Sampling Research: The Emerging Thespian in Market Research with Propitious Endeavors Date:   Wednesday , July 02, 2014 When Dr. Shikha Suman completed her PhD in Technology Management from IIT Kanpur, she was crystal clear about her future. Unlike any of her peers, she knew she wanted to play with numbers and drag out an abstract report from them to help companies grow. This is why she jumped into the gigantic ocean of research industry to provide niche scientific methodology to her clients and not just data collection service that many of the other research companies were doing. Thus came into existence \'Sampling Research\', which Dr. Shikha found single handedly in 2010. Dr. Shikha saw a huge gap between the two layers of research service providers: the industry giants and the tier II providers. While the services provided by the giants were superlative and expensive that takes SMBs pocket for a toss, majority of tier II providers just gathered some figures from the market and served them on plate to the clients that didn\'t bring much value to the investments made by clients. This is where between the two slice of bread; she positioned her company Sampling Research as the slice of Cheese that touches the surface of both the breads. \"This positioning helped customers understand that we surely provided a bit less from the top players but we were par above the tier II players in the space that helped them recover their RoI faster,\" says Dr. Shikha Suman, Founder & Managing Director, Sampling Research Pvt. Ltd. Today, Sampling Research provides end-to-end workable strategy solutions and implementation assistance to their clients across globe. The company assists their clients to understand the Indian market and succeed in their business, trade and investments in India. They provide comprehensive Industrial & Business Research, Business Intelligence, India Entry Strategy, Social Research and Analytics services to government organizations, NGOs, corporate houses and market research providers across the globe. A viable solution is designed and implemented for every client that fulfills clients\' requirements. Today, Sampling Research serves a wide range of top tier clients in verticals of pharmaceuticals, telecom, automobiles, BFSI and many more. Along with this, Sampling Research also plays the role of an MRO (Market Research Outsourcing) where they work with large market research companies in different parts of the world including U.S., UK, Japan, Singapore and France. The company is also working heavily with CSR wings of different corporate houses. To provide a niche and pin-point accurate report, Sampling Research themselves outsource a bit of their work for data collection to small firms, local channel partners and freelancers who are present in small cities of India. \"We do focus on collecting data as the right amount of data will help us interpret the best result and help our clients with this. We work across spectrum in terms of understanding the objectives of clients\' research, designing a research and questions for them and getting the responses which is done either with our team or with local channel partners,\" explains Dr. Shikha. En Route to Future What started as a one man company grew exponentially over the years. However, getting the right mix of attitude and industry knowledge is one of the major challenges the company faces till date. Being a startup, Sampling Research do not have the pocket to shed off on hiring tier I guys. Their strategy rather gyrates around accumulating the right mix from not the IIMs of India and giving them strong training for couple of months before gearing them up for the war. Sampling Research never wanted to proliferate their power into other hands, thus is still bootstrapped. Dr. Shikha adds, \"If you are on right time, in right place and if you are able to showcase that you deliver perfection, clients will become advocates. There are very few companies who provide solutions at the price we do. This helped us get our working capital flowing from day one, thus we never exposed ourselves to external funding\". The Mumbai headquartered company has delivery center in Delhiand local offices in all the metros of the country. Sampling Research plans to move from face-to-face survey to technology based survey by leveraging the emerging technologies like cloud and smart devices. They are involved in developing a product where they can panel the respondents. \"In the near future; we will extend our offerings to beverages and textile verticals as well. We are also adding syndicated reports to our offering which we have not worked on till date,\" concludes Dr. Shikha.