3 Things You Should Be Asking of Your Market Research Suppliers

Editor’s Note: This commentary is featured in the GRIT Insights Practice Report. The GRIT Insights Practice Report is your #1 guide to brand success in the insights industry, featuring the GRIT Future List, client perspectives, and emerging methodologies. You’ll learn what’s making strides, what trends are worth following, and where your company fits into it all.

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Only 27% of buyers are satisfied with the recommended business actions their market research suppliers provide. On the other end of the research process, and equally low in satisfaction, is how well a supplier understands a buyer’s business to begin with. Can you relate?

With these numbers, it’s no wonder that only 56% of market research suppliers were able to grow their revenue in the past year. Suppliers are falling short on two of the most important drivers for customer satisfaction. Yet when a supplier understands your business and can leverage those learnings into recommended actions, you win. When you win, you’re more likely to work again with that supplier, and to tell your friends about them. This translates into a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) for the supplier. And a high NPS (>65) is empirically tied to well-above-average Net Retention.

Why does this matter? Because the more satisfied you are, the more work your supplier gets from you, and the better positioned they are to improve and optimize their research methodologies to ensure your continued success—and, by extension, to grow their own business. This is the key ingredient to long-term sustained growth for any business, whether you’re a chocolate factory or a market research company.

So, how can you help your market research supplier optimize and grow? Ask these three things of them:

1. Make sure they understand your business.

This requires investment from both you and your supplier. Your supplier needs to employ client services and research teams with intellectual curiosity, the commitment to understand your business, and the innate wiring to do great work. Their understanding needs to go beyond the current project at hand; they must become true students of your business. Likewise, you, as the buyer, don’t have to treat your relationship with your supplier as only a transactional one. Rather, spending the time to educate your supplier on your key objectives and initiatives for the year, and what success looks like for you when your plans are achieved, is what helps create a real partnership with them.

 2. Make sure they execute your project with greatness

Suppliers tend to be strong in this area already. Conducting the research and implementing the research plan earns top marks with buyers in terms of overall satisfaction. The market research industry has invested wisely in quality standards, automation to create efficiencies and reduce errors, and the implementation of tried-and-true methodologies, among other strategies. Combined with attracting people who are logical, show high attention to detail, and have great project management skills, the industry has created a recipe for success. Your job as the buyer is to hold your supplier to their own standards and demand quality at every turn.

3. Make sure they recommend business actions

For this third and arguably most valuable “ask” to be possible, the first two imperatives need to be executed well. But it’s important to understand that this goes far beyond your supplier just reporting what the data says. It’s about understanding the data and then how to activate those insights. For example, presenting high-level statistics on non-category buyers and their purchase habits is just reporting on the data. Recommending specific attributes to communicate to non-brand users that would have the most impact on persuading them to try your brand, along with the best media channels to harness, is a recommended business action. While this capability is less commonplace in the market research industry today, it’s nevertheless becoming more popular as hundreds of millions in private equity are now funding insights firms to buy activation agencies and vice versa. Your supplier should have the skills and tools available to give you actionable next steps that make the most sense for your business.

As outlined in this report, there are many trends, technological advances, and other innovations influencing the market research industry today, but at the end of the day, your supplier will succeed when they intimately understand your needs and objectives and make actionable recommendations that can significantly impact your business. You, as a buyer, will need to invest the time and resources in your supplier, just as your supplier will need to acquire and develop the right talent and tools. With this type of partnership, you not only increase your satisfaction with your supplier but the industry can truly flourish and grow.