Knowing Your Customers Takes Teamwork: 3 Roles Involved in a Buyer Research Project

Executing a buyer insights project is truly a team effort. While one person can conduct the research and analysis, turning the results into action can require buy-in and support across the entire organization.

In the world of B2B, where the path to purchase is often anything but a straight line, it is crucial for salespeople and marketers to know as much about their prospective buyers (and their buying process) as possible. Acquiring that knowledge takes systematic research, often in the form of a buyer insights project.

The beauty (and also difficulty) of a buyer insights project is that it often requires inter-department collaboration, and presents the opportunity to pull from the collective knowledge of the entire company. At its core, however, there are three main roles necessary to complete a buyer insights project. Although one person can hold multiple roles, it’s important that the roles are explicitly identified early on, and that each of them is held by at least one person.

3 Buyer Research Project Roles

1) Stakeholders (Director Level and up in Marketing, Sales, and Product)

The stakeholders in this project are senior managers in a range of business functions that involve direct interaction with buyers. They are responsible for sales, marketing, customer service, or even product management, and typically have some level of responsibility related to customer acquisition or retention. Because the outcome of the project will directly affect their team, goals, and strategies, it’s very important that they are both committed to the project and excited for the results. They are also responsible for committing their teams’ resources and time in support of the project.

2) Project Owner (VP Level/Head of Marketing)

The project owner is typically a senior manager of the marketing or sales organization, and is generally also a key stakeholder. His or her primary responsibility is to act as the project’s sponsor, building support and buy-in among the stakeholders for the project and its methodology. This responsibility is important not only in the initial phases but throughout the project, right up to the delivery of the final recommendations and oversight of their implementation. As the champion of the project, the project owner shares with the researcher the responsibility for the quality and impact of the final delivery, and the two roles should meet frequently to review results and adjust the work plan if necessary.

3) Researcher (Director Level and Below in Marketing/Product Marketing)

The researcher will have the most involvement in the project and is responsible for the majority of the conclusions and output. In some cases, the researcher and project owner will be the same person, but if not, the researcher likely reports to the project owner and should be closely aligned with his or her vision for the project. Most research steps, including generating call scripts and target lists, the calls themselves, surveys, analysis, and presentation of results, should be conducted by the researcher(s). For some of these steps, the researcher may benefit from a second opinion or review by the project owner.

The overlap of all of these roles, and the importance of individual tasks, can be seen in this infographic:

By having each team member stick to their assigned tasks, there is no unnecessary overflow in workloads. In addition, everyone gets to contribute a great deal to the project while sustaining a more structured, chaos-free project. As a result, everyone gets what they ultimately want — gaining more insight into their customer’s interactions with their product.

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Buyer Insights Research: How to Understand Your Buyers So You can Eliminate the Guesswork outlines a step-by-step approach to conducting the kind of research your company needs to:

• Introduce a more customer-centric way of thinking across the organization
• Improve customer acquisition effectiveness
• Focus on the decision-makers within a target company and their key influencers
• Understand the subtle distinctions between different roles in the buying process
• Build a pipeline with more targeted and effective messaging
• Create compelling product packaging and pricing schemes
• Enhance customer success and retention with improved product and service delivery

 

Photo by: Vanessa