Knowing what is happening in the marketplace is vital to the success of your enterprise. Monitoring emerging trends, customer likes and dislikes, and understanding unmet customer needs can determine how rapid a rate of incline or decline your business experiences. Companies spend millions of dollars conducting surveys of customers, potential customers, industry experts and key opinion leaders to determine if their products or services effectively meet, exceed or miss market expectations.

Many companies utilize channel partners to flow products and services to the marketplace. Channel partners can take the form of wholesalers, distributors, manufacturer’s representatives, franchisees, online consolidators and retail stores.