Reflective Research Process
When you need to know where you stand from a competitive standpoint, the best way to learn is through your customer and partners eyes. Peak Consulting can provide a comprehensive view of your competitive landscape and how you measure-up with in the industry. The Reflective Research process gives you more than an indication of what competitors are doing - it measures what customers value about your competitors and you to help you focus on the factors that create truly competitive product and program offerings.
Reflective Research starts with our team discussing the subject under research to understand what you already know and determining what elements of the subject, such as partner fit, program response or product messaging, you wish to test with the subject group. From there, we devise a qualitative discussion guide to both refine our understanding of the key questions, as well as test assumptions that you may be making. This short, interview-based research process often yields critical insights into how your subjects are thinking about your product, programs or messaging.
From this qualitative discussion process, we create a quantitative survey instrument to test on a broader scale the hypothesis formed in the first phase. This web-survey is sent out to measure the behaviors, opinions and demographics of your target audience on a broad-basis, forming a statistically sound framework for decision making. Once the results are returned, we analyze the data for correlations, segementation and insights.
Typically, every research project raises a couple of 'a-ha!' responses that drive questions as to why partners or customers responded the way they did. Following the quanitative survey process, we review the results with you and create a final discussion guide to go back to selected participants with a follow-up interview to add depth and color to the data collected. In this part of the process, we test the results to discover the thoughts and biases of the respondents, giving your true insight into the market.
This Reflective Research process can be conducted very quickly, using Peak Consulting's existing base of partner respondents or a list of respondents from your existing partner or customer base. Reflective Research is a very powerful method for discovering:
- What value your partners see in your latest programs and areas for improvement
- Competitive assessments of what partners truly value and pain points in competitive products or programs
- Segmentation of partner or end-user buyers based on behaviors and value-discovery, resulting in actionable segmentation and messaging
- Product features and functions that are valued higher by different segments of buyers
- Key gaps in program or product marketing efforts
- Operation gaps in working with partners or customers that lower overall satisfaction
For more information on how we can help you get the data you need, please contact us at info@peakconsulting.org
