Building a disciplined market research program isn’t always a Day 1 priority. But as stakes rise, keeping a pulse on the market and customers becomes essential.

A company’s success in its early stages is often guided by industry experience and seasoned instincts, and it can be hard to let go of that model as the organization grows. Why mess with a winning formula?

But every company will reach a point where experience falters. Sales start stalling. A new competitor or industry trend disrupts the marketplace. A new product doesn’t see traction. Suddenly, instinct isn’t enough.

Ideally, you won’t wait until things start to go wrong. Instead, you’ll be proactive to maintain your competitive edge. To do so, you will need to have a strong market research muscle within your organization to ensure strategic initiatives are not developed in a vacuum but rather are driven by the latest market insights.

Understandably, building a disciplined market research program isn’t always a Day 1 priority for many growth-stage companies. But it is essential to keep a pulse on the market and customers as stakes rise. In this GrowthBit, we’ll look at how to use market research to help improve and validate decision-making in your organization.

Establish your company’s market research muscle

At many companies, market research is often ad hoc and decentralized across teams and functions. As a result, valuable insights stay trapped within functions, patterns go unnoticed, and the broader organization misses out on opportunities to get smarter.

Leading companies build a strong market research muscle that spans the organization, bolstered by coordination and knowledge sharing across teams. Done well, it becomes a strategic advantage that enables faster, more informed decision-making.

Tips & Tricks: Best Practices for Market Research

1. Create a central knowledge hub: Store and share past research and findings in a centralized, accessible location. This will help your company avoid duplication of effort and allow teams to build on past work.

2. Adopt a proactive approach: Stay ahead of the curve by actively seeking insights. Make market research a habit, not a reaction. Stay proactive and keep a pulse on the market.

3. Establish cadences to share insights: Avoid silos by creating regular cadences to share insights. Carve out time in Board meetings to share latest market insights. Allocate time in recurring cross-functional meetings to discuss ongoing research activities and findings.

Broadening your research sources beyond your customers will help you develop a more nuanced view of your market position.

 

Sources of market intelligence

Broaden your research beyond your core customers

In early growth stages, companies are typically more nimble, teams often wear multiple hats, and budgets are tighter. Every customer matters – and their feedback often shapes key strategic decisions.

While this agility and focus is a strength early on, relying on instinct and a narrow set of inputs can create blind spots as your company scales. Broadening your research sources beyond your customers will help you develop a more nuanced view of your market position. Triangulating insights across sources will not only sharpen your strategic clarity but will often reveal new insights that can unlock your next phase of growth.

Tips & Tricks: Best Practices for Utilizing Market Sources

1. Go beyond your core customers: Customers are often the easiest (and cheapest) source to reach. But don’t rely solely on their feedback. Listen to non-customers and other market experts to identify blind spots and surface untapped opportunities.

2. Triangulate across sources to uncover the truth: Combine insights from multiple sources to identify patterns, validate takeaways, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the situation.

3. Refresh your sources regularly: Markets can shift quickly. Insights collected one or two years earlier may no longer be accurate. Develop a cadence to regularly refresh your insights and update your fact base.

Methods for gathering market insights

Interviews: Take a deeper dive into the “why”

Interviews are a powerful yet still often underused tool in your research arsenal. They create an opportunity for you to dive into the “why” behind your most important market questions and uncover subtle nuances which data alone can’t fully capture.

For growth stage companies in particular, interviews often are too narrowly focused on existing customers, biased towards confirming assumptions, and lack consistency. Implementing a few targeted best practices can significantly enhance the accuracy and consistency of insights gained from interviews.

WHEN: Interviews should be ongoing, not a one-off activity. Leading companies check in with customers every 1-2 quarters (especially top customers). They conduct annual pulse-checks with non-customers and experts to stay on top of key trends or market shifts. They perform in-depth interview campaigns as needed for key strategic initiatives & decisions.

