Transcript

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki and Jeff McKay.

Jason Mlicki:
So Jeff, I am excited today, because we’re doing a recording, but I actually get to speak with someone who brings real facts to a conversation, not just hyperbole and opinion like you. So you’ve invited a guest who knows a thing or two about research, and so, I’m excited about that. So Jeff, do you want to introduce Mike for our listeners?

Jeff McKay:
I’ll give him a quick nod, and then I’ll let him introduce himself. Mike is probably my favorite researcher. I’ve known him since my days at Anderson. I mean, that’s been decades almost. But what I love about Mike, is he’s kind of a New Yorker, although he doesn’t live in Manhattan. The thing that I love about him, is he’s just a straight shooter, and no matter the project I work on with him, is he gets it done. He just gets it done, and he leads one of the best research firms in the nation. So, I brought yet another great guest.

Mike Nash:
I will try not to let you down, Jeff. I know you guys have a running competition over who has the best guests. So I will put my name in the ring, and do the best I can.

Jason Mlicki:
For what it’s worth, Mike. If that’s a competition, I am losing that. Yeah, it’s not even close.

Mike Nash:
Sounds like Jason just needs a few more friends. My name is Mike Nash. Thank you for the accolades, Jeff and Jason both, for the time on this. I appreciate it. Always good to tell the research side of things and tell the research story. I’m the president of KS&R, we are about a hundred person shop based out of Syracuse, New York, with some remote staff in different parts of the country and globe. I focus most of my time in a B2B technology space, but we have practices in consumer, retail, financial, healthcare. We own a pharmacy panel, where we have 5,000 pharmacists throughout the US, on speed dial ready to talk to people about different ways of interacting with their pharmacist, which is particularly interesting in this time that we are in at the moment.

Mike Nash:
And yeah, we spend a lot of time trying to get stuff done as you said, Jeff, but also make sure we are providing actionable data. There’s nothing worse for us than a research project that sits on somebody’s shelf. So we are very big right now into doing workshops and anything to help activate those findings or those recommendations, to make sure that the businesses follow through and move forward in some direction with our results. So thanks again for having me and I’m looking forward to it.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. Thank you for joining us. First off, because I think you and Jeff sort of threw this topic at me and I think Jeff and I were both shocked that it was a topic and the question was like, “Should we do research right now?” And of course I think both of our mouths dropped like, “Why would you not?” Other than budget. So let’s start there. So obviously lot of companies have had some serious budget constraints and they may be thinking about cutting their research budget, if they have a research budget or maybe they’re pausing research investments. So I mean, is this a bad time to make a cut like that? Talk us through your thinking on that. How do you frame that decision, if it’s a good one, a bad one, or it’s just a bad one in general?

Mike Nash:
Yeah, I mean again, we obviously, of course have our own vested interest to do research, that’s our business. But I think in this particular window, I think getting off of that treadmill and taking that pause, really puts you at a couple of different disadvantages. One, you have a unique opportunity to connect with your customer, whether it be a business customer or a consumer customer. So you have this unique opportunity to empathize with them, to really understand what they’re going through in this unique setting and continue to show that you’re there for them. So I think that is all part of the side effects of a positive research engagement, during this time of crisis.

Mike Nash:
Secondly, your competitors are doing it. If you get off the track by definition, whenever this goes back to some sense of normal, whatever that turns into, you will be behind. How far behind depends on again, what your competitors are doing. But we still see most businesses still engaging, most businesses still pushing forward. And if you choose to not do that, you’re just setting yourself up for risk down the road that you will be putting yourself behind. From whether it be a product innovation standpoint, pricing structure, pricing model standpoint, customer satisfaction standpoint. So all of those factor into some of the rationale, of why we think this is, if not even a good time, but a necessary time to conduct research. To again, make sure that your customers are engaged and you’re understanding how their mind share and their emotions are shifting, given the unique once in a generation circumstance that we’re living under.

