data we collect, it will be the experience “in the field” that will teach us many things about how the market is and what our sales opportunities are. Regardless of how much we study and analyze the data it will be the actual work we do that will give us much of the information we need to improve our approach when carrying out our sales activities.

I will talk about these issues in a book that will be released in September 2018 and which I talked about in the post THE BOOK: “EXPORTING IN 7 STEPS”