ROI

I am a huge fan of Patty Azzarello. Her blog on business leadership is consistently full of the kind of advice that makes you change the way you work (or wish you’d had someone to tell you before you learned the hard and painful way.)

She recently posted a great article, titled “Do We Need More Data?” It’s a great question and one that market researchers are often scared to ask, because if the answer is “no”, you lose business.

She makes a very important observation: There is time for market analysis and study, and there are times when either you know the answer, or there is no more useful data to be had.

Patty is not bashing market research here, the way some bloggers often do. She merely points out that it’s worthwhile checking in to make sure that’s what your project needs before you move forward.

She also suggests a great question that I ask all my clients: “What additional data is available that’s going to help me?” Going into a research project, you should have a good idea of how you will be able to act on what you learn. If your research shows that the market has a strong need for something that is outside of the core competency of your business, you may have done something interesting, but you haven’t added value to your business.

As always, it’s about goals. And when knowing specific information about the market is going to drive better business decisions, then you do need more data, and it’s time for a market research project.

It’s a bit of a Catch-22 for vendors who sell to Corporate IT. In pre-sales situations, customers demand to see evidence of ROI achieved by other customers. They want calculations and solid numbers. But then when they deploy your product they don’t track their own ROI, so you can’t share that with new prospects.

For what it’s worth, Corporate IT knows that they do this and that it isn’t fair. I’ve talked about this with many participants in interviews and focus groups and they understand the dynamic very well. They do appreciate your efforts to get them anything, even if it’s clearly an internal ROI that is heavily biased. But of course, they really do want that real ROI since their management is demanding it from them.

In response to direct client feedback, Dimensional Research has launched a new offering for establishing ROI, The ROI Framework. In this project, we interview your customers to get their ROI – whatever they have. Some will be solid, some will be anecdotal, but when you put together the information from 5-10 or more of these customers, it’s pretty compelling. To make it easy for customers we’ll offer anonymity so they can be completely open about their ROI and not have to jump through hoops getting corporate approvals.

We’ll take those interviews, and put together a white paper summarizing the input that can be used as a collateral piece. We will also use the content to develop an ROI calculator for use as a sales tool or on your web site. Now your ROI calculator will have as a source “Dimensional Research Customer Analysis” rather than “our best internal guess.”

Do You NEED More Data?

ROI Analysis