Getting business partners to act on your recommendations can be a real test of influence.  We know that things like trust, stress, and relationships can be quite influential in business decisions, and I blogged earlier this year about how influence is one of the 5 skills that researchers can build to improve impact.

That’s why I was excited to find an HBR blog that espoused the importance of brief impressions on influence, and provides some tips for improving not just your first, but all future “next impressions”.  Thinking of these interactions as television commercials is a fun way to try to improve your influence on business partners (and is a bit of a natural leap for those of us who conduct research on commercials and advertisements for a living).

• Capture the audience’s attention-ads use humor or emotion to snap the audience to attention; can you use something similar in your next interaction?  Past research shows that funny people are more successful in business.   And some of our most recent work found that using emotion can help break-down business partners’ pre-conceived notions.
• Convey a clear message-it’s all about knowing you’re message up-front.  Know what you want the “viewer” to take away from your interaction.  This dovetails nicely with our recent work on embedding customer knowledge, which focuses on having Research inject their insights into the company’s natural learning patterns—don’t fight other information sources, co-opt them.
• Differentiate-understand what makes you different and highlight those qualities.  Think of the skills that you bring to the table—insight, business acumen, synthesis, etc.—and specialize to have the most impact you can.

If you think of these things in your daily interactions you can start to brand yourself as a true partner in the organization, one 30-second interaction at a time.

Related Blogs:

• 5 Skills to Build to Improve Impact, Part 3: Influence
• The Key to Your Success: Humor?
• How to Teach a Know-it-All

Related Member Materials:

• Closing the Researcher Influence Gap
• Gut-Busting Learning Experiences
• Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business
• Skills for the Next Generation of Market Researchers

In his book Passion Capital: The World’s Most Valuable Asset, Paul Alofs presents the importance of culture to long-term business success.  We’ve done the analysis, and we know that that culture isn’t just a general business concept: environmental factors drive insight productivity.

With that in mind, here are Alofs’ 8 rules for creating a passionate work culture and some of the specific lessons Research can take from them.

1. Hire the right people-Alofs recommends that you hire for passion and commitment first, then experience, and credentials third.  For Research, we like to say that curiosity is king: researchers with intellectual curiosity are more likely to be better at insight generation.  Look for people with a diversity of interests and who seek to ask questions that no one else does: those are the right people for the function.
2. Tend the weeds-this is Alofs’ descriptive way of telling you to keep your eye out for those who don’t fit the culture.  People who don’t share your passion or focus can create a negative environment, and should be replaced with those who truly want to push your mission forward.
3. Work, Reward, Repeat-folks need to understand that long hours may sometimes be necessary but will be recognized and rewarded.
4. Be ambitious-thinking big will lead to big rewards.  We’ve seen Research functions greatly improve insight quality by establishing a principled risk-taking environment: Research needs to be more than the sum of its data!
5. Celebrate diversity-Alofs notes that differences in background and interested generate energy.
6. Communicate-and this doesn’t just mean talking.   It’s important to let people speak freely.  Even when providing feedback, we’ve seen managers foster individual ownership of development by using “Socratic” coaching methods.
7. Focus on physical space-Alofs focuses on the overall building, which should foster collaboration, but I’ve blogged in the past about how you can optimize your individual workspace.
8. Take the long view-Alofs notes that people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in the short-term but underestimate what they can do in 5.  And for researchers, trying to push the future of the organization is our job: embrace it!

Are you able to lead a presentation that captures and keeps the audiences’ attention and teaches them something?

Communication is an essential part of a researchers’ job—the best insights in the world mean nothing if you cannot get your organization to take action on them.  Our research identifies communication and influence as key skills for the next generation market researcher.

So, when the oh-so-talented team of executive advisors at the Corporate Executive Board gathered for a few days of training (yep–we’re trying to make our presentations more engaging and effective for our members as well!), I knew the topic would be one researchers would be interested in. Below are 10 of the top tips from CEB’s masters of effective presentations. Apply these in your next presentation and let us know how it goes!

