Guide to Profitable Sales
Data Collection Techniques
Focus groups
Focus groups are sort of like holding a meetings with the respondents; perhaps consumers, health care professionals, or others who have appropriate knowledge. You need to think carefully about who logically has the actual knowledge you seek and recruit among that target. Good meetings are productive by using an agenda; focus group agenda’s are called ‘topic guides’. You need to think about the likely homogeneity or heterogeneity of your target when planning Focus groups. It is typical to do them geographically dispersed. But diversity of opinions may vary by things other than geography; age, gender, race, income, prior category experience, etc. So recruit to see if opinions are consistent or diverse. Don’t be afraid to do rolling recruitment if you happen to find lots of differences of opinion among those in your initial focus groups. Video or audio taped your focus groups to allow more people to see the responses. DO NOT SUBSTITUTE FOCUS GROUPS FOR QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH. The way you should use focus groups is to discover the target’s language and terms to subsequently phase questions and to bring focus to those factors likely to be most powerful to influence. However, the prevalence of those influence factors, their association with specific target segments, and their quantitative impact on purchase intent points you to why focus groups are a start rather than the answer.
Expert interviews
When we seek knowledge that a very limited number of people have or that is is very specialized, we may benefit from expert interviews. Recruiting for expertise rather than for geographic, income, age, etc. dispersion may be beneficial for highly technical subject and/or from those who are influence agents to many others. Still a group settings similar to focus groups can cross-fertilized, compared, and contrasted ideas. Where the length and depth of discussion require, expert interviews can take a one-on-one format.
One-on-one interviews
When in depth understanding is required one-on-one interviews are often a productive. Such interviews can be conducted in homes or offices of those being interviewed. This can be especially valuable to understand the context of answers, such as around actual product usage experience. While fairly expensive compared to other approaches, this approach can be highly productive in the right situation.
Phone interviews
Everyone has experienced telephone interviews. You know them as the things that interrupt your dinner. Phone interviews can easily achieve broad geographic dispersion. With good purchased list sources you can also often recruit within lots of specific subgroups. It is also typical to use a ‘screener’ set of questions at the beginning of such an interview to further qualify respondents. You can also do interesting pre- and post-recruitment when combined with other interview methods. For example, you can phone recruit to obtain agreement to review material you subsequently mail to the respondent and arrange a callback for followup. Or you can mail or internet target respondents with instructions to call to and inbound phone bank for an interview.
Mail interviews
Mail interviews help with some types of respondent cooperation because they can answer when they have time rather than the moment of your phone call or internet popup. Such interviews and often be more thoughtful in terms of deeper consideration of responses. Still, you can expect response rates to be no better than that of a typical direct mail advertisement. So you might leverage ‘open rate’ tactics to improve response.
Internet interviews
The internet has become a common place to carry out market research. Caution must be used. There remain segments of the population who don’t use the internet, have slow connections, or are legally off limits by things like age. It is not uncommon for people to try the self-serve internet interviewing software. Again, it has its limits. Don’t expect too much in terms of assuring questions are properly worded, responses are comprehensive, analytics are effective in capturing interactive influences. Nothing is better than a very experienced Marketing Research professional to help you even if you do ultimate use the self-service tools to execute the interviews.
Mall intercept
These use to be a thing. Now days you probably need to reconsider very carefully who is traffic in the mall. If your target is mall walking senior citizens or is ‘tweenagers’ you might still find the mall intercept useful. Otherwise lets do something else.
Behavioral observation
Simple behavioral observation can take many forms. If you are selling a retail and want to see how consumers behave at the self setting before you pay those slotting fees to that premium self location, in-store observation might be worth considering. If you are doing product research and want to see how people actually use your product in practice, heading to the local fishing hole to watch people use your new reel may make sense.
Digital footprints
Digital dropping is sort of an additional modern form of behavioral observation. We had a client who was in the mobile advertising industry. In that process we learned that they were collecting billions of pieces of information every day. For context, they could track not only when you got on the commuter train every morning and at what stop, but that you opened your phone to play an online game for which they could tell your score and progress in improving that score over time. The issue we helped with was not the collection of data but how one might reduce the raw collected data into meaningful interpretation for practical use.
Legal & Ethical
Data collection methods are subject to a number of guidelines and legal requirements. Professional research organizations who are members of the Insights Association will assure these requirements are met. If you are a ‘do it yourself’ type, please familiarize yourself with these key requirements.
European Commission Digital Services Act