Alterra Group Newsletter: January 29, 2010
Alterra Group's newsletter provides insights on how professional services firms can increase awareness of and demand for their services.
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Alterra Group is conducting a survey on the topic of account-based marketing (ABM) and we need your help. In this survey, we explore how prevalent ABM is in professional services, why firms are using it, how effective the approach is, and the key factors that drive success in ABM.
If you are familiar with the ABM approach and currently use ABM in your organization, we would value your participation. In appreciation of your time, we will give you an exclusive advance report of the results—outlining best practices from leading firms—and enter you into a drawing for a new Garmin navigation system. Please take 15 minutes to complete the survey.
The value of thought leadership surveys
Part One:
Scoping and Designing Surveys
Marketers, business developers and practice leaders at professional services firms face a familiar and increasingly difficult task: how to generate awareness of and demand for their services. Surveys can be an excellent way to address this challenge. A well-designed and well-executed survey can provide the content for a variety of marketing activities to showcase a firm’s expertise to prospective buyers. It also can provide substantive grist for the media relations mill to entice influential reporters and bloggers to write about the organization conducting the research.
Unfortunately, while there is a plethora of surveys produced by professional services firms, quantity doesn’t necessarily translate into quality. There are many examples of organizations investing months of time and a lot of money in survey research, only to have it generate little interest in the marketplace.
What separates surveys that are powerful lead and awareness generators from those that fall flat? In our extensive work on surveys during the past 15 years, we have identified a number of key practices across the survey design, execution, analysis and promotion process that are critical to creating surveys that deliver superior return on investment.
Here we focus on scoping and designing compelling survey research.
Scoping the research
The proliferation of surveys means firms must dig much deeper in their studies to capture audiences’ attention. As a result, it’s critical that a firm ultimately selects a survey research topic that is both important and highly relevant to its clients and prospects, as well as insufficiently covered by other surveys and research studies.
There are several ways of finding an issue that will win the attention of a firm’s target audience. In some cases, no “process” is required: A firm that knows its clients’ businesses well may be able to identify the top challenges those clients face and hone in on an appropriate topic and angle. However, other times a more rigorous approach is required. This typically involves a two part process: holding a “scoping” workshop with key subject-matter experts and business development professionals to provide their insights drawn from client work and sales conversations, and conducting in-depth secondary research to identify an aspect of the research topic that has not already been addressed by other organizations.
Designing the research
Once the research topic has been fully vetted and scoped, a firm then must address the challenging task of designing the research, which begins with developing a set of hypotheses about the topic. Hypotheses serve as formal guideposts to help ensure the research activities remain focused, and they force the research team to think about the logic of the research by presenting a preliminary story about the topic the team believes to be true (with the veracity of the story eventually supported or refuted by the research). It’s important that each hypothesis is not too broad that it can’t be covered adequately by a survey while, at the same time, is not so narrow that it makes it difficult for any new discovery to be made. In our experience, hypotheses are absolutely critical, as they help a firm avoid the “kitchen sink” approach to questionnaire development and make data analysis much more efficient and effective.
The hypotheses should be used to drive questionnaire development to ensure that only appropriate questions—i.e., those that will help prove or disprove the hypotheses—are included. When crafting the questionnaire, a firm should present the questions clearly in a sequence that flows logically, and ensure the end result takes no more than 20 minutes to complete. To encourage respondents to answer all the questions in the survey, a firm should create predominantly closed-end questions, avoid using questions that require a significant amount of thinking or calculation on the part of the survey respondent, and be sure that all questions can be answered by the target participant.
Next Issue: The most effective ways of executing and analyzing survey research to uncover high-value insights
Please visit our website for more in-depth insights on this very important topic.
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