Industry Interviews for Market Research: The Dos and Don’ts

What are Industry Interviews?

Industry Interviews are informational interviews conducted with participants in a market that the company is selling into, typically not with customers or potential customers. The goal of the interview is not to collect standardized responses for the purpose of quantitative analysis, but is to capture the varied nuances and trends in the market, from the perspective of each market participants.

Why do Industry Interviews?

We have written on the needs to gather and analyze data on your target and adjacent markets, and also highlighted many different types of analyses to get to valuable insights on the market and the customer. However, aggregate data often fail to reveal subtle nuances of early market trends, or special customer needs that ultimately evolve into major market opportunities over time. We can try to get to these insights by gathering data directly via primary research with market participants. While primary market research typically means interview, survey or focus group with customer or potential customers, we could not overemphasize doing interviews with other important players in the market: Market experts, industry analysts, investors, third-party vendors and consultants, services providers. The goal for traditional market research (aka talking directly with customers/prospects) is to directly uncover insights on the customers’ attitudes, needs and use cases so that the company has very clear profile of the customers to which it needs to target its product, marketing and sales effort. The goal for the interviews with other participants is broader and more fluid – it is to detect early signs of industry trends, to see the customers and the products from an objective perspective, and to help situate the company more strategically and holistically with other players in the same market. Let’s explore Industry Interviews more in the next sections

When are Industry Interviews most often used?

Industry Interviews can be used in almost every market research and analysis project – they are great in the initial exploratory steps of a full scale market segmentation project, essential in market diligence analysis, helpful in guiding new product development surveys etc. The important thing to note is that these interviews should be adapted to the project they are supporting – the questionnaire length, the types of questions, the balance between open-ended and fixed responses questions, and the order of importance of those questions.

What is asked in Industry Interviews?

Industry Interviews are typically heavy on open-ended questions because of their exploratory nature. What also sets them apart from customer-focused primary research interviews is that respondents are not typically asked to assuming the role of a buyer, but are often asked for objective observations on the market. Industry Interviews are also typically prefaced with more in-depth introduction which explains the context and goals of the research project to set the right framework for the respondents in answering the questions.

In later posts, my team members and I will be exploring in more details the various aspects associated with developing and executing industry interviews of various types. I do want to cap off this short introduction with some tips I have picked up in our various research projects here at OpenView Labs:

The Dos

• Do extensive secondary research ahead of time to sharpen focus of questions and avoid unnecessarily confirming validated facts.
• Be up-front about time commitment with potential respondents: get a good estimate of the length of the interview by rehearsing it several times in full with your team members.
• Ask (politely) for referrals to additional respondents.
• Be sensitive to the role of the respondent: Do research on the respondent’s role, responsibility and areas of expertise in their organization before the interview.

And the Don’ts:

• Assume basic facts, unless they have been fully validated by other respondents: Interviewers might appear to be overly self-confident, dogmatic, or even arrogant if they assume too much about the topic being discussed, and rush through the “ground-setting” stage of the interviews because they believe that there is nothing else to know.
• Ask more than you hear: Be flexible in the order of questionings, and be willing to dive deep and/or give the respondents that appropriate air time to explain themselves. Because these interviews have so few standardized answers, the interviewer has to be extremely attentive so as to capture even the slightest nuance in the open-ended answer.
• Ask for personal judgement/decisions such as “would you buy” or “would you invest”, because it forces the respondent to put themselves in others shoes, and use their own personal views to make decisions for others. Such questions and responses do not have a whole lot of value, because they are not capturing the objective market participant viewpoint, which is the goal for the interview.