Last week, I wrote about the peaks to valleys to peaks flow of a typical strategic planning session, and how without this Breakdowns leading to Breakthroughs flow it is difficult to attain truly actionable projects and to-do's from the discussion.
Now, planning sessions run like this are always good, but to make them great a critical ingredient needs to be stirred in.
That ingredient is research - into a business’ industry, market, and customers, and into and about the other businesses competing for those customers.
Research that goes beyond the "obvious” and digs in and gathers intelligence on what is important right now to customers and competitors.
And almost always, the only way to get it is through a primary research undertaking.
To be clear, secondary research involves surveying information, reports, and data that has already been collected - by professional research organizations like IBIS, Frost, IDC, and Euromonitor and as found in Trade and business publications like the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company, TechCrunch, et al.
A lot of it, especially as done by organizations like the above, is insightful, and given the choice between no research or secondary market research only, then of course we choose the latter.
Primary research, in contrast, involves directly surveying an industry, customer, and/or competitor contact list that we as the business principals design and determine.
This points to the first benefit of the primary approach: To do it we first need to develop a list of questions to be answered!
This need - to distill the business problem into questions that an anonymous third-party can (and will!) understand and answer - is beneficial even if no one answers the questions!
Now we do want and expect answers to our questions, which leads to the next benefit of the primary approach: creating the right Survey Contact List requires us to think hard about whose opinion is truly important to us as an individual business.
This then forces us to confront our Conventional Wisdom - those individual and group biases, prejudices and stuck thinking that so impede entrepreneurship and innovation.
Yes, research like this takes more time and effort than just basing decisions on one's gut or on a cursory Google search.
And because it is hard, most executives don’t do it and their strategic decisions are just okay as a result.
We, however, strive for much more than okay.
The precision of thought and hard work that primary research requires are both their own reward and far more often than not it pays for themselves immediately…
…in new market and customer ideas and contacts, in competitive intelligence, in strategic “aha” moments and breakthroughs that are the lifeblood of business growth.
I encourage you to try it for your best business challenges and opportunities.
And leave the “just okay” to your competitors.
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Confronting Our Conventional Wisdoms…through Research
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