post

November 7, 2016

Read time: 3min

Increase efficiency in your market research teams

Market Logic Team

Nothing drives me crazier than inefficiency. I often ask myself, “Where am I heading? Where do I want my team heading? And where do I want my company to make the biggest impact?” The answer: limit duplication and swirl. So how do you do this? Simplify for your market research teams. Don’t get stuck looking at the big picture; think about the day to day time sucks that directly impact researchers.

Along with weekly team meetings, here are three fundamental actions I believe drive efficiency in market research organizations:

1. Execute market research easily

Ideally, before a researcher commissions new work, she would explore what research has already been done and collaborate with fellow researchers in similar categories. In a perfect world, they would have time to share what they know and all previous research done that addresses real learning gaps and builds on existing knowledge. But the reality isn’t perfect. Researchers feel exhausted by the mountain of paperwork required just to get a study out the door. They have little to no energy remaining. By making market research easier to execute, it saves researchers’ time and energy.

2. Find and share insights conveniently

When researchers do search your knowledge repository, make it as easy for them as possible. This can be a bit nitty-gritty but it’s key to overall success. One of my team’s jobs is to ensure the right filters are available and are easily navigated, for example by category, brand, or country. The search experience is organized in such a way that when you want to find consumer verbatims, you only see those and are not also inundated with final reports. My goal is to help guide users through the search experience in a dynamic way so they find exactly what they’re looking for to connect the dots.

3. Ensure teams are speaking the same language

This one is a personal passion point for me. Having worked with large, federated organizations, it’s common to see various research language from team to team. Even simple differences like calling an “A&U” a “U&A” can impede insight sharability. What’s the point of finally getting people into a system to find what they are looking for only to realize they can’t understand it due to language variances? If that happens, all the value of an insight-sharing platform is lost. Make it easy to promote universal research language, by providing clear explanations for terms in tool tips and training so your team never runs into that problem.

Lost time is a waste. Why not increase efficiency and decrease needless duplication of tasks by testing my top three actions. Looking forward to your thoughts.