The sales intelligence produced by market research is useful stuff, of that there is no doubt. Trouble is that the intelligence brought home by market researchers tends to come from the attitudes of customers interviewed and what we know is that there is always a big difference between our attitudes to an issue and our actual behaviour when confronted by that issue. For example, most of us have an attitude that we should eat healthy, fresh food but on a Friday evening when we are tired and stressed by screaming kids our behaviour has a tendency to lean towards turkey twizzlers, fish fingers and oven chips because it is a pragmatic and practical answer to the immediate issue. The same thing counts when buying technology - in theory we may say that we will upgrade all our networks and consolidate our datacentres as well as implement green IT (our attitude to IT) but when confronted by the impenetrable darkness of a global recession our actual behaviour will be very different......

So where soes sales come in to all of this? If our relationships with our key customers are Value Offered or Value Added then our sales people can not really help much here because the first thing that they hear about a divergence between the customers' attitude and behaviour will be when they hear that orders or projects are cancelled. The Value Created sales realationships however are a very different thing. Because the sales people are exchanging opinion with the customers about future direction they are considering they will get early insights from the customers about any change of thinking or nervousness about current thinking - gold dust.

Now, I know it is too late to get an early warning on the downturn but this recession will not last forever so should we not think about establishing an early warning for the upturn?

Good market research can help with all sales cultures. By "good" I mean well designed, considered and targeted research that is then analysed and interpreted properly. Most research is not good. Some examples of good work: we predicted the collapse of Marks & Spencer a full 6 months before sales started to fall off. We tried to warn M&S but they wouldn't listen as they felt they had such good relationships with their customers that they knew it all. I recently worked on a new B2B product designed to help the customer analyse data and produce reports quickly and easily (rather than going back to the supplier each time). I took a rep from the client to an interview with a customer they (and the customer) would say they share a Value Created relationship with. The customer did not know this person and by the end of the interview the rep recognised that they would have to completely re-evaluate their relationship with that customer. It's not that they lie, it's that nobody tells everybody everything. We all have things to protect (whether consciously or unconsciously). Working in alliance with the client, good market research can fill gaps in knowledge, it can be a great predictor of trends and it can be used to enhance those Value Created relationships