Jason Mlicki:
Do you think it’s actually an opportunity? I mean, I’ve been just thinking out loud for a second. I mean, I know we’ve done some webinars, we’ve produced a lot of thought leadership in this moment, to help marketers move through this. And I know we’ve highlighted a lot of firms that are doing the same thing for their clients with their thought leadership. And we’re seeing, quite frankly, we’re seeing startling results from some of those organizations. I mean, significant traffic lifts, significant recognition of their voice in this moment. So I mean, do you think that the research kind of follows that same gambit, that it’s like this is actually more of an opportunity than it is a risk?

Mike Nash:
We see very little downside. Again, we have a couple of rules, right? You don’t want to go out and try to tackle respiratory therapist experts at the moment. They’re a little tied up. But other than that, you’ve got people that really have some time. They’re not sitting on their hands, totally bored out of their mind, but we are seeing response rates that are pretty high. We just did a work, some gaming consumers in Italy, of all places, about a month ago, in the height of it. And we thought there’s no way anyone’s going to talk to us, but we had very strong response rates. People were locked up in their homes looking for something to do and looking to engage and again, talk to a human outside of their immediate nuclear family. And we had very good results in Italy, during that height of their trauma.

Mike Nash:
So I think yes, it is a great opportunity to spend some quality time with a customer and talk them through about what your plans might be or get your feedback from them about future plans. The thought leadership, I think that’s kind of interesting you mentioned that, it’s my next blog piece that should come out in the next couple of weeks, is that, we see the research as a critical element to break through that clutter. Like you said, everyone’s writing thought leadership right now, because they have some time, they have some resources and they’re trying to stay ahead of the game. And we’ve been doing a lot of research to put some statistics into those thought leadership pieces and to build some depth into those pieces as well.

Mike Nash:
And we’re seeing the same kind of lift, that they’re going very well. And so we’ve got a piece coming out pretty shortly about how to engage research to better support your thought leadership endeavors. But yeah, we see the same kind of phenomenon, that people are reading it and people have time to look at stuff that maybe before they didn’t. The only downside is again, some of the competition, right? You got a lot of people putting thought leadership out there. And we see research as a differentiator to put some statistics and some numbers with those good thoughts as well.

Jason Mlicki:
See Jeff, someone to bring facts. See? I’m excited. Facts, something you lack. [inaudible 00:06:57] Keep going. So go ahead Jeff, sorry.

Jeff McKay:
I get having had to make decisions about go, no-go, on research projects, I get the angst that goes with this. One of the questions that I have, given the state of mind of people right now, how do you make sure that the quality of the feedback that you’re getting is accurate? If you’re going to go out and do this, so many people are emotional, so many people really have no clarity on future plans or the impact of this. Is there a narrow definition of what types of questions you can ask and get accurate information? Or is there a way to word questions to get more strategic direction type of information right now?

Mike Nash:
Yep. No, those are all good points and we wrestle with those issues with our clients. I’ll take it from a couple of different perspectives. On the B2B side, again, where I spend probably more of my time, 90% of my time, it’s a little bit less concerning. Many of these businesses are still trying to function at some level, right? So they’re not quite as, typical consumer sitting around home with nothing to do. So I think the emotional element is still there. I mean they still have some new fears that they didn’t have two months ago, and you have to factor that in and be sensitive to that. But I think on the BTB side, they’re still trying to run their businesses in a new way, search for a new model of what’s going to be successful.

Mike Nash:
And on the consumer side, it’s a little bit more of what you’re suggesting there. And what we have there is a couple of different options. We’re actually doing a project on emotion right now. And we have some baselines from prior times and we’re going to look at those and try to see, “Okay. Is there a shift in the overall emotional tenor, if you will, during this window?” So we will ask some self directed questions to sort of give a self perception. “Do you think this is the same answer you might’ve gave three months ago or three months into the future?” Which is always a little bit of a wild card, but we’ll ask that question and be able to do some calibrations against that. And we’ll also look at results from prior times, right? And try to see, is there a spike in some way that’s being caused by the situation that you’re referencing.

