Dimensional Research

Technology Market Research

Partners: The Secret Sauce of Customer Research

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Every company knows that the more they understand the complex business issues behind their customers’ decision process the greater their chance of success. Any great technology company credits the way they listened to their customers as a key factor in their success. But how can you get all that great customer feedback you need when you barely have time to get to the bathroom between meetings!  

Of course, you start by talking to your customers. A Customer Advisory Board is a highly effective tool for gaining important feedback from major customers while strengthening your relationships with them. A structured customer advisory board program brings consistent feedback throughout the product lifecycle.

But don’t forget your business partners. Partners are often ignored in market research, but I strongly believe that including partners is crucial. Partners, especially resellers and VARS, can provide you with a unique insight. In addition to being deeply familiar with your product and your customers  (admit it, they often have better trusted advisor relationships than your own employees do) they are NOT employees of your company.  This mix of deep expertise and external viewpoint often identifies issues that lie just under the radar for employees that are too close to them, or problems that are too vague for customers to properly communicate to you.

One way to get this valuable information from your partners is to add a panel of partners to your Customer Advisory Board. You should talk with partners separately, but do ask them the same questions you ask your customers and get feedback on the same topics. Another option is to start a dedicated Partner Advisory Board. A Partner Advisory Board gives partners a specific voice in your company’s strategy and has the added bonus of facilitating strong partner relationships.

WARNING: Reseller partners are very “real” with their feedback.  They’ll put it all on the table – both good and bad.  If you want to only hear the good things, partners are not the group to talk to! But if you resist the temptation to dismiss their negative feedback as “whiny”, you will gain important insight into what prevents them from selling more. During the best sessions, the partners freely and openly discuss issues, while the moderator encourages that discussion, makes sure any negativity is heard, and then leads the conversation into a dialogue on realistic steps to solve problems.

Really listening to your partners is absolutely one of the best ways to ensure your company’s efforts match the market’s needs.

Technology Market Research Is Best Done By Technology Experts

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Anyone can do technology market research, right?

Wrong. When dealing with IT professionals, it is very important to actually understand technology, for several reasons:

When the researcher understands technology, she gains the respect of the participants. As a result, they cooperate with her and share more of their own knowledge and expertise. The resulting marketing analysis is highly focused and useful.

When the researcher is a technology expert, the participants are comfortable using professional terminology and speaking at a deeper level of technical detail, because they know the researcher will “get it.” Again, the result is a highly effective marketing analysis.

A moderator who has expertise in technology can ask the right follow-on questions, because he understands what the IT professionals are talking about: Let’s imagine a scenario where a moderator is talking to a security professional about network security. The security professional unexpectedly starts talking about application development. Many moderators would not understand the connection between developers and security experts, and would have missed the opportunity to learn more about this important relationship.

A moderator who is a technology expert is knowledgeable about the application development lifecycle – past, current, and future. Such a moderator will drill down into exactly how when exactly the security professional works with the developers, and use the knowledge he gains to create actionable recommendations.  This is not a theoretical scenario: the key to success in a recent project I worked on was understanding the involvement of both security and development teams in the purchasing process.  Understanding the workplace dynamics between the two teams allowed me to recommend a go-to-market strategy that focused on the diverse roles these different players had.

Another great example from my own professional experience of using technology expertise to produce better, more accurate technology marketing analysis: a moderator who was comfortable with ITIL enabled a group of participants from Europe to use the ITIL language to quickly communicate their issues. No time was wasted with this group of busy IT executives explaining basic concepts such as the difference between incident management and problem management. Since the moderator was familiar with these concepts, the conversation was highly efficient and focused on pinpointing issues and brainstorming solutions rather than on explaining fundamentals.