When organizations engage a research firm for a project, it’s common that multiple departments or work groups — perhaps marketing, sales, customer service, and product development — are counting on the resulting data to drive their individual performance improvements. And indeed, though one research project typically can’t meet too many conflicting objectives, it often can benefit multiple internal end-users to varying degrees. But, the key to delivering that value across the organization is to give your research firm access to those diverse end-user groups during the upfront planning of the study.

However, it sometimes works in just the opposite fashion. The client’s project manager insists on being the only point of contact for the research firm, citing complex internal processes or incompatible schedules as reasons for blocking access to the end-users of the data. Unfortunately, this approach typically results in a more time-consuming and costly survey development process as well as at least a few unhappy end-users when the research results are finally delivered.

Our advice is to trust your research partner to collaborate with the end-users — and willingly facilitate those meetings. True research experts will help your end-users:

• Define and explore their information needs and business challenges within a framework of what can be realistically accomplished with the research methodology, budget, target audience, and so forth.
• Identify common needs across disparate end-user groups.From there, the research firm can more effectively prioritize objectives and then structure the research to deliver on as many of them as possible.
• Explain, in research terms, why some of those needs can’t be met with the project at hand so that end-users have aligned expectations and aren’t disappointed at the end of the project.
• Advise end-users on other sources or means of gathering the business intelligence that the current study can’t deliver.

Indeed, when the research firm collaborates directly with the end-users during planning, the resulting study benefits more areas of the organization. And that means a higher return on your research investment.

When properly planned, a research project can often meet multiple objectives in disparate departments within an organization. But here’s even more good news: research can also enhance other areas of the business for which it’s not even planned or intended.

Market Connections has a client that frequently conducts focus groups and surveys with customers and prospects to gain intelligence on how to improve the functionality and relevancy of its web-based products. But, this client doesn’t stop there when it comes to getting value from their research results. They carefully study the focus group video clips and read the survey transcripts for comments that may not necessarily relate to the research topic, but that provide insights into other areas of the business.

For example, the client could tell from an innocuous customer response to a product-related survey question that a particular account person wasn’t giving that account enough attention. Another time, a prospect happened to reference in passing how impressive a competitor’s proposal was. While this information didn’t relate at all to the research objectives, hearing it when studying the focus group video inspired the client to call some contacts and learn more about that competitor’s pitch approach.

Some research clients even incorporate clips from focus group videos into sales and management meeting presentations and training, enabling the sales force and account teams to hear first hand what people are saying about the company and its offerings. This, in turn, drives customer service improvements and more effective sales pitches. The same is true for customer satisfaction surveys. Rather than focusing only on the scores, we help clients glean from the survey results the most important satisfaction attributes across the spectrum of customers. Some clients almost immediately convert those findings into resonating selling points and marketing messages.

In other cases, research projects fuel story angles and content for press pitches, resulting in trade magazine articles that position the organization as an industry thought leader. This is especially true for research that reveals emerging market trends or usage patterns.

So, next time your organization conducts a research project, consider pulling together a cross-functional team to thoroughly study the video tapes and transcripts. It’s very likely that, by viewing the data from a holistic business intelligence perspective that goes beyond the original research objectives, you’ll discover improvement possibilities you never even imagined.