Market Connections recently conducted a national survey of education and state and local IT professionals, and will release the findings in a report available on its website on Tuesday, August 14th.�

The report gives insight into the state and local public sector’s top IT priorities, IT challenges, top future IT investment areas, most valued vendor attributes, most popular sources of IT information, and the IT procurement process.�

This report is an excellent investment for those wishing to better understand the workings of the education and state and local IT markets.� Make sure to visit www.marketconnectionsinc.com next week to order your copy of the 2007 Guide to IT Challenges and Priorities: State and Local Public Sector IT Marketing Report!

I just wanted to let you know that Market Connections’ July newsletter� will be going out next week on Tuesday, July 24th.� This month the focus is on best practices for customer satisfaction improvement and the differences between quantitative and qualitative research.� Please click here if you’re interested in signing up to receive it!� �

Research is a significant investment for any organization. Equally important, a poorly designed or executed program can have a seriously detrimental impact on your organization’s ability to make effective and timely decisions. The tips below will help ensure you gain the most value from your research provider and, as a result, your research project.

Involve your research firm from the start
Call the research firms you’re considering and discuss your business intelligence needs before issuing an RFP, as their input may actually help you refine your objectives and create a more level playing field for comparison of proposals. And, once you’ve selected the research firm, get them involved from the very beginning, as their expertise will be very valuable in defining and developing an effective program.

Provide thorough input to the project
Surprises and secrets between clients and research companies are non-productive and, in some cases, even detrimental to research programs. To ensure your research partner optimizes the program design and execution, share a complete overview of your organization’s current status — both good and bad — in the beginning, and maintain that openness throughout the project.

Ask for more than one option
Ask your research firm to provide alternative approaches — including the pros and cons of each— for meeting your research objectives. This may not only save money, but also provide ideas for enhancing the project.

Stick to the program
While unexpected occurrences sometimes dictate last-minute changes, do your very best to avoid them. Changing course midstream puts you at risk of incurring additional charges and may increase the chance of data errors or oversights.

Trust your research firm
Choose a research partner in which you’re highly confident so you don’t have to micromanage the project. Once things are underway, step back and let the firm do its job.� However, do expect periodic updates and reporting throughout the project.

Understand what your research firm really means
In reviewing the management presentation of the report findings, ensure your research firm has clearly articulated the data analysis and has shared their opinions on the business implications to your organization. And, like most businesses, research has its own special language. During the project execution or management presentation review, don’t hesitate to ask if you or your associates don’t understand terminology, acronyms, data representations, or anything else.

Provide feedback to your research firm
Developing and executing research programs is an intense, highly focused endeavor. As such, most research firms develop a strong sense of ownership in the studies they conduct. After your research firm completes your project, provide them with honest and thorough feedback. Whether good or bad, it can go a long way toward improving future research projects.

View research as a team effort
The best clients treat their research firm as part of their team and utilize them as such. A team attitude, joint proposals, and joint presentations to executive stakeholders can truly have positive impacts.

Align with one full-service firm
Working with multiple research firms to execute your research projects may prohibit them from accumulating as much knowledge as possible about your firm and market. And, it’s unlikely you’ll receive long-term commitment and attention from any of them. Furthermore, some specialized firms may promote their method of research rather than recommend what would actually be the best approach for meeting your objectives. Partnering with a single full-service research firm — one with expertise in both a wide variety of research methods and in your specific market — usually results in better value in terms of program quality, client service, and prices.

*Adapted from Practical Marketing Research by Jeffrey Pope

When preparing to conduct a research study, your research provider may use some terminology with which you’re unfamiliar. Here are explanations of some of the most commonly used terms and concepts in the research business.

Quantitative Research
Quantitative studies collect statistically valid data from large respondent samples. Usually conducted via telephone, mail, or email with a carefully crafted survey instrument, their primary function is to confirm or disprove preliminary assumptions, insights, or ideas to drive informed decision-making and appropriate courses of action. Unlike other forms of research, the numerically calculated results of a quantitative study with a large enough number of respondents can be projected onto the market as a whole with an acceptable level of confidence.

Qualitative Research
On the other hand, qualitative studies, typically conducted via focus groups or in-depth interviews, explore participants’ emotional and rational reactions to, perceptions of, and attitudes toward a concept, product, or service. They can also reveal in-depth information on the product/service features most likely to drive increased usage. The exploratory nature of qualitative studies makes them valuable for developing initial insights and providing direction for further research. Due to the large amounts of open-ended data collected from smaller subsets of people, qualitative research requires a subjective interpretation of the data, which cannot be meaningfully quantified.

Population
The word “population” refers to the entire universe of people targeted for the research. In short, it’s your target audience for the study. It’s often necessary to collect different information from different segments of the population, such as varying titles, decision-makers, influencers, and such.

