Stop wasting your (and your clients’) time

So you think you know the answer and you are busy burning the midnight oil writing the debrief for tomorrow’s client presentation...

What if you were wasting your time? You most likely are...

Having spent 20 years in the insight industry, I’m amazed how frequently I still hear of clients failing to act on insight work they’ve invested time and money in. Even worse, some take action diametrically opposed to their agency’s recommendations.

We, insight consultants (be it client or agency side) typically consider the ‘final report’ the end of the journey - ignoring the fact that it may be the beginning of a new journey for the end client. And that journey can be torturous.

So, what should we do differently?  

Well for one thing, we have to know our client inside out: what keeps them awake at night, what inspires them, the context within which they operate and the barriers to action they may encounter. In an ideal world, you could start to explore hypotheses around what the results might say before embarking on the research - this is why the briefing phase is so important. 

Second, let’s do away with the still-too-common practice of charting up too many slides of data and then haphazardly selecting a few to present, slapping on descriptive tiles at the very last minute…. sometimes even on the way to see the client… you know you do that… we all are guilty of it! But if we are lost in the data, how can we expect the client to find the golden nugget of insight that will make the difference? Ultimately it’s not about producing slides, but about finding a story with a beginning (the problem), a middle (the insights) and an end (the potential solutions)… tell the story simply, succinctly and get your audience on the journey…

Notice how I say the potential solutions… that brings me to the third point.

Third, we insight consultants need to accept we do not hold the answer! If the answer simply lay in talking to a few hundreds or thousands of respondents, life would be easy. But, more often than not, the answer comes from putting together conflicting data sources and opinions and anchoring eveything in the commercial reality. Our job, as insight consultants, is to bring what we have heard to the table but, also and critically, to work through things WITH the client to craft the insight and arrive together at the conclusion (and the decision). It takes time, because sometimes you have to let things nurture and because you have to discuss things over and over as some decisions can be scary. Once all that is done, you can write the final recommendation and by that time your audience should have seen the answer and be ready to commit.

At Insight Angels, we believe the value of consumer insight work should not be measured by the weight of the report but by the impact it has had… and that impact comes from spending time with your clients, understanding their business and fostering quality dialogue.

So, step away from your computer… you definitely are wasting your time at your desk… go out, talk to your client, test hypotheses and craft the insights with them.