Big data versus little and thick data and the manufacturer’s representative

Although the growth of ‘big data’ and the methodology of accessing, analyzing, and using the data has been characterized as a revolution in information (Erevelles et al. 2015), sales people from smaller organizations may not be able to take advantage of this revolution since their small size limits their access to resources. However these sales people nonetheless need this sophisticated customer information to understand where to concentrate their selling efforts. So, what can sales people from smaller B2B organizations do to understand their markets? This issue is compounded when the uncertainty of international markets is introduced. Should the sales person concentrate the selling efforts in country A or country B or country C? This paper will argue that there are a number of sources of “little data” the sales person from smaller industrial products organizations can utilize to more productively plan the selling efforts. The first step is to conduct a broad review of environmental forces in a grouping of international countries, perhaps on a geographic, economic and/or cultural basis. Although this process is cumbersome when compared with senior marketing executives reviewing an analysis of big data, it will yield rich data capable of guiding the marketing efforts of smaller organizations with fewer resources. The second step is to conduct qualitative research via ethnography, personal interviews, focus groups, participant observation, etc. to collect rich and “thick” data from the marketplace experiences and social worlds of the most appropriate stakeholders.