The goal of any survey project is to generate completed responses that can be passed through for survey data analysis. However, life often gets in the way and respondents may not be able to complete your survey between meetings of before putting the kids to bed. This can lead to incomplete...read more

As winter winds its way down and spring looms on the horizon, I was reminded recently of a sampling technique used in the old days that has taken on a new spin. It used to be called snowball sampling. Just as a snowball gets bigger as it rolls down the hill, this form of sampling builds up the...read more

Are questions with dichotomous answers the best use of our online survey design? Answering this question is not as simple as saying Yes or No. Dichotomous questions (those with two response options) may be simple to answer, however they leave one key component behind. Variance allows us to dive more...read more

Marketing as we know it is comprised of two primary functions – customer acquisition and customer retention. Much of the effort skews toward acquisition and its numerous strategies for lead generation, nurturing and eventual hand-off of qualified leads to sales. The volume of companies selling CRM...read more

Let’s now prepare for a return to the Political Silly Season. Sample size, confidence levels and intervals are critical to the public opinion polling process. However, another crucial aspect for consideration by researchers of all stripes is the nature of the sample and of the respondents.It is all...read more

There isn’t a marketer out there who hasn’t at one time or another questioned whether he or she was putting the right messages into the market. After all it is all about how and what we communicate. This is true regardless if we are in acquisition mode or focusing on customer retention techniques....read more

As someone involved in B2B market research, I am often asked by my internal and external clients a very simple question “Why do customers buy from us?” As simple as this question may seem it is not always the easiest to answer. Most clients, especially those in the C-Suite, expect this to be...read more

What does B2B market research have in common with our general marketing colleagues? Well aside from serving marketers as our primary internal clients, we also rely on email as a tool for lead generation and other marketing tactics. In our case it is designed to encourage potential respondents to...read more

Allowing your important marketing decisions to be determined by your customers might seem a little strange. After all, isn't that why you have highly paid analysts and marketing teams? Why would you outsource that job to your customers, who probably have little to no marketing experience? I'm not...read more

Surveys as lead generation tools, this sounds like an abomination. However, they can be conducted in the spirit of both research and sales. In the old days of marketing research, when phone calls were one of the primary tools for data collection, unscrupulous sales people would lead with a survey...read more