Becoming the Strategic Advisor

Researchers are feeling the pinch, with teams regularly downsized, and the value of insights professionals questioned. If Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are losing influence, and AI tools enable anyone to run research, why spend money on professional researchers?

The answer lies in researchers’ ability to be strategic advisors that guide and enable teammates. To do this, though, researchers need to be actively engaging with stakeholders to proactively offer support in a decentralized, “always-on” model of research. They need to learn the language of the decision-maker, whether that’s a product manager or a Chief Financial Officer, so that they can offer clear, unambiguous recommendations based on an always-current, holistic understanding of consumer needs and desiresFinally, researchers need to become the voice of the customer, being the one person in the organization that has access to all of the customer data and can act as their representative in business strategy conversations.

The Role of the Research Advisor

The future of research is a decentralized, always-on, information gathering system in which multiple teams are constantly running their own projects. Some researchers are probably already sobbing in the corner at the fact they don’t execute every project. And we can understand the fear that allowing other teams to run research makes researchers redundant. But it’s actually the opposite - the more research becomes commonplace in the organization, the more research becomes valued, and the more important the researcher becomes.   

As a strategic advisor, we should be working with teams to ensure the success of their projects and aiding in transforming that data into actionable insights that can be immediately implemented. That starts with understanding the needs of each team, recommending appropriate tools and techniques, training colleagues on the right equipment, and then helping as needed to ensure the smooth execution of projects. After all, this is the true role of an advisor: being the expert in the room who can guide the group through to a successful end result.

AI moderators and other AI-enabled market research technology can gather useful information, but that data is worthless if it doesn’t come from the right audience. Let’s help our teammates set up and run projects, support them in understanding the gathered data, assist them in turning that information into actionable insights, and then support them by identifying key next steps. Finally, let’s make sure that the gathered data goes into a central repository for use by all teams across the organization instead of being forgotten in a corner of a shared drive.

As part of directly supporting teams, researchers will be asked for their recommendations.  Unfortunately, many experts are hesitant to directly give their suggestions and instead tend to hem and haw. That means that researchers need to get comfortable with uncertainty: organizations do not have the time to spend months running research to get a perfect answer. 

They need a 80% confident answer NOW so that they can execute and move on. Researchers need to get comfortable saying “the data indicates that this is the right decision” while not having every single piece of information required to make a perfect decision. And it’s fine to admit when we aren’t certain, when the data is lacking, when more research is needed: honesty is always the best option.

Learning Decision-Maker Language

Of course, a big part of supporting other teams is speaking their language. We must keep in mind that for many teams, there are a limited number of business outcomes they are focused on achieving.  If we wish to be successful, we must translate research insights into factors that positively influence these key outcomes. Many of our key stakeholders will be members of the C-Suite who are most often focused almost exclusively on growth and profitability. 

For these leaders, metrics showing improved marketing performance will fail to impress unless they are directly tied to clear growth indicators. Does strong brand awareness really matter to a CFO if sales are dropping?  Or will trumpeting market recognition statistics at a time of declining sales and revenues instead cause senior leaders to question the utility and effectiveness of the marketing and market research teams? 

Researchers love to claim that they are storytellers, so let’s start telling stories to our colleagues to help explain our work. To use the previous example of the brand awareness metric, we can tell a story that explains how research shows that the entire market is suffering but that our sales drop is quite minimal compared to our competitors due to our strong brand awareness. 

Suddenly, the entire conversation has changed from one of misalignment between marketing and growth to how research and marketing are keeping the company in the game despite the adverse economic climate.  We’re successfully fighting churn and maintaining consumer spending despite the headwinds instead of failing to properly grow.

When combined with assisting various teams in their research efforts and assimilating all gathered data into a centralized repository, along with learning to communicate effectively with everyone in the company, an interesting transformation takes place. The researcher suddenly shifts from being an employee whose work is often undervalued and misunderstood to the one person in the company that truly understands the needs of the customer. 

The researcher has not only seen all of the consumer data available, but they understand how that impacts each team and can clearly communicate the needs of the consumer to every member of the organization.  That moves the researcher from passively gathering data to an active participant in decision-making by serving as the representative of the customer. Suddenly, just by repositioning their work, the researcher has gone from a cost center of dubious value to a key teammate of critical importance for every decision.

It’s not easy to do all of this, and it represents a major shift in mindset for researchers. The good news is that we have the tools to do this already; we have access to strategy planning documents and can easily learn about the business outcomes teams are focused on by asking about their business goals. Once we take advantage of those data sources and practice repositioning ourselves, our data, and our stories, we will see increased security and strategic relevance that will propel us long into the future in any organization.