HOW: Interviews are time intensive, so preparation is essential – focus on strategic, open-ended questions and respect the interviewee’s time. Customer interviews should likely be led (or introduced) by those with the strongest relationship, while external interviews can be sourced via expert networks, LinkedIn or other industry contacts.

WHO: Interviews are often owned and led across functions – particularly product, marketing, customer success, and strategy. The most effective companies coordinate these efforts to avoid silos and ensure insights are shared across the organization.

Surveys: Support strategic shifts with comprehensive data

Surveys are one of the most data-driven research tools. They allow you to capture broad, quantitative insights beyond what interviews can provide alone. But let’s be clear – surveys aren’t just for simple customer satisfaction check-ins. They can uncover patterns in purchasing behavior, competitor sentiment, and product/feature usage. In an increasingly data-oriented world, they are becoming more critical.

WHEN: Surveys are ideal for collecting market-wide insights/perspectives, gathering specific data for analyses (e.g., market models), or getting quick feedback from a large audience. Shorter customer satisfactions surveys are done throughout the year, while larger market surveys with external stakeholders are likely only needed every 1-2 years.

HOW: Surveys require thoughtful design to ensure data quality and accuracy. Test thoroughly and use reliable tools or vendors to field the survey. Strong analytical skills are critical to extract insights from the results. Costs can add up quickly, especially for external market surveys which may require panels, incentives and vendor support.

WHO: Simple customer surveys can often be managed in-house at a lower cost by marketing, customer success or product teams. External market surveys are more complex and costly – often requiring panels, incentive payments, and advanced analytics. For these, external vendors can be worth the investment with cross-functional oversight.

Tips & Tricks: Best Practices for Surveying

1. Keep your survey concise and targeted: Long surveys tend to lead to survey fatigue and drop-offs. Be targeted. Clear direction and selective bolding can be helpful keeping respondents focused.
2. Test, test, test: Make sure to thoroughly test your survey for programming, language, formatting, and timing. Garbage in, garbage out.
3. Keep your scales and language consistent: The phrases you use (product terminology, abbreviations) and the answer scales (e.g., 1-5, 1-10, select top 3, select top 5) should remain consistent throughout your survey.

Desktop research: Touch base regularly with your industry

WHEN: Desktop research can be performed early and often (monthly, quarterly) to supplement other research types and layer in industry and competitor perspectives. It is especially useful for quick, directional insights.

HOW: Desktop research involves finding relevant third-party or publicly available information such as analyst reports, industry databases and associations, review websites, and even blogs/forums. In a sea of available information, the primary challenge is determining what sources are credible.

WHO: Desktop research is a shared skill that can be leveraged across the company. More senior or experienced leaders can provide initial direction and sense check findings to ensure credibility.

Tips & Tricks: Best Practices for Desktop Research

1. Cite your sources and defer to the trustworthy and updated: Keep a list of your sources so you can refer back. Include citation info in your analysis / report – website, author, and publication/access dates. Government databases, academic publications, reputable reports, and industry associations will be your best bet for trustworthy sources. Make sure to use recent data (ideally, <2 years old).
2. Check and double check: Where possible, use multiple sources to triangulate your data and provide additional confidence in the findings. Trace data back to its original source, where possible.
3. Be hypothesis-driven but remain objective: Approach research with clear hypotheses to direct your exploration but avoid seeking only the data that confirms your assumptions. Instead, explore multiple perspectives and viewpoints to ensure a balanced and unbiased understanding.

Here’s the bottom line.

Early on, expertise, experience, and intuition can often be enough to drive a company’s success. But as you grow, deeper justification is required for bigger investments, and they must stand up to the input of a wider range of stakeholders. Start building an intentional, coordinated process for collecting market data from the broader market to help your validation. And most importantly, don’t invest all that time and money only to ignore the data. Take the time to synthesize your findings, understand the implications, and create a plan of action to address them.