1, public information and sorting
For example, the data of the Bureau of Statistics, the annual report published by the company itself, the research reports of other market institutions, or according to the scattered information published;
2. The purchased database
There are many product databases in the market, such as Bloomberg, OneSource, Wind and so on. This is usually bought in the name of a company, not only consulting companies but also many universities and research institutions;
3. Your own database
There are self-maintained databases, but few. First, professional data companies have done almost everything they can think of. Second, it is actually a very troublesome thing to make your own database. When some data is not available to the outside world, you can maintain a small database;
4. Consulting industry experts
Of course, it is paid, which should be quite common in the project. Some industry experts specialize in collecting and selling data and can basically buy what they want.
5, send a questionnaire
Sometimes, special data is collected for individual projects. If the outside world really doesn't have it, but there is no problem with the project, you have to do it yourself, such as sending out a questionnaire, but this kind of data needs to control the workload, because unless the data itself is one of the deliverables, you can't spend too much time and energy on a middleware.
6. Customers
Some data come from customers, even consulting company's products. For example, the industry salary data of HR consulting company, some databases of the big four and so on. The collection of these data requires strong professionalism or time accumulation, and a large part of them are counted by investigating the data collected by customer HR.