Why demographics?
- Demographics are descriptive statistics about a marketplace. They answer the questions “who” and “where.”
- “How big is my market?” is a basic question that requires demographics.
- Business revenues are the results of decisions made by people solving problems and filling their needs. Knowing where they are is essential in understanding opportunities and to ensure that resources of sales, promotion, staffing, channels and logistics, and customer support, are properly used and how they can be deployed.
- Reliable and objective demographic data are needed for these strategic and tactical decisions. ExpliStats draws from independent sources: Census and other government verified data are a foundation for your efforts.
Markets are Always Changing
Demographics Quantify Those Changes and are a Window to Changes Ahead
- Changes to markets are usually detected in the natural course of business as managers note changes in sales or activity. Demographics help document the nature, size, and scope of those changes in an independent way.
- They also shed light on whether the changes in a company are the result of changes in a marketplace or the effectiveness and skills of management. That is, if sales increase by 5%, that’s underperforming if the market is growing at 10%. Conversely, if a market is flat, but a sales territory is up by 5%, that might actually be heroic.
- In the ongoing business, most plans and organization were put in place at a particular point in time, and expected to last for many years. Because markets are always changing, past decisions need to be reviewed and revised. Past decisions can be refreshed with new data and modified accordingly.
- For the new business, opportunities are evaluated based on where it is believed that the greatest number of them are. Businesses evaluating where to grow next find demographic data to be very valuable in comparing where to direct their next efforts.
Value proposition
- ExpliStats Business Demographics is a high-value and low-cost input for important business decisions
- Value-added
- Historical perspective available
- Data updated with five Government economic data-sets* for many geographies
- Managers also need to anticipate changes and see trends in their markets. These perspectives are necessary to develop plans for the future, and to realistically consider how resources may need to be reallocated or newly deployed.
Government-sourced data are accurate, without double-counting common in other sources
- Many businesses rely on services such as Hoover’s, Dun & Bradstreet, SalesGenie, and industry magazine lists, and others. These services are often valuable, but have some issues that veteran business researchers know, but casual users often do not. Among these problems is that many business locations have more than one corporation at them. This is especially a problem for small and medium businesses where financial, tax, and succession planning make it seem that there are multiple business entities at one location when there are really just one.
- Many times businesses that have merged or acquired others keep the phone numbers or the corporations that they had. This is another reason for multiple counting of businesses. In the experiences of one of the founders of this program, double and triple counting of businesses can lead to estimates of market size by factors of 40% or more. That means when there are actually 1,000 prospects, the data may mean that there will be sources stating that there are 1,400.
- The Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and related data collection efforts focus on business establishments with employees, which makes the data more realistic.
(*) Economic Census, County Business Patterns, Non-Employer Statistics (Census Department),
Local Employment, Quarterly Census of Earnings and Wages (Bureau of Labor Statistics)