How to Conduct Market Research for Consulting

To make effective and meaningful recommendations, consultants must keep a close pulse on the companies, industries, and trends that stand to make the most impact for their clients. Comprehensive market research is therefore essential to delivering the best outcomes for clients and ensuring consultants’ success.

However, conducting market research is still by and large an inefficient, manual process for many consulting professionals. In our recent State of Generative AI and Market Intelligence report, the top 3 market research challenges identified by respondents included: time spent searching for responses, fragmented information sources, and data accuracy.

Consultants need comprehensive, accurate, and relevant market intelligence insights to drive innovative and strategic guidance for their clients. The rise of AI-powered platforms like AlphaSense and the expanded use of generative AI capabilities is solving many of the challenges that come with traditional research methods. 

Below we explore the use cases driving the most value for consultant workflows, including the prevalence of private company information, accelerating market and industry trends, access to broker research, expert perspectives, and dashboards and watchlists. 

The Basis for Consulting Decisions

Market research serves as the cornerstone of informed decision-making in the consulting world. It is also the basis for the thought leadership that consultants are well known for, having a reputation as expert influencers. 

By gathering and analyzing pertinent data and trends, consultants provide companies with actionable insights. They examine industry trends, macroeconomic factors, and market dynamics. Market intelligence, backed by thorough research, enables consultants to customize solutions and recommendations for their clients with confidence.

Consultants meticulously gather data from various sources, ensuring they have a holistic view of the market landscape. They not only identify potential threats but also highlight untapped opportunities, guiding their clients toward sustainable growth. Without thorough, comprehensive market research, consultants cannot adequately support their clients, or help businesses to succeed and thrive. 

Components of Effective Consulting Market Research

Private Company Insights

Private company market intelligence and insights are important components of consultant research. Often, consulting firms are retained to provide strategic guidance or oversee deal activity for both corporate and financial services clients. 

For corporate firms, private company insights may help surface opportunities in the form of M&A deals, or assess a competitive landscape and identify new and emerging players in a particular industry. Financial services firms rely on consultants’ perspectives to navigate their investment strategies across many realms. This involves assessing market landscapes and identifying potential opportunities for investment and/or acquisition. 

Generally speaking, private company research is not only difficult to procure, but is also usually spread across disparate sources. It can take countless hours to search across lengthy documents and often requires using CTRL+F to locate one specific topic or theme. An AI-powered platform can eliminate the fruitless time and effort spent on these types of manual searches.

AlphaSense has filings from more than 5M+ limited companies registered in the UK, adding 500K+ new companies each year. What’s more, our streamlined AI search technology quickly surfaces insights on financial performance, annual returns, leadership changes, and more—accelerating your speed to insight and eliminating the noise. 

Our private company profiles aggregate company metadata, financial statements, and key financial data and ratios for 10M+ private companies located across EMEA and Japan. With these profiles, you can access and export key financials, ratio analysis, income statements, and balance sheets. You can also leverage these profiles to gather insights on current and former board members of a private company, and explore the parent and subsidiary hierarchy of a company. 

Additionally, AlphaSense has multiple content sets that help consultants get up to speed quickly and thoroughly on private companies including company tear sheets, Companies House filings for UK firms, broker research, and expert transcripts. 

Accelerate Time to Insight

To make the most impactful recommendations and secure buy-in from C-suite leadership, consultants must be well-versed and knowledgeable across a multitude of companies, their clients’ competitors, the industry they are covering, and the most relevant themes and trends in the space. 

Consultant findings are often presented as a clear, compelling narrative that synthesizes data and insights for macro consumption. AI tools are accelerating the speed at which consultants can access critical market trends and surface the most comprehensive findings to base their findings on.

With AlphaSense’s cutting-edge AI technology, consultants can get the insights they need in seconds. With a simple keyword search, they can uncover a wealth of documents, transcripts, broker research, and expert perspectives on any theme or topic they may be looking to make recommendations on. 

AlphaSense’s Smart Summaries is the only generative AI tool that draws from a premium content universe to provide citations with exact snippets of text across earnings transcripts, broker research, and expert insights, combining high accuracy with instant verification. Smart Summaries provide a 360-degree view of any trending theme, topic, industry, or company relevant to consultant research. 

Additionally, our synonym recognition technology, known as Smart Synonyms™, expands keyword and thematic searches to compensate for the many different ways to say the same thing and ensures that users don’t miss data points critical to their research, which ultimately drives informed decisions. 

Ultimately, all of these features accelerate consultants’ speed to insight, which ultimately helps set their business apart and gives them the competitive edge.

Access to Broker Research

Broker research reports are highly sought after in this space because they address the “why” behind market movements that are hard to pinpoint anywhere else. As deep subject matter experts, equity analysts conduct in-depth research and publish reports on corporations, industries, and macro trends, offering an expert lens into a subject.

These reports enable consultants to combine context from top-down industry reports with bottom-up peer analysis on topics like M&A, macro conditions, and industry headwinds to inform and drive strategic recommendations.

