About

As a sponsor of this research, you'll gain a key competitive advantage. You’ll learn what corporate research buyers really want -- how to best reach and sell them the first time, how to meet their shifting needs, and how to maintain and grow the relationship by becoming a valued partner.

This research, which uncovers the insight industry's "path to purchase," provides practical and timely guidance on how to successfully sell into new client companies and how to nurture and grow existing relationships in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

If you're one of the early sponsors of this study, you'll have the opportunity for input into this research.

We will uncover the hidden triggers -- rational, emotional, and corporate -- that lead to buying decisions, but clients do NOT always share with you. Even if you gain only a single client from your investment in this research, your return will more than pay for your investment. So, here's an easy opportunity to "practice what you preach" -- by investing in research that you can act on and that can drive revenue.

Objectives

To gain a greater understanding of the “client journey” in commissioning research and insights projects beginning with the first contact to procurement, proposal, engagement and an ongoing partner relationship
To reveal the emotional and practical drivers of how research and insights clients making their “buying” decisions
To identify and empathetically understand research buyers’ unmet needs, challenges, and pain points
To provide insights to research suppliers to guide and support their internal sales training and develop biz-dev, newly effective best practices
To understand how procurement departments influence supplier choices, and how buyers “work” the system to bring in suppliers they want

Why?

If you're one of the early sponsors of this study, you'll have the opportunity for input into this research.

Methodology: Qualitative

Qualitative Design

Design Rationale:

The two-phased approach, combining projective exercises on an online platform with IDIs, allows us to uncover both rational and emotional reasons as to why research buyers make the decisions they do. Phase One's use of projective techniques, leveraging imaging and storytelling, will shed new light on clients' seldom-articulated emotional motivations for vendor selection. The IDIs will allow us to explore these issues even further and to address the listed objectives through extensive direct questioning.

Approaches:

This will be a two-phased study:

PHASE ONE will be comprised of three-days of digital ethnography on the Aha platform, employing projective techniques, in order to explore and uncover emotional issues associated with being a marketing-research client and the triggers that lead to buying decisions.

This phase will also include direct questioning about relevant issues, ranging from pressures within the company that influence marketing-research decisions to gut-level (system 1) issues that pull buyers toward certain suppliers (or push them away). We will explore specific issues, such as:

-- The last time a new supplier was brought in, and why
-- How corporate buyers find new suppliers, and what sales strategies work best
-- What corporate buyers tell suppliers NOT to do
-- In the case of clients with procurement departments, who owns the budget, and how this affects supplier choice

PHASE TWO will follow the three-day digital ethnographies with one-on-one in-depth qualitative interviews with selected respondents, all moderated by David Harris of Insight & Measurement and Jim Chastain of RealityCheck.

Number of research sessions (or interviews) by specific approach:

This will be a two-phased study, employing a mixed-mode approach. Phase One will be comprised of three-days of digital ethnographies on the Aha platform. This phase will also include direct questioning to address the project's stated objectives.

Phase Two will consist of in-depth interviews, moderated by David Harris, the project leader and CEO of Insights & Measurements, and Jim Chastain, founder of RealityCheck. (For methodological details, see "Additional Approaches" below or email info@collaborata.com to schedule a phone call with David Harris.)

Qualitative Research Target

Gender: 50% Male, 50% Female

Ages: 25 to 65

Additional Demographic Screening:

A total of 25-30 research buyers will participate in the online projective activities phase of this project. We will recruit a mix of clients across industries, experience, gender, B2B vs. consumer, company size, and sector. About half of the respondents will have a procurement department, and the other half will not. For the IDI portion of the study, we will select a minimum of 15 particularly productive respondents from the first phase. During recruiting, we will screen and re-screen to ensure we have the desired mix of respondents. To ensure our sample is of the highest quality, we will pay an appropriate honorarium to these professionals.

Deliverables

Reporting: Formal Report

Presentation: Web-based

Funding Timeline (once project is approved): 45 days

Timing: 6 weeks from funding to delivery of final report

Supplier

Company: Insight & Measurement, LLC

Previous Projects: 3

Rating:

Supplier's Qualifications:

This project will be led by Insight & Measurement, with support from Aha, a Strategic Online Qual Platform, RealityCheck, and GreenBook, the organization behind the GRIT Report, IIeX, and other innovative industry thought-leadership events, publications, and research.

This project will be personally managed by David F. Harris, President of Insight & Measurement.

Dave has more than 20 years of experience in the marketing-research industry. For many of those years, he was a corporate research buyer. At GSK (GlaxoSmithKline), he and his team bought and managed over 900 marketing-research and insights projects annually. So, he brings both client and vendor perspectives to this project.

He has also designed and implemented training programs on everything from how to be a qualitative moderator and how to write about qualitative research to conjoint and discrete choice. In 2014 he published, The Complete Guide to Writing Questionnaires: How to Get Better Information for Better Decisions. His book begins with why clients need to do qualitative research first, before designing surveys. He has designed and managed online qualitative research for 10 years and IDIs for more than 20. He passion is collaborating with experts to ensure we get the insights we need to make sound decisions for our organizations.

The partner companies for the online platform will be Aha and RealityCheck. Aha offers a comprehensive suite of interactive activities and methods include: Storytelling, image + text collage, innovative video upload tools, webcam integration, concept testing methods, home use test templates, mobile app for in-the-moment occasions, perceptual mapping, social/community activities, quant tools, and robust analytics. The experienced Aha team will provide support with study design, project management, respondent recruiting, and analytic consulting.

RealityCheck is a global partnership of experienced creative facilitators, strategic conceptual analysts, and storytellers who believe in the power of human insight to make marketing better. Their co-founder, Jim Chastain, will be supporting the design and implementation of this project. The team at RealityCheck specializes in getting at human insights, not just consumer insights, through empathic listening and by thinking of people more as narrators of their story than research respondents. This opens them up and gains insight that hasn’t been heard before.

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Corporate Research Buyers Speak: How to Engage and Sell Us To Become Our Preferred Insights Partner