Sampling Frame
A sampling frame is a group that is representative of the population to be surveyed. For example, let’s say you want the opinions of federal IT decision-makers. A possible list source would be a federal government publication subscriber list, such as FCW. The subscriber list would be your sampling frame that you use to make inferences about the federal decision-maker population.

Sample Size
Sample size refers to the number of respondents in the sample who actually participate in a survey. This number is very important in determining the confidence interval in quantitative research studies.

Confidence Interval
You may recall hearing the plus-or-minus margin of error figure when opinion poll results are reported in the news. Derived from a formula based on the size of the total population as compared to the size of the sample surveyed, it defines how accurately the research results can be applied to the study’s population as a whole. For example, let’s say out of a total population of 25,000 federal program managers, you survey a small subset of 350, giving you a margin of error of +/- 5%. If 70% of the 350 people interviewed say they prefer X provider of networking services, given the margin of error of +/- 5%, the confidence interval tells us we can be reasonably confident that the preference of the entire population will fall between five percentage points above or below the preference rate of the sample. Therefore, the confidence interval indicates you can be reasonably confident that anywhere between 65% and 75% of the entire population would report the same preference of networking services if surveyed.

Screener/Filter Questions
Screeners or filters are questions that qualify respondents for subsequent questions or ensure that the survey is within their realm of experience. For example, if you are attempting to reach federal decision-makers, you should have a screener question that ensures you’re speaking to a federal government employee and that the person has at least some level of decision-making responsibility relevant to your offering.

Many organizations utilize customer research to expand and enhance their business intelligence, measuring everything from satisfaction levels to future purchase intent to interest in a new product or service offering. However, many of these companies – even some large enterprises – don’t capture this and other customer data in a centralized database to further extend this intelligence.

Certainly, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system or centralized database – which are available in numerous levels of sophistication – is a serious investment in terms of the technology cost, initial data collection and implementation time, as well as ongoing maintenance and management.� But the improved decision making and marketing segmentation opportunities that result from effectively mining the captured data can provide a very handsome return on that investment.

Once you make the commitment to developing a centralized customer database - and insist that your staff share their customer knowledge – it’s important to uniformly populate the tool upfront with as much useful information as possible.� This includes customer decision-maker and influencer contact information and functions, purchased products and services, length of the customer relationship, size and locations of the customer organization, and so forth.

Mining the Data for New Intelligence
As sales and marketing staff use the database to implement various outreach programs, the results of those efforts – response times, additional purchases made, and customer feedback – should be added to the database.� Additionally, the organization should capture information collected via traditional customer research methods, including satisfaction surveys.

As your customer database grows richer and more robust over time, your organization can perform increasingly sophisticated data mining and analyses to identify patterns and predict behaviors related to customer loyalty, product and service preferences, purchasing cycles, price sensitivity, customer complaints, and much more.� From there, you can put these new insights to work, whether it’s more effectively segmenting sales and marketing programs and messages, developing more appealing offerings, easing transitions between sales and account management staff, and a host of other activities.

A Case in Point
While mining a centralized customer database can tell you what certain groups of customers are doing, only talking to them via qualitative and quantitative research can tell you why they behave a certain way.� For example, data mining showed a computer network provider that large companies were more likely to purchase 24-hour support.� This information helped drive insightful questions on a broad customer survey, which revealed that these larger customers wanted “peace of mind” regarding system performance, while smaller companies were more concerned with the overall cost of system maintenance.

The network provider used this new data to develop a highly successful bundled service plan which included 24-hour online support and discounted system upgrades. The new plan, which was targeted at only the largest customer and prospect organizations with a messaging campaign focused on 24/7 support, quickly became one of the company’s most profitable offerings.

If properly developed and maintained, a centralized customer database is a powerful business intelligence tool – both on its own and when used in conjunction with traditional research methods.� In fact, regardless of the resources required to sustain it, such a tool provides a sharp competitive edge that companies with aggressive growth goals simply can’t afford to ignore.

Business intelligence is only valuable if the organization can put it to use in ways that will benefit performance. In fact, some companies shy away from market research because prior studies failed to deliver data that they could realistically act upon to affect improvements.

To avoid such a mishap, Market Connections advocates what is sometimes referred to as a “backwards” approach to the research design phase, wherein the research firm and client collaborate upfront to define how the research results will be used. This process requires not only defining program objectives, but drilling down further to explore data gaps that could be inhibiting sales, marketing, or operational improvements. The result is a clear understanding of the content, depth and data views that need to be delivered in the final analysis report.

From there, the research firm can determine the types of analyses required to match those needs, and then design a closely aligned survey. In fact, since it clearly discerns between “must have” and “would be nice to have” intelligence, this approach naturally helps streamline the survey instrument (which could translate into a more cost-effective research program).