Mike Nash:
So those are both a couple of things that we do to sort of at least ground the data in some comparison point, to make sure that we’re just not totally off the deep end, based on this last three or four week, little mini blip that we might be under. So yes, you’re always looking for the false positive of some sort. But we do try to ask directly that, “Given the COVID-19 window, do you think you might’ve answered the same way previously?” And again, we have some data points from that time to compare. And, “How might you answer in a few months from now?” So, those are a couple of ways to get at it on the consumer side. And we still them some COVID specific questions on the B2B side too. Even if it’s not the topic of the study, we always put a few things in there just to make sure that again, we’re grounding these results and we have a touch point to this current special window to see how that may or may not be impacting some of the responses.

Jason Mlicki:
I have a follow on question for that. A couple of follow on questions, Mike. What about research that was in flight? So, research that you already had. And full disclosure, we’re recording this on April 28th I believe it is. And so I always… When this publishes, things may be a little different. But what about research you had in flight before the pandemic really sort of hit its apex and caused so much, I’ll just say both health and economic damage? How do you look at that as a researcher, to inform your recommendations to your client or decisions they should be making? How should they, I guess, discount what they see or-

Mike Nash:
Yep.

Jason Mlicki:
… in that data?

Mike Nash:
Those were some of our toughest decisions in general. When this all hit a month ago or so, or even six weeks ago, those were the hardest decisions to understand, “Okay, we’re halfway through this now what do we do?” Right? “Do we stop? Do we pause?” And we have several clients that paused, kind of came out of field and said, “Let’s hold off or let’s just stop with what we have.” Let’s say we have 500 interviews, instead of getting the full thousand, let’s stop at the 500 and take that as a baseline. But we suggest that, again, we know when every data point comes in, right? So again, you have an internal map to see where and when results start changing. And you can look at that within a single dataset. So again, let’s pretend we have a thousand completes. We know that 200 of them came in on Thursday, March 23rd and 50 of them came in on Sunday, March 27th. And so we have that tally and we can look at those results individually, if there is such a clean crossover point.

Mike Nash:
We never found one, right? In the stuff we’ve done, we don’t see a real clear delineation point, that all of a sudden everyone starts answering differently on day X compared to day Y. But we were certainly looking for that, and trying to make sure that we understood where that crossover was. But I think the clients that had some of the toughest choices, were the ones that were in mid flight at this point. They’ve either come to the conclusion that they want to do research or they don’t. But the ones that were in mid-flight, where the head most of the hand wringing as to, “Do we keep going? Is it appropriate?” A lot of clients were worried about the sensitivity. “Is this fair to be talking to people during this time?”

Mike Nash:
I mean, I would argue in most cases it is. It’s still a good time to talk to customers. They want to hear from people. They want to know that their opinion counts and matters in some way. So we would strongly suggest to keep moving, in most cases. Again, there’s some sensitive topics, some airline work that went dark. And then like I said, some of the restaurants stuff, you can’t find people in a restaurant, so that’s not a viable topic. But we did not see a big crossover from during the pandemic, that somehow results were being skewed or drastically altered in some way.

Jason Mlicki:
That’s good to know. And then I have another question is, I like how you said that customers do want to talk. I mean, they want to talk to companies, they want to give their input and feedback. Are you finding it hard to reach them? I mean, I know I talked to our clients and even talk to them about just selling and they’ve found that they can’t reach executives anymore. Because they’re not there, they’re not physically in their office. And they’re not forwarding their phones, so they don’t even know how to make connections with people anymore. So what are you seeing on the research side?

Mike Nash:
Yeah, no. I mean, that’s been our bread and butter for years, right? Especially on the B2B side, it is harder and harder to get to that decision maker. So, we see that on a good day. In some ways this made it tougher, particularly in certain industries. But again, we have found the email, most people are getting their email, right? So some of the phone work’s certainly dialed back a bit, but the emails are still sort of valid. People get their emails forwarded. We have been having good luck with various panel partners of reaching individuals. But yes, it’s still a trying exercise, but that’s kind of been our way of life for the last God, at least five, maybe 10 years, of sort of how do you get to that decision maker? And even when business is in a normal situation, so that world has not changed. Maybe it’s gotten a little bit harder, but not drastically harder, based on the COVID situation.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Mlicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Pedal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on iTunes. Thank you. Now, back to Jason and Jeff.

