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You Can't Be Brilliant Alone: How to Achieve Influence Without Authority through Effective Collaboration

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At today's AMA MRC, Chris Frank, vice president of B2B research in Global Marketplace Insights for American Express, discussed how market researchers can collaborate with internal and external clients.  Chris has worked client side and supplier side, bought research and designed research, even moderated focus groups. Chris provided seven principles on how to collaborate:

1. Be clear on the Essential Question. What is the high-order, indispensible business question for each business unit to drive their business? Don't move forward on a plan until you understand this question. Then, when you present the results, emphasize the essential question and how the results relate.
2. Lead a hypothesis flip-chart session. Document key hypotheses for the essential questions to find out preconceptions of the sponsors of the research. In the report, summarize the hypotheses, whether they are true or false, and how you came to that answer.
3. Practice smoke-jumping. "A smoke jumper is a firefighter that parachutes in to combat wildfires." In research, the smoke jumper is rapidly deployed to investigate smoke and understand hot spots from ongoing research, to the point of commissioning a second study even while the first is still in the field. The smoke jumper prevents the fire drill!
4. Reveal the surprises.  What surprised you in the results? Don't lead with the data, but lead with the surprises: summarize that 400-page research tome in one page.
5. Steer clear of the squiggly-line syndrome. "What?" Ignore the trending and the minor shifts in metrics over time; don't get caught up in the morass. Ask "So What?" What are the ramifications of the data? Then ask "Now what?" What do we do as a result of this?
6. Avoid the "Alice in Wonderland" Meeting. Don't do research for the sake of research if the results will be ignored; reframe the research to answer the Essential Question.
7. Make your bottom-line your top line. Put the key findings at the front of the research. Organize for clarity; data supports the story. "Research is like a lighthouse; we shine a bright light on the five big rocks."

As Chris said up front, "Syndication is 90% of a researcher's jobs. We are educators as well as researchers. We have to tell the story again and again and again."