Defining Your Purchase Journey’s North Star

Shopping for research technology today can feel like wandering into Ikea with only a vague idea of what you need during one of the seasons when they've just released a few new lines, some permanent, some temporary. This experience can be overwhelming, distracting, and full of dead ends. With more than 1,700 tools available, finding the right fit for your team often feels impossible.

Over the next few articles, we will be focusing on each step of the needs assessment process to dive into best practices for your team. These will help you put each step into context, showing how each feeds into the next to create a holistic needs assessment to prepare you for identifying and evaluating the tools most likely to support your team.

Business Objectives

The first step in the needs assessment framework is defining your business objectives. These objectives often take a dual form.

1. Your company's or stakeholders' objectives for which they are using the data provided from the research.

2. Your team's objectives for how the research is conducted and delivered.

The tech you purchase will not only impact your team's processes, it will likely also impact the way the data is delivered to your stakeholders, which might impact the way they're able to use the data to support their business objectives. When it comes to your restech, knowing both sets of objectives is crucial.

Stakeholder Objectives

Defining your stakeholder's objectives might seem like an easy task: look at the research they request of you, and there you go!

Except it's not actually that easy. Often, the project requested is a small part of the larger objective. Most objectives, if not all, will lead to increasing the company's revenue. The ad testing conducted isn't just to learn which ad to air for a campaign: the objective really is to reach a target audience to increase sales of a product or service by X% by the end of the year. Brand tracking is done to know how a brand is performing compared to its competitors to identify opportunities to grow its customer base or to have warning when they see a competitor's audience grow so they can uncover what is happening to lead to that growth.

When uncovering stakeholder objectives, one of my favorite questions to ask is, "What are the metrics you're responsible for moving as part of your annual goals this year?"

Research Team Objectives

The research team's objectives are in support of the rest of the business, but knowing which metrics the team is responsible for supporting with data will help you see how what you do ladders up to the overall company goals.

Research team goals will likely also include increasing process efficiency, finding ways to add value to stakeholders, and increasing the influence the research team has within the business.

From Objectives to Actions

Now it's time to talk to your researchers about the projects they conduct during the year. Asking questions like the following can start to give you a view of "a year in research" for your team.

• What projects does the research team take on year over year?

• What business decisions does the research team support?

• What is the seasonality of these business decisions?

• What are the pain points in the process of running the research and getting the data?

• What are the ad hoc projects that seem to come in every year?

Once the data has been gathered about the projects and the frequency of the data delivery for those projects, map the activities to the objectives you gathered earlier. Which projects support which business objectives? There should be a clear line from project to how it's delivered (research team objectives) to what metric or business decisions it's supporting. If there isn't, there's an opportunity to clarify and find the alignment.

Rank the project priority based on the impact it has on the business and the business objective it supports. For example, studies that are conducted to make go/no-go decisions for the business are more critical than studies that are conducted after a decision has been made and the study is being done to see what could be improved the next time. This will help when we reach the purchasing prioritization phase.

Once you've walked through this part of the assessment, you're ready to move on to the tech inventory!