1. Start with Confidence, Purpose & Content. The audience should know you’re in charge right away, and that they will learn something very quickly.
2. Half as Long, Twice as Good. Commit to every point you make. Never half-say anything: say it confidently or don’t say it at all. If you can’t decide whether to say something, don’t—everything is premeditated and focused.
3. You’re Happy to be Here. Don’t just smile. Be excited to be here and let it show.
4. Silence is Power. Be comfortable with silence. Use it to own the room throughout the presentation.
5. Believe it. Show us that you truly believe your message.
6. Prioritize. You are here to tell the audience what is most important. Which information matters most? Where should they focus their attention? Tell then what to do, what matters, and why.
7. Don’t Talk What. Talk Why. Why are we talking about this? Why should we care? Why is this hard? Why do we believe we should change? Why are we showing you this information? Always be answering why—that makes for a much more fascinating presentation.
8. Don’t Address Slides. Address the Audience, Using the Slides. You are here to teach and engage people in the room. Use the slides to do that, but make sure you address the people, not the slides.
9. Transition with Purpose. Never say “page 9” as your transition. Tell me why we’re leaving page 8. All transitions are about why.
10. Manage the Clock—Openly. Managing time from the very beginning. Once you have a time problem, it’s too late to solve it.

I recently read an article by John Tierney at the New York Times about the downside of open office layouts. Many companies choose to forgo high walls between workspaces in an effort to bring down physical barriers to communication and encourage idea-sharing and collaboration among workers.

 One consequence of these redesigned office spaces is that lack of “speech privacy” is now the number one office grievance cited by employees.  What’s more, open office plans can actually backfire. According to Professor Anne-Laure Fayard, quoted in the article, studies show that “people have shorter and more superficial conversations in open offices because they’re self-conscious about being overheard.” The Corporate Executive Board office in Arlington, VA has a fairly open layout, and I admit to having sent instant messages to coworkers sitting only a few feet away so that our conversations wouldn’t disturb others. So much for encouraging open communication…

And what about the more figurative noise that can invade our work life and distract us from our priorities? There is no magic white noise machine to drown out bad research requests, but functions that have criteria to easily assess the importance of ad hoc requests can put some important boundaries on their work space and cut through noise from internal clients.

Norwich Union uses a project prioritization scorecard, built back from firm strategy, to ensure that internal resources are allocated appropriately. In addition to enabling Research to match its level of support with the project’s impact, the scorecard’s transparency also encouraged line partners to ask better questions.

Disney screens out low value-added research with a formal review process to assess the impact of potential projects, and sends requests of questionable importance along to senior management for final arbitration. With this practice, Research reduced project volume by 75 percent.

Our offices might be getting noisier, but our to-do lists don’t need to be.

How common is this predicament: senior leaders have asked for more creativity, but then shoot down the novel suggestions they receive.  Organizations seek creativity to grow and improve, but simultaneously shun the groundbreaking results of their creative focus.  A recent article on CNN.com outlines the bias against creativity:  the folly of seeking certainty.

Our ancestors learned to seek certainty and predictability to ensure our survival, and now our organizations’ needs to change and try new things is suffering.  The author of the CNN article postulates that we often believe that an idea can be either practical or creative, but usually not both at once, and that leaves people subconsciously categorizing creativity as a luxury.   

But, as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.  To get through tough times, the tough need to get creative.   This means that researchers need to break through their own unconscious barriers to creativity to come up with true insight, and also the barriers put up by business partners to get the insight acted upon.  No sweat right?

Break through your own need for certainty

We need to foster comfort with uncertainty, which can be hard for those of us who find comfort in data.  But the best insights are created in departments that foster an open, creative culture:

• Assert judgments based on information and experience rather than simply relying on project outcomes.  As researchers we have a wealth of past experience and business exposure to draw from: Use It!
• Utilize your judgment to push research projects forward.  Hypothesize early and often throughout the research process to ensure research is finding true, new innovation. Read More »

When Google launched their Google Analytics product in 2005, the free tool was so wildly popular that the company had to temporarily shut down new signups a week after introduction due to overcapacity. Ecstatic at the new ability to study their visitors’ every move, website owners couldn’t wait to unlock the powerful capabilities of web analytics.

