INSIGHT on INSIGHT: Planning the Delivery of Results
In my experience, a typical research project literally produces ten times more data and analysis than what any client will take time to review. And it isn’t uncommon for only about 10% of what the client reviews to ever get shared or presented with internal or external partners.
Do the math and that means about 1% of the material from a research project will be utilized to produce almost all the value.
The highly concentrated nature of those results increases the importance of how material is filtered and what makes it into the final client delivery.
In addition to having clear, well-thought-out objectives, successful projects understand how the client expects to receive and share the results. To be prepared for this, take time to determine how each of the following will apply to your project:
Who will be the audience for the results? The attention span and expectations of a C-suite audience will require a very different deliverable than what a marketer or sales person or buyer or market research role might want to see.
How does the client plan to use the results? Insights gathered solely for internal decision-making can often be summarized in a point-counterpoint manner to help decision-makers weigh the merits of each option. Insights intended to sell an idea externally may require more selective filtering and manipulation to support a single conclusions or recommendation.
How much material does the client want to see in the final summary? There is always a tricky balance between including enough information to provide a complete picture and not providing so much information that the key insights get lost. Some clients will devour a 100-slide deck while others are hoping for a 5-page executive summary.
How does the client want the results to be organized? Most insights are only meaningful in the relative context of comparing them across groups (i.e. females are three times more likely to prefer my product compared to males). It is critical that the presentation of results makes these comparisons as easy as possible. For example, it is important to know if your client will be looking for differences across products, across retailers or across demographics so results can be presented accordingly.
What delivery format does the client prefer? Great data visualization typically reduces the need for lengthy explanations while numeric tables can occasionally be the cleanest presentation. Understand if your client wants a graph-heavy Powerpoint deck with limited text, a lengthy Word document written more like a whitepaper, an audio or video summary, or a mix of these components.
Does the client value inferred or implied insights or recommendations that might not be directly supported with the available results? While some clients may only expect objective observations pulled directly from and supported by the data, a good researcher will almost always develop new hypotheses or triangulate data points to arrive at deeper insights or recommendations that go beyond the black-and-white results spelled out in the research. While less definitive, these connections can often produce some of the greatest value. Because researchers approach results with a different perspective and less bias, they can also often produce thoughtful or creative recommendations that would be far less obvious to the client.
How deep will the client want to get into the data? While some clients may be clear data geeks planning to do their own analysis, others may only choose to get into the more granular data if the topline results are less clear or less appealing than they wanted.
Before you get too far down the path of design and execution, make sure you’ve considered what the final deliverable will look like. Take time to answer the above questions and you’ll have a clear plan of attack once the data starts pouring in.