How do you influence/convince your team to implement your research?

I’m going to assume this question is referring to getting partner teams like product and marketing to implement or act on findings from your research. Research actionability is hugely important, and it’s also hard to do well. 

You have to get several things right for your colleagues to want to stop what they are doing to pay attention and take action on your recommendations:

1. Make clear and strong recommendations in the first place. Your synthesis is only as good as how easy it is to digest. If your findings come across as very mixed or complex, or even too comprehensive (a bad habit of mine!), it may be hard for people to cut to the heart of what is most impactful in your research study.

2. Think like a marketer in how you build your deck or synthesis doc. Who are the audiences you are most hoping to influence with this work? How do they make decisions? What kinds of visuals or arguments have you seen them respond well to in the past? Structure your executive summary and top 5 slides to reflect what those stakeholders need.

3. Build a sense of urgency in the findings. If you have historical data to show trends, you can strengthen urgency if there are any worrying signs or opportunity windows emerging in the competitive landscape. You should always have a clear “Next steps” section that includes some follow ups that you can own and that leaves room for the addition of priorities from other stakeholders.

4. Roadshow! Building influence is all about getting eyes on your work and skillfully mastering who to bring in when. If you’re already confident in the quality of your deck, I suggest starting with your closest and most senior stakeholders–ideally 1:1 or asynchronously–and asking them to add their comments or share what stood out most to them. Eventually, you can take the work out to broader forums, like all of marketing, all of product, and the whole company. 

5. Identify your ongoing allies. Make sure you know who you 1-2 biggest allies will be in making sure the work is brought up and resurfaced over time. Oftentimes, due to outside circumstances or existing priorities, our recommendations can’t get taken up right away. If you have allies who see the insights as valuable, they can continue to cite your work and in time, it’s more likely to get acted upon. 

Bonus point – Research findings are much more likely to be acted upon if your stakeholders are brought along before you even launch your research. This helps ensure they have trust in how you’ve set up the study and that they agree this is important to do in the first place. At Quizlet, we put “potential action plans” at the top of our research brief to ensure we’re focusing the design of our studies on the right kind of insights and the right format of information to support the decisions at-hand.

Finally, if I misread your question and you’re talking about making a case for getting your direct reports or partners to do the research itself, it’s probably mostly about making sure the business questions and potential impacts are clear and compelling enough. Or, for your own team, you may need to make a case for what else needs to be traded off to make this important work happen!