Does your company track its sales? How about year over year growth? Does it look at market share? As any business professional knows, measurement statistics are pivotal to all businesses. Unlike focus groups, ethnographies and other type of qualitative research, quantitative research is the backbone of how people look at your business. These types of statistics are extremely valuable for attracting investors, for finding strengths and weakness in sales, and creating benchmarks to keep your company on the right track.

While graphs and pie charts are wonderful to print out and pass around the board table, they are full of data fundamental to enhancing your business. However, it is important to ensure those eye-catching graphics correspond to the most relevant and accurate data from a variety of quantitative research methods. Any market research company will have in-depth knowledge of the five major steps involved in the research process:

1. Defining the Problem.
2. Research Design.
3. Data Collection.
4. Analysis.
5. Report Writing & presentation

Many of us only read the end results and see the presentations without appreciating the first four steps that are crucial to any type of deep understanding about the market. While we may be very familiar with the problem, sometimes defining it in a way that leads to a resolution through research can be complicated. Uncovering and solving the true business need can be difficult, especially without the resources to execute the study and the expertise to design and analyze it. For this reason, most businesses invite a third party market research company to step in and complete the five steps.