Many of those website owners, however, went on to discover just how tricky it is to analyze behavioral data. It might appear impressive that your company’s website traffic increased by 25% last month, but look a little closer and it may not be clear why. Did search rankings change, allowing people to find you more easily through search engines? Is it because a misleading paragraph on the home page is attracting customers who immediately click away when they realize they’re looking for an entirely different product? Or is it because an offline marketing campaign for your company’s website is has been surprisingly successful?

We recently completed a study on using web analytics in market research and uncovered some of the more challenging issues our members face:

• Challenge #1: Online segmentation is difficult without authentication information.
• Challenge #2: Web analytics efforts can collect an enormous amount of data, but determining what is useful and what is not is more ambiguous than one might think.
• Challenge #3: Web analytics is hard to explain to researchers and business partners alike.
• Challenge #4: Web analytics teams are not always well structured to integrate with market research.

Despite these challenges, web analytics can become a powerful tool for market research, whether to perform online segmentation or to increase sales conversions and lead generation. And, with the skyrocketing number of consumer transactions occurring online, it’s no longer an option to ignore how people are using your website.

MREB members, read our latest whitepaper An Introduction to Web Analytics to learn more about these challenges and how to overcome them.

Related Blogs:

• Segment Online, Even With Limited Data

Related Resources:

• Segment Online Consumers
• Integrating Analytics into Market Research
• Changing Role of Analytics for Market Research

Guest poster Kayleigh O’Keefe works with communications executives for our sister program the Communications Executive Council. This week she examines how to optimize internal social media collaboration across an organization.

As we’ve charted developments in the internal social media and collaboration space, we’ve seen many over-invest in the latest and greatest technology platforms. These efforts, such as implementing internal Facebook or Twitter-esque applications, met initial enthusiasm only then to see early adoption rates plummet and to struggle justifying value created for the business.

For the most part, these efforts failed because the platforms were non-intuitive and without an obvious purpose or benefit. Many companies wasted time and effort on employee sharing solutions that simply couldn’t compete with employees’ personal options. Before you begin experimenting with new social media options for employees, here’s what you need to beware of:

• With significant investment and application of the right principles, companies can create tremendous value from tools that allow employees to connect with and learn from one another. (see how one pharmaceutical company launched a wiki-style site to facilitate easy consumption of organizational knowledge)
• Companies should beware of efforts that require significant investment but feel unnatural for employees to use; these efforts will disappoint.
• Consider leveraging existing live and virtual employee interactions to redirect energy towards strategies that encourage peer learning. (for example, Research at Texas Instruments and Sabre Holdings have used this technology to identify expert opinions and tacit information) Read More »

The purchase funnel: that theory is so 1898.  Our friends at the Marketing Leadership Council recently blogged on HBR about changes in consumers’ purchase processes, and it looks like all of the information barraging consumers has caused them to adapt their shopping habits to cope with the noise.

For almost one-third of consumers the information is too much and rather than conducting a considered search they drop the work altogether and just zero in on a single brand.  And MLC research has found that decision simplicity in the purchase process is the #1 reason why consumers are likely to buy a product, do so repeatedly, and recommend it to others. 

In fact, brands that simplify customer decision making are:

• 86% more likely to be purchased
• 115% more likely to be recommended

The Council created a 15-question quiz to help you determine how simple—or complex—you’re making your customers’ purchase decisions.  And you can also access their HBR article on the new Decision Simplicity strategy.

Related resources:

• To Keep Your Customers, Keep it Simple
• Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights

Related blogs:

• Stretching Shopper Insights Resources
• Setting Up a Shopper Insights Shop
• Santa Won’t do your Insight-Shopping for You

Across the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a number of you at one of our member meetings on Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business.  These have been really great, interactive sessions with lively discussion and idea-sharing. 

