What is an Expert Network, Anyway?
Expert networks are utilized by companies conducting extensive research on various industry sectors for a number of reasons—including exploring potential investment opportunities, creating business development strategies, and building a technical knowledge base. Part of the integral, comprehensive primary research process involves speaking with folks who have first-hand industry experience—since, no matter how much academic material is available, there’s nothing so efficient and accurate as culling opinions from combined decades of experience in the field. These companies come to us to source these qualified experts (that’s you!) for them.
Why would a company spend money to hire an outside firm to find experts? Doesn’t that make us ostensible middlemen, simply facilitating a process rather than producing a deliverable? Well, yes. But don’t write it off yet. It would be a short life indeed if we personally undertook every single one of our professional endeavors. The term ‘middleman’ connotes a lot of things—most of them orbiting around ‘busywork’, ‘useless’ and ‘inefficient’. But here in New York, the middleman trade (or, euphemistically: “professional services”) not only pays the bills for most of the white-collar community; we invest money, sell real estate, generates ideas, and perform research for the rest of the world! Individuals and companies rely strongly on the value supplied by third-party specialists.
Consider the following—
You’re an executive heading a new product line at Tribeca Technologies, a premiere software firm. You want to know what sorts of product-related improvements you could make this quarter to increase sales. How would you go about doing this?
You could do it yourself, but that would require your putting off more important tasks directly related to generating profit. Alternatively, you might hire a market research firm to poll all software users, to see what sorts of features they’d like to see in new products. Here, the benefits of involving a third party are apparent:
- You’d skirt the process of having to learn best practices for soliciting honest, critical feedback
- You’d get to punt the grunt work to someone who does know how, while you work on what you do best; making software, managing developers, etc.
And that’s where middlemen come in—not as marginal paper-shufflers, but as helpers who enhance the value of your business by ensuring a more efficient delegation of duties. Tribeca Insights has got a quick-draw research team that looks into companies and projects relevant to our clients’ needs. We’ve honed best practices for getting in touch with—on a project-by-project basis—people with business experience, technical know—how, and great communication skills. In addition to this, we perform all the pesky logistics that come with scheduling a phone call and processing payment. Lastly (but certainly not leastly), we’re here to collect your questions and feedback, which will in turn, help us best serve both our experts and our clients.
technorati tags: Tribeca Insights, expert networks, primary research
Allen Taylor
April 6th, 2009 at 4:16 pm #
Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.
Allen Taylor