What facts do you need today to support critical business decisions?

In business, you don’t make decisions in a vacuum and you don’t make them impulsively when you consider advancing a new business initiative. You are trained to make decisions on both knowledge and gut feel and operating with imperfect information. But how many facts do you need? How much is enough? How do you assess what you don’t know?

Usually, when you put our team around the table, you have a pretty good view of what is going on within the company, with customers, and with competitor offerings. But it’s easy to gain a sense of false confidence when you start to aggregate that collective intelligence.

It’s hard to know what you don’t know.

Of course there is the rigor you can achieve with a properly controlled quantitative study. Often, to support an imminent decision, you must rely on qualitative input from customers and other market participants and observers, in order to move quickly to meet a decision goal. The goal of research always is to go as deep and broad as possible, given your constraints.

When your questions are in the marketing and sales arena, they are almost always focused outside the organization. And even with a quality customer sat or loyalty program, the information you have is rarely precise enough to adequately answer specific questions. Here are a few axioms to consider as you reflect upon your own business circumstances and information gaps:

· You always know more than you think you do when you focus on the right questions and engage your own team properly in gathering market intelligence.
· You always know less than you need to answer the questions with any level of confidence.
· You will never have perfect knowledge about the outcome of a decision until after you make it.
· You will never regret learning more in advance of the decision, filling the gap between what you think you know and what you need to know.

Is your sales and marketing strategy driven by current market dynamics?

If you run your sales and marketing programs based upon written plans, you face this challenge. Written plans are usually done by year end and are usually done as a refresh of last year’s plan. This isn’t wrong – it’s typical; almost everyone does it this way. In the time crunch you have to work in, there usually isn’t a current effort to include a rigorous view of how your sales and marketing environment has changed.

Like the old saw about the wisdom of looking through the windshield while driving, rather than the rearview mirror, you want to have a forward-looking view of the world. Knowing what your competitors did this year or what they are doing today isn’t as valuable as what they are planning. It’s critical to understand where you rank among your competitors in customer terms – especially the customers you want to retain and gain more of. It’s not enough to tweak last year’s numbers, you need to understand the changing needs of customers and prospects segment-by-segment to win the competitive race and secure real customer loyalty.

How do you validate the market need for your new product or service?

Market validation is not a black and white process; it’s not a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ choice. Creating the right attributes for a well-positioned solution is a complex endeavor that requires a rigorous process of mapping buying drivers and assessing the switching potential for buyers from the legacy solution to the innovation you seek to validate.

It’s helpful to go both broad and deep, with both quantitative and qualitative studies. However, in the validation scenario, it’s possible only to glean dissatisfaction with current legacy solutions, not propensity to buy your proposed new solution. A mere description of a concept isn’t sufficient to know if you’ll succeed: if you really have a clearly superior alternative. In fact, you could be close to the right solution and not know it. A quick survey to potential buyers isn’t enough to make the right decisions. You don’t need a yes or no – you need to understand the fine-tuning of what and for whom to know if you are on course for success.

Instead, a multipoint qualitative research process will be useful in determining how all the groups that make up your constituency will accept your solution and purchase it post-beta. Constituencies include: target segment buying influencers, key opinion leaders, technology leaders, etc.

Goals often include assessing several critical success factors:

· Will a critical mass of buyers, beyond early adopters embrace the technology?
· What might the adoption rate be?
· Where might the company encounter points of resistance?
· Are there existing or emerging competitive technologies that represent an insurmountable market lead?
· Is there a solid case for making a go-forward decision?

What is the best way to break out of the “So what?” trap of market research?

All research starts with a working hypothesis to be proven or disproven. Sometimes there are several. It’s the nature of research to follow a plan and once that train starts rolling, it’s difficult to make midcourse corrections that are helpful to the overall process. So the issue becomes, when working with an outside research group, how do you make sure you will get the results you know they are capable of delivering.

One answer is to contextualize the research; that is, make sure your contract researchers know as much as possible about the business underpinnings. Of course you know the business context when you define the research project. It helps to include everyone in a thorough briefing of these business issues behind the research. It means going several layers deep and briefing them on sensitive strategy and competitive information. This raises difficult trust issues, notwithstanding the NDA’s you have in place.

Another is to build in systematic checkpoints to allow for mid-course viewing of preliminary results. This makes the process a little slower and more cumbersome, but well worth it.

A third method is to make a point of reviewing source documents, such as interview transcripts. Invariably, the research sponsor will see opportunities for probing and modifying the discussion guide, based upon the verbatim replies to research questions. This may be counter-intuitive, since the reason you hire a competent research team is to save you time. This quality check is well worth your time, especially in the early stages.

It helps to hire a research team that has strong operating experience, so they can quickly absorb the business context.

How do you make your research projects actionable – the nice to know vs. need to know?

If you are a Research Manager, or Product Manager overseeing research, you fight this battle on every project. It’s possible to squeeze actionability out of every project.

Here are some ideas for doing that:

If the study is quantitative, you can look for second order significance if the primary analysis fails to show significant results. Sometimes it’s the subtleties that make a difference; it takes an astute analyst to look at the data in insightful ways.

For qualitative work, it takes a fieldwork team that is comfortable probing deeply. When a discussion guide is lengthy, the moderator is incented to move on, rather than probe, in order to complete the interview in the allotted time. Most important, the interviewer must not only be comfortable with probing, they must be steeped in the business context so they can probe appropriately and fluidly.

You can use a layered approach where a more senior analyst does a follow-on interview with subjects who are deemed to be high value. This in-depth interview can build upon the initial one.

What is the perfect alignment of research methods with the relevant business questions?

If you are outsourcing research, you want to avoid the “hammer in search of a nail” pitfall. Some research companies specialize in a methodology, or at least favor one over another. These biases aren’t always wrong, but you should be cautious. For example, a focus group conducted too early in a product launch cycle may not be as productive as one done later on, when the panelists can actually react to the product—at least a beta representation.

Often a blended methodology is best, where components from several methods are combined in a creative way in order to provide maximum insight for minimum investment. It is often less expensive to do blended methodology than a single one.