Are you startup business owner or have a small business? I am sure that you undoubtedly have the goal to build your business growing bigger. The requirement of growing your business is to have greater profit and positive cash flow. To get a positive cash flow, you must have a lot of sales. In order to get a lot of sales, you have to understand the customer's needs. To understand the needs of customers, you have to do some activities which is called marketing intelligence activities.

Consequently, understanding the customer's needs is a very important thing. Failure to understand and provide products which are needed by customer will result customer disappointment. It makes your business get failure.

Therefore, I will explain best practices in conducting marketing intelligence activities. There are several best practice, they are:

- Creating an agenda to meet with customers.

To meet with customers, keep in the same time interval. For example, go meeting every three weeks. The goal is to find out the products and services they need now and in the future. You have to directly interact with customers informally to learn how to serve their needs well. In this case, you have to put yourself as a fellow consumer. Why? usually talks will be open as a fellow consumer of a product, so you can dig deeper into the information that you need.

- Evaluating data obtained from the activities above.
Perform analysis and make conclusions. From these results, you will get early detection of the customer desires alteration so that you can formulate a product / service innovation to customers. From the above activities, you will also know the quality of your product and service offers from customer side.

- Creating an agenda to meet with retailers and distributors of your products.
In addition to meet with the consumer, meet with retailers and distributors are very important because they are a chain of your products towards the end consumers. In this meeting, you have to dig up information such as the difficulties they face in marketing your products, their needs, and so on. From this data you can determine an appropriate reward for their success to market your product and proper act to inspire them.

- Creating an agenda to meet with competitors.
In this meeting, of course you have to put yourself as a consumer product. List of questions you would ask, and ask through all available media such as the telephone to customer service, officers in the front office, informal meet and chat to fellow users of these products or even the manager. You can also view your competitors’ public information in their website.

By doing the above marketing intelligence activities, the research team can do the analysis intensely, so you can comprehend what steps should be done to make  innovative products and services.