Jeff McKay:
Building on that, you raised a great question or a point about reaching people. I’ve seen quite a bit of research come out recently and I think this has been a trend generally. Do you really need to talk to people to do research? And by that I mean, are there other ways to get at information? And I’ll give you a couple of examples. HubSpot came out with some research about sales performance of its customers on its platform. Because they have access to all that data, they were able to track new pipeline opportunity and dissected the data that they already had.

Jeff McKay:
I think I saw, there was something, I don’t know if it was Netflix, one of the streaming services, talking about the changing trends of streaming watching, with everybody at home. I mean, in those situations there’s no reaching out to anybody, to really get some interesting insights on the customer base. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing on that front? And maybe even throw into that just social listening on social media and those types of waves of doing research.

Mike Nash:
Yeah, so we have a great respect and need and utilization of telemetry data, [inaudible 00:15:16] that’s a fine input to the research process and to business decision making. Particularly in our tech field, we do a lot of work in B2B tech. And we have clients that make great use of their telemetry data, sales data, behavioral, actual data as opposed to perception data. What we see missing in that, is that you see spikes, you see activity, you see page usage, screenshot usage, duration was great, but you don’t get rationale. You don’t know why they’re at certain places. You don’t always know. You can decipher or hypothesize, but you don’t know why they lead from one to another. Why they go from page X to page Y or why they buy item X with item Y or with item Z?

Mike Nash:
And so the rationale and the motivation for those behaviors is what we bring to the table, both in a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures. We can add in or overlay to that telemetry data, more useful information that will really help the business activate and take action. Otherwise, you’re just looking at spikes and trends and themes without necessarily understanding the underpinnings of how those themes came about. But yes, telemetry data is taking off, particularly in that tech space. And we’re probably going to see it more and more places, as phones become more powerful. And we think that’s a great tool in the market research industry, but it’s not the only or it’s not an exclusive tool.

Jason Mlicki:
So in a lot of ways, you’re basically just saying that qualitative may be more important than it used to be. Because now all of a sudden you can observe some behavior that you couldn’t see before, but now you have no idea why it’s happening.

Mike Nash:
Correct.

Jason Mlicki:
So it’s almost like it’s just opened up a whole new world of questions for you. It’s like, well, good to see that this behavior is occurring. What comes to mind for me is, in the early stages of this crisis, I reached out to our SEO lead and I said, “What are you seeing in SEO data?” And she was like, “Well Jason, here’s the thing.” She’s like, “For the most part, search console only updates itself and Google search trends, on sort of a monthly pattern.”

Mike Nash:
Yep.

Jason Mlicki:
Essentially, she said it was broken, that you couldn’t even see any data. Because the data spiked so quickly, that Google either A, wasn’t sharing the information out to its paid SEO providers like Moz, that we use.

Mike Nash:
Right.

Jason Mlicki:
Or the data was essentially invisible, because it was spiking faster than the systems were reporting it. So it was almost like you had this weird anomaly. So it’s really, I don’t know, it’s fascinating. So it’s almost like, the qualitative is more valuable today than it was in the absence of that telemetric data.

Mike Nash:
Yes. Yeah. Well it has more power, let’s put it that way. I don’t know if it’s more or less, but it certainly gives it more power. People that shrugged their shoulders or brushed off that anecdotal focus group of six people, now that [inaudible 00:17:50] a little more valuable. Because that focus group of six people or those IDIs with those three key business decision makers, once you see that they went through a certain pattern that you care about, you can then sort of step them through that whole buyer’s journey, customers’ journey, whatever you want to call it. As to how they came to that conclusion, what motivated them in certain aspects or steps along the way? And again, how they got the job done, from point A to point B.

Mike Nash:
And you see it, the spike on the graph from a telemetric standpoint, but now you hear the rationalization and the motivation for how they ended up there. They may not even have ended up there intentionally or it wasn’t their first choice, right? So you pick up all this stuff that you can see in the telemetry data, but now it backs it with a rationale and a motivation and helps the business make sure that that is the place where they want that customer to end up. Because oftentimes we see it, just because they end there, doesn’t mean that’s where the business wanted that customer to end.

