How do you manage limited / time attention from customers with teams wanting to ask 25 minutes surveys?
Two ways to answer this question:
Follow best practices
Use common sense
Best practice: Survey fatigue isn’t as much about the time it takes to complete a survey but about the number of questions to answer, as well as question type. Best practices for the exact number vary, but the suggestion I follow is to keep the shortest path to under 35 questions. The question type matters as well—open-ended questions have a much higher mental load than multiple choice questions. This article has great suggestions for market research survey best practices.
Common sense: Don’t use a single survey to try to tell you 15 things. When presented with an opportunity to run a survey, it’s easy to get excited and want to ask it all. Don’t give in to the temptation. Focus your research project on the critical things that you need to learn or confirm. If you identify and align on the survey goals correctly, you’ll be able to identify the most critical questions to ask and more easily cut out questions that could be a distraction.
Instead of pushing back on the teams to reduce the time, challenge them to distill their questions to the most critical ones that align with the survey’s goal.
Further reading:
In my experience across consumer goods and retail industries before transitioning to SaaS, market research played a pivotal role in crafting successful go-to-market (GTM) strategies. The nature of consumer goods and retail, where margins are often lower, requires marketers to function as general managers, necessitating thorough research efforts before product launches or marketing campaigns. I share this as there are multiple methods to conduct research as I've been able to apply those in SaaS.
Effective market research, irrespective of the industry, begins with a comprehensive understanding of two key elements: (1) the objective and (2) the target audience. It's essential to align on these foundational components before selecting any specific methodology, such as surveys.
It's common for cross-functional stakeholders, including marketing teams, to default to familiar tactics like surveys without considering alternative approaches. This presents a valuable opportunity to educate the team internally about market research, showcase your leadership, and then, determine the right approach to get results.
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