Video Transcript

Differing businesses have different levels of research maturity when it comes to leveraging internal and external insights to solve business problems. In this context, maturity means the sophistication of your research tactics and your ability to incorporate those insights into your business. Business size does not always equate to research maturity.

Let’s take an example. If you’re a marketing manager at an enterprise grade technology business, you might want to understand the buying habits of your executive purchasers. So you’re going to want to ask, What do we already have? You’re going to want to assess your resources. You’re going to want to look inside your organization for data that might already exist through your sales team or in your systems. This can be information from your customer support logs, your analytics platforms, your CRM database, or even insights from your sales team.

Once you started with what you have, you can then move outside your organization and start looking external into the broader market. Maybe these executives are part of a trade association and that trade association publishes a state of the industry report. These can be a treasure trove of information for your project. Once you’ve gathered off the shelf and internal resources, you can start doing original research to answer your question. Primary research will be assisting in collecting data to answer your question, and it will be unique to your business problem. Primary research could look like running a survey or interviewing these executives.

So when should you be investing in a more mature research process? Well, this often comes down to the inflection point of your business. Maybe you’re wanting to bring a new product to market or go to market in a new location. Maybe you want to change your competitive strategy or you want to redo your brand and messaging. These are instances where you would want to invest additional time and financial resources into your research maturity.

So remember, look at what you have. Look outside your organization. Start collecting original insights and integrate those into your organization and happy researching.