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah. Well, I have one last question before we go to wrap and it just came to me as you were talking, is, given the current situation… There’s been a lot of criticism of focus groups for years. That the problem with a focus group is that, there’s usually one voice in the room that overshadows people and pulls people in a direction. And I’m curious, A, is doing virtual focus groups a viable thing and is that working? And then B, is it maybe actually mitigating some of those problems that you see that occur in team dynamics, when you have nine people in a room together?

Mike Nash:
Both answers are right, right? So I mean, the old fashioned, we have not done a traditional, I personally have not moderated a traditional focus group for about three or four years. That was mostly due to recruiting, right? The difficulty of getting someone in Midtown Manhattan, to show up at 3:30, on a certain day and talk with five other CIOs about technology. So we have been going much more virtual, even before this pandemic situation. And it’s a mix, we do a lot of things one on one. So we sort of devolve the whole group think problem right away or we have tools and ways to sort of work around that and activities and exercises to minimize that.

Mike Nash:
So yes, it has gotten a bad rap over the years, in some cases. We still think it’s a perfectly fine exercise. Right now, we’re not doing any obviously. And we are doing a lot more virtual groups, either in a video session. We’re doing a lot of bulletin boards, where again, it lets people come in at their own leisure. So you leave a board open or a question series for three, four, 12 hours and it lets the respondent come in as they need to, as opposed to just being there at a certain window. So anything you can do to ease the respondent’s burden and get them in the moment of when they want to respond to you, is what we’re trying to do. And certainly all this qualitative techniques are part of that and aid in that ability to do so.

Jeff McKay:
Jason-

Jason Mlicki:
Yeah.

Jeff McKay:
Do you see why I invited Mike on our podcast?

Jason Mlicki:
Oh, he’s finally a good guest. Most of the guests you bring are kind of like bottom feeders. I don’t know who these guys are.

Jeff McKay:
I told you he was good.

Mike Nash:
I try to accept Jeff’s invitations cautiously, let’s put it that way. It’s like when someone invites you to a party, you’re not really sure if you want to go. You got to really tiptoe around to see, “Do I have any other options other than this?” But I was free, and this sounded good.

Jeff McKay:
That’s good. That’s good.

Mike Nash:
But I do want to thank you guys, this has been great. I love what you guys are doing. You’re getting the word out there. You’re telling stories, telling narratives. And I think this is a great use of time. So I appreciate all the work you guys are putting in, and getting different perspectives out there. And I think it’s been helpful to me, just to listen to some of your back archives. And again, I appreciate the window to let me tell a little bit of the market research story.

Jason Mlicki:
Well I want to thank you for coming on because it was really, really helpful. And I also think it’s a really interesting question that I hadn’t really… As we said at the beginning, it hadn’t dawned on me that firms would even question the viability of doing research right now, you know?

Mike Nash:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jason Mlicki:
From at least a conceptual framework, let alone budgetary being a different story. But it just shocked me, so I… Why wouldn’t you want to talk to your customers? That seems crazy, but-

Mike Nash:
We need more buyers like you, right? We need more decision makers like you to sell to. Right. But no, it has been a lot of discussion over the last three or four weeks. Again, I think people are starting to see the value of it. But yeah, there was definitely a lot of discussion as to, “Is this appropriate? Is it sensitive, insensitive? And am I going to get real, positive answers?” And I think we can answer all those questions affirmatively, that this is a good window and really there are no bad times to talk to your customers. It’s really a matter of how you present that context and how you emphasize with that respondent as to what you’re trying to get out of them.

Jason Mlicki:
Well, thank you Mike. I appreciate it. Nice to meet you and thanks for joining us today.

Mike Nash:
Thank you guys. Keep up the good work and have a great day.

Jason Mlicki:
Thank you.

Jeff McKay:
See you Mike.

Mike Nash:
Bye.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode at rattleandpedal.com. Rattle and Pedal is also available on iTunes and Stitcher.