Demand for services. How to determine the demand for services when starting a business

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Any business operates solely through the sale of goods or services. In the event that no one buys anything from you, it is pointless to talk about building a business of your own.

However, starting and organizing your business from scratch, you do not know for sure how much product you can sell and how many customers you can attract. To solve this problem, you need to find out the demand for services in the segment you plan to work with.

Difficulties in determining demand

To begin with, let's define why it is not as easy to find out the demand for your product as we would like. The answer is obvious: sales and trade are purely practical things, since many real factors influence the dynamics of their development. Some of them cannot be predicted in any way, except to be determined in a practical way. So we have such a picture: we have not yet begun to offer our paid services, but we want to know how many people are ready to purchase them. Without the immediate start of work, it is very difficult to do this, but it is real. Actually, we will try to tell about this in this article.

Demand research paths

There are many tricky tricks and movesin order to "probe the market" - to find out the demand for goods and services where we ourselves want to sell. The simplest, but also the least accurate way is to analyze and generalize the details of your future business. This technique will not allow you to reveal how many people will order a product or service from you, but you will know what they are, what they want and what they need. Simply put, you can analytically draw up a portrait of the buyer, and then simply logically determine: are there many such people, can you find them, how will they become aware of your product, and so on. We will tell you more about how this is done below.

After the analytical method, you can try to take the first practical steps. This is also a whole range of measures that allow you to get more or less accurate data on what will be the demand for paid services. It is noteworthy that this is done without actually organizing a business, that is, the risk of losing invested funds in the case of using such methods is minimal.

Making market analysis

To understand how the analytical approach works, let's take one situation as an example. Let's imagine that you want to rent a shawarma kiosk near the metro. To do this, you need to know whether you will have a demand for services, say, 100 sales per day or not. To clarify this, we investigate a potential buyer. Your customers will obviously be passers-by who have just arrived or are leaving somewhere using the subway. It is possible that most of these people will be hungry. You can’t calculate the number of people who will buy food from you, but you can roughly decide what your target audience looks like (those who are interested in services). Then we turn to other factors: competitors, the level of employment of people, their status. Are there any other shawarma stalls around? Do they buy food from them? Is this business developed enough here? Is the demand for food normal in the area? Or is the metro station in question located in a remote, remote area? And so on. We apply other factors to the characteristic that we received when studying the target audience: the mood of people, their goals, the area, the visibility of the object of trade (if we are talking about this area) and other nuances. All of them will make it possible to characterize the service market, demand - and supply, respectively, to create for it.

Communicating with competitors

Another way to find out the demand can be called even more accurate and useful, since it has a direct relationship with practice. It consists in getting a piece of the experience of your future competitors who already know the demand for services in the niche where you want to work. Of course, this is unlikely to be done directly, because your competitors in the market are not interested in you interfering with the sales of their services or goods by offering yours. But by using the trick, you can also learn something.

For example, contact your competitors as a buyer. Of course, this is not possible in every business (for example, you cannot find out the demand for construction services in this way). But try thoseniches where the purchase, sale and consumption of services or goods takes place at one moment, it is possible. In our case with the stall and shawarma, you can approach your competitors, buy something from them and kind of inadvertently start a conversation. You can talk about anything, reporting your problems, transferring the merchant to a sincere conversation. So you will win over the person to yourself by finding out some information useful for business. Such a method, though morally wrong, can produce good results.

Checking demand in practice

In addition to communicating with competitors, the demand for services can also be learned in a practical way without starting a business. Again, this approach does not work in all areas of business, but there are niches where it is easy to do.

For example, if you want to become a manufacturer of some product and plan to sell it using social networks, you can try to organize a fictitious sale of your goods (using false information). For example, you need to start a group, post other people's photos, write descriptions. You will see how many people turn to you, and you will understand, although not quite objectively, what the demand will be.

In other areas, such as, for example, street trading, the flow of potential customers is even easier to determine. Stand in front of the point of the future competitor and count how many people have come to him. You can also try to determine the number of those who made a purchase.

Different approaches in other areas of business

The many ways in which demand is determined indicate that it is impossible to identify any one approach for different areas of business. Moreover, different approaches to sales can create a completely different level of demand. For example, the demand for educational services promoted through social networks will differ from the demand for advertising the same niche in another way, such as handing out flyers. When applying one or another method of evaluation, it must be taken into account that it involves a specific source of sales, which is also capable of providing one or another volume of customers. It is best to use several techniques in combination so that the end result is as objective as possible.

What to do, knowing the demand?

When building a business, knowing what the demand for services will be is important in order to correctly calculate all sources of income and already focus your expenses on them. If you are sure that, for example, 100 tea sandwiches will be bought from you, this will make it worthwhile to purchase a new teapot. And so it is in all areas of business. A potential buyer is the “golden fleece” that entrepreneurs are looking for, and, focusing on it, you need to build your own business.