Manage Your Project Stakeholders: Gauge and guide involvement at each stage to strategically address your business decisions

This is the first of two eTips! on managing your market research project stakeholders. This issue focuses on how to determine appropriate levels of involvement. The next issue will cover considerations for developing an effective communication plan for stakeholders.

As an analyst who guides market research initiatives, you’re probably comfortable managing the RFP process, vendor selection, timeline, and scope. Yet an often underestimated and overlooked skill is managing the involvement of groups who may share a stake in research results.

To get your project moving and keep it on track, determine who really needs to be involved at each step and how much influence they should have. Think about:

• Your Boss
• The Marketing Team
• Sales Management and the Field Force
• Your External Partners (e.g. market research supplier, ad agency, co-marketer)

While participation by each stakeholder can be vital at certain stages in the project, not all should be involved with every step. Since both under- and over-involvement of others can hurt your project, it’s critical to strike a functional balance. Of course, your company’s culture and guidelines, along with your experience, will drive your particular approach; but at each step, ask yourself:

• Whose insight might improve this effort?
• What buy-in will help move the project forward?
• Who will support/ sabotage your research results?
• How might an individual or group’s involvement affect implementation?

The graph below illustrates involvement levels that are effective for most projects.

The first—and arguably most important—step in the research process is to accurately define the business issue. Here, you may solicit input from the brand team, sales director and your market research partner. Before moving forward, a list of well-defined, integrated—and obtainable—research objectives are developed and, if necessary, signed off by your supervisor.

After determining what the project should accomplish, the research supplier can design a plan of action that ensures the information collected will meet your objectives. The research partner should walk you through the methodology, sampling and analytics plan and help establish expectations for final deliverables.

During data collection, your internal stakeholders should only be involved if topline results are significantly different from expectations. Your market research supplier can work with you to appropriately frame the potential impact of unexpected results and develop contingency plans as needed.

Final results are the true test of research design: How well did we address the business issue? Involvement of stakeholder groups during the review of final results will depend on their particular objectives related to the study, but will typically be very high.

Market research stakeholders tend to have a huge impact on how a business decision is delivered to the market. In the implementation stage, follow up with stakeholder groups to gauge progress and determine if additional market research is warranted.

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