Personalize your analysis to exactly what your company needs. Now software allows you to filter down to your company’s sectors and regions instead of having to weed through every area of the industry. Save time by building a dashboard that highlights trends that are useful to you.
Data is most useful if its personalized to your specific situation. Big, generalized statistics can be misleading, because they are averaging results across such a large space. If you operate locally, then learning that the US market is increasing by 3%, isn’t going to be very useful to you. Wouldn’t it be better to know what is going on in your state or even better your city? What if the country has slow growth, but your region is accelerating? You won’t get this insight unless you drill down to your areas and demographics. If you are going to make financial decisions based on the information, the more detailed and representative of your situation, the better.
Associations have members covering the entire industry. Big vs small, East vs West, Rural vs Urban; all of which are unique from each other. If your members can compare themselves to those most like them, they can learn from each other and help promote the industry through healthy competition. This can be applied to compensation studies, sales trends, or financial & operating ratios.
Examples:
- Manufacturing companies can look at their product’s performance against other similar products within the same region.
- Physicians can look at the finances of their practice vs other similarly sized practices in their region to determine which services to offer, competitive salaries, and how many ancillary staff to hire.
- Software that can handle this level of analysis is Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI. Find one that best fits your needs or work with a consultant to assist you through the process.
Vault Consulting provides outsourced accounting and market research for nonprofits, associations, and their affiliates. Please contact us for more information about collecting and analyzing market data.
