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Throughout my 25 years in business, one of the most important weapons I’ve used to win business or to solve a problem is information I’ve dug up via research. This info includes: industry stats, info on a company’s background or market opinions. When you have big budget you can find lots of valuable sources to get the good stuff. But what do you do if your budget runs dry?
1) Quick backgrounders on a company.
FREE 7 day trial, easy access to company profiles.
Goliath is The Gale Group, a part of Cengage Learning’s online-business content service, providing global company and industry intelligence to business executives. They provide online access to millions of records including business articles, industry reports, company profiles and executive contacts pulled from business data resources. While they offer comprehensive paid reports and intelligence in a variety of categories, if you need a fast snapshot of a company, their executives, revenues etc. you can sign up for a FREE 7 day trial.
Cost: Zero Oddpodz review: I was recently pitching a client and needed some background info. This is an old guard firm that did not even have a Web site. Within 5 minutes, I had company’s history, contacts & officers, comparable companies, product & brands, company financials, divisions & subsidiaries and business rankings. A credit card is needed to sign up, however, cancelling a subscription was easy and fast. It provided useful and timely information.
2) Need a fast FREE, opinion group?
Ask500People.com is brought to you by Wondermill. Here you will find tools to survey groups of people quickly. Questions can be answered by image choice, scale of agreement, YES or NO or with an open word or reply. Ask500People touts a FREE survey for businesses. I signed up and, yes, it was FREE and fast. However, the pool size was 5 votes on question, hardly enough to provide me any valuable insight. Cost: Zero Oddpodz review: Nice site, nice idea, easy interface and pricing reasonable ranging from 50 people for $29.00 to 1,000 people for $374.00 to conduct a survey. Did I find there FREE offer rewarding? Nada.
3) Need a global industry reports?
www.free-research.com has over 3902 industry reports on 27 diverse sectors. This site based in the UK and focuses on non-US studies. You can search by industry, country, company and associations. Cost: Zero Oddpodz review: This site is easy to navigate, requires registration and also offers fee-based research reports. I downloaded several industry studies related to a client am writing a marketing a plan for. I found them credible and helpful and they fit in my budget, too.
4) Where do I find an airplane window?
 
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Simply text your question to 242242 (spells ‘ChaCha’) or call 1-800-2ChaCha (800-224-2242) from your mobile phone to ask any question. Cost: Zero Oddpodz review: This innovative service gets the bright light. Well done, easy Web site and got to love the name. |
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