Market research is the foundation of great strategy. Knowing more about your market and your customers than your competitors gives you an advantage when it comes to identifying new opportunities and capitalizing upon them.

There are many kinds of market research, and a wide range of expert services to help you apply them. In this article I will therefore focus on the kinds of qualitative research that is most helpful in strategy development. By now you will have developed a research plan that describes your chosen research methods and plan. In that you will have identified the key questions you wanted answered, and the sources most likely to provide those answers. You will if necessary have identified partners and resources that can help you achieve your goals.

Research execution is an operational problem—following through on all the complexities of running a program that depends on people outside your group and company. Here are some tips:

• Start scheduling customer meetings early. There is often a long lead time getting to customers, especially if it means travel. It’s also important to think about the sales relationship in business-to-business markets: the sales team may be close to finalizing a contract, in which case the last thing they want is someone potentially destabilizing the customer discussions at a sensitive stage.

• Schedule interviews away from quarterly boundaries. If you are part of a public company, or if your customer is public, there’s a crunch time in the last month of the quarter, and it’s much more difficult to carry out good reasearch at these times.

• Work at achieving consistency in the research interviews. As soon as you have more than one interviewer, you have a risk of inconsistency. By preparing and briefing everyone, and by making sure there’s a good script, you can increase the consistency of results. Bear in mind that we’re not looking for consistent answers, but for consistent approaches to the questions, so the answers are able to be understood in aggregate.

• Allow for open-ended discussion. Nobody gets all the right questions out in the planning phase. Inevitably a customer or some other person will come up with a need, or an insight that you didn’t predict. This is gold, because it will cause you to think new thoughts, and to potentially find breakout ideas that can significantly improve your strategy. I always end a meeting by asking “Is there anything else you want to add?” And if a new idea emerges during the discussion, don’t be afraid to let it develop.

• Use knowledgeable interviewers. I’ve been on the end of market research interviews often enough to know how frustrating it is to talk to someone who seems to be slavishly following a script, without any real understanding of the material, or an ability to debate or discuss. Use good people from within your company if possible, bearing in mind that interviewing skills are not universally available. Often product marketing and sales people are pretty good at drawing out the customer.

• Capture information systematically. I have used a database or spreadsheet to capture a matrix of all the answers by interviewee. This allows you to sort and organize and generally increase your understanding of the data. By organizing the data well, you increase the likelihood that insight will be found, and that other people will look at it.

• Write up the narratives. If a new person comes into the team, or if someone wants to understand the research at a later date, transcripts, captured in a common format, make it much easier. Some people are better at understanding the narratives than the tabulated data, so it helps people to understand the information, and will lead to better decisions.

There are many more aspects, but these are some that are particularly important to the team that is responsible for executing market research where the goal is more than statistical data. Insight requires the use of smart interviewers, who can debate and explore with the interviewee.

Once the data has been captured, you can begin to think through what it means. In fact, you may well have some emerging ideas as the research proceeds—by all means capture and test these as you go.

The next step is the generation of a working hypothesis—the first stage of a real strategy.