Survey Software HQ

Companies today are in dire need of finding ways to innovate so that they can stick out from the dozens or hundreds of companies competing with them.

Step 1) Listen

One approach that makes a lot of sense is to survey your customers. Ask them what they think. Not just the ones who paid for your service, but really focus on the ones that are vocal and opinionated. What do they have to say? Listen carefully…

Step 2) Innovate

Let’s say you sell staplers and in your survey it turns out that a few people don’t like the way you have to load staples into your stapler. Everyone else’s stapler loads in staples the same way, you think to yourself. You realize you have discovered a unique opportunity and decide to market a new “EZ load” stapler.

Step 3) Raise Prices

Congratulations. You’ve created a new market segment (EZ Loading Staplers) that has never been done before. You are first to market so you should state that loud and clear. Because it’s a new segment there could be a lot of buzz to support your marketing efforts. People could overwhelm your little company if you don’t have some controls in place. Raising the price is a great control because of the law of supply and demand. When demand is low, and supply is high you have to lower prices (look how cheap you can get a DVD player nowadays). When demand is high and supply is low, you have to raise prices in order to effectively serve the market.

Enjoy your newfound success and feel free to send me your questions at bhenderson @ prezzatech . com

How many responses do you need in order to have an accurate survey?

You need to understand the right amount of survey responses that you need in order to be confident that your survey results are fairly indicative of reality. Usually people trained in this field have a background to statistics. But the basic idea is that someone conducting a sample survey tries to get results from a portion (sample) of the overall population and tries to get as many responses as possible to reflect the opinions of an entire population.

Here’s a Free Survey Sample Size Tool and how you would use it.

Let’s say you are conducting a health care survey on the attitudes of the patients of a particular hospital. You need to get a rough estimate of how many patients they serve, and that becomes your population size. Plug that into the survey sample size tool and then leave the defaults.

Read up confidence levels and intervals if you have some time and you will learn a lot more about the results from this tool.

My company’s motto is that you don’t need a Ph.D in order to create, analyze, and share results from a survey… you just need some common sense (and a connection to the internet

- Brian, from SurveySoftwareHQ