One discussion point that has really been a hot topic at many of the meetings is how to get research results faster?  The speed of business is rapidly increasing and does not look to be slowing down any time soon.  In this “I need it now” world, how can Research adapt what we’re doing to better fit in?  Or, should we?

When a question in the forum asked what others do when colleagues request quick turnaround research, over half of the respondents said they would refer to a collected and synthesized repository of information (per below). 

We’ve seen one member, Motorola Mobility, do this particularly well, when they implemented a “quick-fire” synthesis process to be able to answer executives’ questions in as little as 24-48 hours.  Whose colleagues wouldn’t want that kind of a turnaround timeline?  In looking at the process, and how other research teams could imitate for like results, two parts stood out as key in making it a success:

• Ready Resources – their core library of collected and synthesized information
• Task Specialization – clearly defined roles aligned to the person who can make the best contribution in the fastest time

The other suggestion a number of Research Execs have brought up is to tap into online communities or panels for quick responses and feedback – whether managed internally or not, these can be a great option for quick information from a set of customers you already know you care about. 

Have you tried these ideas?  What have you found to be an effective way to get information into the hands of your business partners faster? 

Or, on the other hand, do you hold strong to the idea that we need to push back when business partners ask for results in a quick (/unreasonable?) timeframe?  When one of Research’s roles is to be a “risk-reducer,” it is certainly fair to argue that we should be looking for the best results and not compromise quality.  Poor quality research can lead to poor quality decisions – so maybe the question isn’t one of how to get information faster, but rather how to get research requests in a timelier manner?

So, I ask you, if your colleague asks for information that would be best answered with a survey that will take 8 weeks to field and get results, but they want results in 1 week, do you take that opportunity to educate them on the research process, and note it is not possible, or do you work to get them as much information as possible, while saying, “we can’t have a perfect answer”?

Is “good enough” good enough? 

Member resources:

• Embedding Customer Knowledge into the Business
• Motorola’s Quick-Fire Research Teams
• Wells’ Dairy’s Fan Panel

Related blogs:

• Just Say No: 5 Smart Ways to Disagree
• It’s Better to Be Fast Than Right
• Yes, You Can Unlock Insights from Social Media

Last year we ran a quick poll and found that fewer than 30% of research teams work all in the same office.  And even for those who have the luxury of a single-location team, we still have to deal with far-flung vendors and business partners, which can only mean one thing: dependence on the teleconference.  Check out your calendar and tell me, how many planners include dial-in instructions?  For me, it’s almost all of them (“Welcome to Corporate Executive Board Conferencing; please enter your passcode…”)

On HBR.com, consultant Keith Ferrazzi recently outlined the benefits of virtual meetings, noting that they have the potential to be more effective than in-person meetings.  To improve these multi-location meetings, the he offers a few tips:

1. Video, don’t just tele-using video is the best way to ensure participants are engaged, and it helps participants read each other—always a benefit to making actual progress in a meeting.
2. Formalize catch-up-reserving the first few minutes to talk about what’s going on in the participants’ lives will break the ice and make folks feel more connected to each other.
3. Assign tasks-making sure you formalize a minutes-takers, Q&A manager, white board guru, etc., will ensure folks stay engaged.
4. Banish “mute”-unless they’re on a train or airport, a little background noise proves that participants are paying attention and not multi-tasking during the meeting.
5. Penalize multi-taskers-don’t just discourage folks from checking email or working on something else while in a meeting, institute a multi-tasking fine jar or chore wheel. 

Come to think of it, I’d like to institute this last rule for in-person meetings too.  Teri, if you check that phone while we’re in this meeting you’ll be on whiteboard wipe-down duty for a week!

MREB members, access more information on how to manage dispersed or virtual teams and offshore research teams.  And let us know, how do you make the most of virtual get-togethers?

Member resources:

• Manage Dispersed or Virtual Teams
• Managing Offshore Research Teams
• Communication and Consultation Resources

Related blogs:

• Optimize Your Work Environment and Impact
• Get Ahead in Business (some bizarre recommendations)
• Poll Results: Dispersed Research Teams
• Build Global Research Teams to Support Growing Business Needs