Hello! How do you generally conduct market research like trends, data and statistics? How about competitor research? Do you just google and use whatever article stat that is posted there for your analysis? Are there any known credible go to sites/tools that you’d recommend? TIA!!!
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Well, Here’s what I’d suggest! Find free industry research reports with trends. Look at total current and projected markets markets. Then aggregate in a way that you can explain to someone without them calling bullshit. 
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I do love talking to users, particularly experts, to understand their needs and how they see our products vs competitors. Sales teams can be great to as they tend to have their finger on the pulse.
After that, free trials with competitors can be useful if somewhat time consuming when you’re learning how to use a complicated enterprise software tool.
Industry articles from Gartner and the like is great to get a snapshot but they can overhype new trends like AI more than they should.
Where budget allows, i think that a survey with a representative sample is great, but this requires market research professionals for survey design, sampling, weighting and data analysis. This can be high level stuff like brand awareness or much more useful things like choice modelling studies where you understand what aspects of the product are driving purchase behaviour. Super useful if you want to know how your product is perceived against the rest of the market and where to focus to drive uptake.
All the other analysis is really about current users to look at their behaviour, product usage and also talk about how they use the product and why. But i think you were interested in the other side of things.
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Google search trends too or any public sourcing of data. If you are competing against public companies then dive into their financial reports and scour them.
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Release notes and blog posts from other companies in that segment are another great source. You often find a lot of valuable stats, anecdotes, and learnings from their failed experiments.
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Not sure why people are one side or the other. Adding to @Karan’s advice… you can dissect it into Internal and External research.
Internal: these guys your best bet for would be to do customer interviews and discovery. Get in front of the customer and talk and ask open-ended questions. Amazing resources on that online. Just google: customer discovery.
In the internal is where you can do competitor analysis too.
TAM and external research:
Well, not my forte. So good luck with that one. but you either purchase reports that are aggregated for your needs or you start googling around like @Christie said and @Natalie said.
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