How do you decide whether to engage an outside research vendor vs. doing scrappy research yourself?

Whether in-house or with a consultant, the goal remains the same: to deeply understand your market and customers, and to leverage this understanding to make informed, strategic decisions. Deciding when to conduct research in-house versus bringing in a consultant is a critical choice that can impact the quality, depth, and utility of the insights gathered. Here's my perspective on navigating this decision: In-House: Leveraging Internal Expertise Deep Product Knowledge: Your in-house team has an i ...Read More

Whether to do user research in-house or hire a vendor is a decision that depends on three key factors: budget, time, and quality. Engaging a research vendor is the more expensive option. It's kind of a you get what you pay for scenario. If you engage a vendor and brief them well, you'll probably get better results simply because its the research vendors field of expertise. If you have a limited budget or need results immediately, then doing the research yourself may be the best option. However, ...Read More

Having skilled, experience market researchers in-house (whether in PMM or not) certainly makes it easy to take on more projects yourself. No matter how good outside firms are, they'll never be as deep as your team is on company strategy, product portfolio or brand identity. So, all things being equal, it's generally best to bring in a consultant or outside firm for research projects where objectivity and neutrality are particularly helpful. Exploratory brand, messaging, use case and pricing inte ...Read More

First understand the appetite level for research across the organization. If a lack of customer or market understanding is preventing the business from achieving key goals (closing more deals, delivering better products, etc.), and you can make that connection, then you might have an easier time unlocking the resources. If there are smaller pockets of need, or it's not a large enough problem across the business, then you might have to start with some scrappier tactics to prove the value. No matt ...Read More

My bias is towards conducting in-house research first to establish the foundations and get crisp on the business subjective, research questions, target personas … what we need to learn, who are we targeting, and why. I’ve found that you can get a reasonable distance with a structured approach to customer research and the process can be a good gauge for formulating the research agenda before you bring in an agency and/or purchase industry reports. Your output is only as good as the clear framing ...Read More