Disciplined Entrepreneurship, 2nd Edition

STEP 1APrimary Market Research (PMR)

In This Step, You Will:

• Learn how to perform efficient and effective original research to better understand your customer.
• Learn the importance of doing this right and doing this continuously to feed the Disciplined Entrepreneurship process.

The process of the 24 Steps only works if you do high‐quality primary market research (PMR). PMR is the essential fuel that keeps the process going in the right direction.

Why This Step, and Why Now?

When you first start down the entrepreneurship path, you brainstorm with the knowledge and expertise you have to determine an idea and potential markets. Your knowledge will soon run out and is biased by your own perspectives, so you will have to learn how to study your customer to obtain the critical information to grow your business. While PMR (primary market research) can and should start even before you settle on an idea, it will definitely be essential to fill out your Market Segmentation Matrix from Step 1 (Figure 1.4 and Worksheet 1.2). Getting good PMR is essential to your work because it is the input to each of the 24 Steps. If you put garbage into it, you will get garbage out. If you give it high‐quality input, the process definitely works, and you will continue to feed the process for ...