Two surveys nearly miss key buyer insight

I just saw the results of yet another market survey that almost failed to ask what turned out to be the single most important question. Several people within the vendor's company, each with decades of experience in the target market, reviewed the survey questions. One of the reviewers had recently worked in the buyer's role. Each reviewer had been involved with the design of the product and knew every detail about the technology and the problems it could resolve.

So why was the most critical question not included in the original version of the survey? it related to a capability that was relatively unimportant to the internal stakeholders.

I have been worrying about this product launch. While the users were overwhelmingly positive about the pilot, we'd conducted phone interviews with several economic buyers and each had reported high levels of satisfaction with business-as-usual. It appeared we would have to either delay the launch or risk positioning against a problem that no one wanted to pay to resolve.

Then a relatively serendipitous review by an external industry expert produced a new question and market feedback that surprised everyone. This is only the second survey I've seen this year and in both cases the companies only barely added the most important question. They were about to launch a product without the key insight that would guide them to feature the capability buyers valued above all others.

I'm always concerned that we are overly dependent on industry experts whose internal role inevitably erodes their objectivity. Now I'm worried that easy web surveys may be the default step for market research. Surveys are great at confirming that the insights gained from a few buyer experts are pervasive. But because they can only provide answers to the questions their designers value, they can also be dangerous.

One of my client's industry experts sat in on just three of the interviews we conducted with the target buyers.  He was absolutely stunned by what he heard. Had those interviews not occurred, or had he opted out of those meetings to do something "more important" than listening to the buyers, the company's targeting and messaging strategy for this launch would have failed.

It is often difficult for a company to adjust its strategy to conform to the market's view. Inevitably a lot of stakeholder passion was poured into the original vision. Sometimes a market will evolve to value the developer's perspective (in this case I suspect that's highly likely). In the short term these companies should be comforted by the cash buyers will spend to solve their high priority problems.

Comments

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I am to submit a report on this niche your post has been very very helpfull

[Adele Revella]

SK -

The survey asked the participants to rank the importance of specific capabilities. The company was focusing on aspects of their solution that they believed to be most important, but the capability that ranked the highest was added at the last minute - no one within the company had considered it important.

Adele

Keep the focus on your buyers --
read the Buyer Persona Blog
www.buyerpersona.com

[SK]

So, what was the question that was missed and later added?

[dee]

Great insight. How many times have you heard "Survey says..."? If you don't ask the right questions you could miss the target completely and be quoting data that supports what you want to sell rather than what your customers want to buy.

[PuristProductManagement]

Oh yes, I've come across this before. I feel that actually the lack of ability to structure questions has forced me to use questionnaires as only a guide. I spend ten times as much time validating the results of a questionnaire in interviews! That's where the real value comes out of user experiance. A questionnaire for me is just a guide to know which questions to ask in an interview.

[Wayne Cerullo]

Adele - Great point about asking the "outside" questions in addition to the "inside" questions in research! We find companies often pay a lot to look through expensive telescopes... the wrong way!

That's why we specialize in inexpensive, exploratory research that unearths insights the company didn't know to search for! These surprises are always more import than the answers you were looking for! The key to getting the right ANSWERS is asking the right QUESTIONS!