For example, we recently helped one client conduct a study on buying behavior around its products. Prior to developing the survey, the client solicited internal feedback and learned that large companies tend to prefer their products more than mid-size companies. We could have simply structured the questionnaire to confirm or disprove this hypothesis. And, when the research results confirmed it, our client would have interesting, but not necessarily actionable, results.

Instead, we included additional questions on the survey that explored the perspectives of large businesses on purchase motivators and various aspects of the buying experience – both relative to our client and its competitors. We also sought more specific knowledge on preferred advertising and promotion techniques. The resulting report gave our client not only a deeper understanding of each segments’ product knowledge and preferences, but also insights into more effective targeting and conversion strategies.

Again, collaborate upfront with your research partner to thoroughly explore information gaps and related actionable results. And, give the researchers access to other internal stakeholders for similar discussions. Though it takes more time upfront, you’ll enjoy a much bigger return on your research investment.

Segmenting your target markets and audiences opens up opportunities for more focused and effective sales, marketing, and even product development. For example, while overall sales for a product are strong, a segmented view could reveal that only one or two customer types or titles are driving that success. This information can help shape strategic decisions around whether a portion of the marketing or product development dollars should be concentrated on those high-potential customer types, how messaging can be tailored to address their unique needs, how sales or channel partners can more effectively serve them, and more.

Many organizations rely on research for such business intelligence. With the correct survey design and analysis, quantitative customer and prospect surveys can reveal promising segmentation strategies. In fact, some researchers utilize statistical techniques such as correlation and cluster analyses to aid the development of segmentation insights.

Some of the categories that B2B and B2G organizations commonly use to segment their customers and prospects include:

• Organization size: revenue, number of employees, number of locations
• Purchase behavior: annual purchase value, frequency, projected purchase value, length of customer status
• Purchase process: motivators and drivers, influencers, final decision makers, steps, length of process
• Usage: number of users, frequency and cycles of usage
• Location: characteristics of operation locations, geographic clusters, political considerations, environmental factors.

Researchers and stakeholders should collaborate during survey design to help ensure that the granularity in which the organization attempts to collect and view segmented data is kept to levels that are actionable. Such decisions can be impacted by the sales/channel model, by plans for new product development, and by other business considerations. In addition, cost-effectively executing segmented marketing is also dependent upon your organization’s database resources and capabilities as well as the degree to which rental email and postal lists, trade magazines and web sites, industry events, and so forth can be segmented.

Though there will be some natural limitations that must be considered, the more segmented your market approach is, the more relevant you will be to customers and prospects.

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.

Common sense tells us that the harder it is to reach and complete surveys with qualified respondents, the more costly and time consuming the research project will be. But, how do professional research firms assess the required level of effort in advance so that they can determine the most appropriate methodologies and provide reasonably accurate project estimates and schedules? They establish an estimated incidence rate.

Simply put, an incidence rate is the frequency of something occurring in a given population. Specifically in market research, prior to a project we estimate the number of people who, once we get them on the phone, will not qualify for the survey, or will refuse to participate. This estimate helps guide the cost of the project. If 4 out of 10 people, once we get them on the phone, qualify for and complete the survey, the overall incidence rate is 40%.

The more specific your audience parameters or “screeners” are, the lower the incidence rate will be, thereby increasing the required number of people to be called. For example, the chance of completing surveys with 200 mid-level IT managers in organizations larger than $20 million is much better than if those same IT managers must be located in the northeast and use a specific brand of servers. Hence, the second sample population would require more money and time to identify. In fact, the difference of only 10 percentage points in incidence rates translates into thousands of more contact names and dollars required.

In addition, the quality of the contact list has a big impact on the incidence rate. Obviously, using a company’s customer list to conduct a customer satisfaction survey will produce a much higher incidence rate than reaching out to prospects to conduct a market awareness study. And, of course, in-house lists that are highly targeted and frequently scrubbed perform better than lists acquired from outside sources.

Good research firms calculate the actual incidence rate for every study they complete. Then, when estimating an upcoming project for a client, they compare incidence rates for past studies that have similarities to the one at hand. They then factor in their experience with the market, the list source, the methodology (e-mail, phone, or mail), the subject matter, and so forth, to estimate the incidence rate. From there, the research pros can determine the required fielding resources, likely timing, and other project design elements in order to build a realistic research approach, budget and schedule. Equally important, they continuously monitor the actual incidence rate as they’re conducting the study so, if need be, they can attempt to mitigate the difference.

So, unless you’re repeating a study for benchmarking purposes, you’re better off not making research budget and schedule assumptions in a vacuum. Instead, turn to a professional research partner — with experience relevant to your specific market and needs — and ask for an estimate and schedule based on an educated incidence rate.