The information found within broker research is differentiated from other content sources and proves highly valuable as part of a consultant’s workflow, whether it pertains to M&A monitoring, market landscaping, or benchmarking. Because these insights cannot be found in company documents, press releases, or news articles, they enable consultants to better serve their clients and also provide a competitive advantage.

Unlike most market intelligence platforms, AlphaSense aggregates aftermarket equity research from global investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America within our Wall Street Insights® collection. Consulting teams can search across reports from thousands of industry analyst contributors all in one centralized location—without the need for 1:1 relationships with brokers or traditional entitlements.

The same benefits that exist for other content sets across the platform—including our patented AI search technology—are layered into the Wall Street Insights® solution, ensuring maximal value per time spent on research.

Unique Expert Perspectives 

Expert call transcript libraries, like Expert Insights, are a prime example of how beneficial the combination of proprietary information and AI can be. Typically, consultants will spend countless hours and thousands of dollars conducting expert calls to gather unique perspectives to bring to their clients. But with an expert transcript library, consultants can reduce the number of calls and answer some table-stakes questions by simply searching across transcripts.  

Consultants can leverage AlphaSense’s expert call transcript library to uncover insights about a specific market or company directly from an industry expert. Often, this eliminates the need to conduct a call themselves, which helps save time and money. 

Alternatively, consultants can search through our transcript library for relevant topics or insights in order to select the right expert to connect with and conduct their own call. Then, they can choose the specific expert that will prove most helpful to their research from over one million vetted experts in our system, avoiding wasting resources on unhelpful interviews.  

Our Expert Insights offering includes:

• Expert Transcript Library – Over 45,000 expert transcripts with proprietary insights from former executives, customers, competitors, and channel participants across a range of industries. Premium insights on thousands of public and private companies can guide strategic recommendations and uncover business development opportunities.
• Expert Call Services – With access to more than one million pre-qualified expert profiles spanning all industries globally, our Expert Call Services enable consultants to quickly and inexpensively connect with experts for customized interviews to fill in any research gaps.

Dashboards and Watchlists

To stay ahead of market and industry-moving developments, consultants can utilize customized dashboards, alerts, and watchlists to surface instant insights and market intelligence into their everyday workflow. 

With AlphaSense, consultants can set up daily email notifications on any research, company documents, or news relevant to their clients. Business development is simplified with widely accessible company data that is surfaced proactively and removes the need for reactive searches.

To narrow the scope for benchmarking purposes, for example, consultants can create a watchlist, allowing them to identify a short list of companies related to a specific theme or trend through our robust content set. Watchlists can also save you time when regularly running thematic searches across the same group of multiple companies and conducting a company deep dive and peer comparisons.

In addition to watchlists, AlphaSense offers dashboard templates to accommodate for the level of monitoring that is most suitable, ranging from:

• Company: Monitoring a single company. Best for in-depth, specific coverage on the company level.
• Industry: Monitoring an entire industry. Best for assessing market trends that affect specific industries, tracking a large competitive landscape at a high level, and staying on top of M&A activity.
• Custom: Monitoring real-time results of a set of saved searches. Best for highly personalized feeds of information that are not necessarily set across a cohesive group of companies or a single industry.

How AlphaSense Enhances Consulting Market Research

AlphaSense brings together four key market perspectives in one powerful platform to give consultants the complete picture, instantly surface detailed insights, and ultimately drive smarter decisions and better client outcomes.

Our platform covers four key market perspectives:  

• Companies: Documents published by a company (10Qs, Earnings Calls, etc) that offer an official view of how they are performing, clues to their strategy, and capture changes and events in their lifecycle. Company documents in AlphaSense include: company filings, presentations, earnings transcripts, press releases, ESG reports, and more.
• Analyst: In-depth research published by Wall Street researchers who leverage years of experience to dive deep into companies, industries, and markets. Analyst research in AlphaSense includes: company reports, market reports, industry reports, macro reports, and market research.
• Journalists & Regulatory: Content published in news and industry journals, as well as publications by government agencies and NGOs. This content set captures how industry experts and regulators react to events, trends, and news.
• Expert: A vast library of calls with industry experts such as former executives, customers, competitors, and partners who are no more than two years out of the industry. These are exclusive, first-hand accounts from experts that have specialized intelligence in their respective fields.

These four market perspectives, paired with the platform’s proprietary AI features, help to quickly and confidently identify the insights you need— so that you can build a complete picture and ensure you never miss a critical piece of information.

Level Up Your Market Research with AlphaSense

AI-powered platforms like AlphaSense are streamlining workflows to deliver the insights and market intelligence consultants need to make confident, data-driven recommendations for their clients, deliver strategic and winning client proposals, and surface business development opportunities by keeping a pulse on the landscape. 

Discover how the world’s largest and most distinguished consulting firms leverage AlphaSense to ultimately win more deals through increased organizational efficiencies. 

Learn why 95% of the top consulting firms trust AlphaSense with their business strategy and pipeline—start your free trial of AlphaSense today.