Dear Corporate Researcher: Essential Ways to Expand Insights Across the Enterprise

Great things come to those who research. What helps make an enterprise successful, though, is sharing those important findings internally.

Too often departmental silos mean that key stories are told only to a select group of stakeholders. Yet expanding insights across the enterprise can help the entire organization leverage information gleaned from your research efforts.

Consider these ways in which researchers can better share customer insights with the broader internal audience.

Effectively promote insights you already have.

Don’t be afraid to use the same messaging tools you use to reach customers to communicate with your internal audience too. This could mean:

• making a video or podcast for your internal website.
• hosting Lunch and Learns to share results and discuss implications.
• sponsoring Immersion Days during which research teams sit with other departments and communicate everything they’ve learned about the customer.
• taking to social media to share bite-sized information on the customer. You could bullet highlights via Slack or Instagram, for instance.

Cultivate champions.

With internal networking and word of mouth, researchers can effectively spread the word about customer insights. Bring together important people from each department who can talk about the benefits of research and learn from others’ observations as well. In fact, plan to pay attention when facilitating these kind of collaborative meetings so that you can harvest new insights for future research too.

Fostering relationships with key stakeholders across the enterprise can benefit the organization — blurring boundaries and building collaboration — and your own research efforts. With the full diversity of departments in the organization aware of the good work you’re doing, and how valuable your research results are, you might be presented with more opportunities to leverage the lessons learned.

Broaden your audience.

Look beyond traditional partners when planning to share the latest research results. Sure, marketing and customer service are obvious places to present your data analysis, but there are typically many more departments that could benefit from your great work.

By delivering actionable insights to the right people in the various departments, beyond the obvious ones, you can help those in HR, PR, New Product Development or perhaps Legal start to think of ways in which they might benefit from partnering with the organization’s research team.

61% of companies say reaching their strategic goals depends on collaborating more across functions and faster decision-making. — Strategy &

Do the hard work first.

As a researcher, you likely enjoy poring over findings and results to identify trends and make new discoveries. That’s why you do what you do. But not everyone in the organization will share your enthusiasm. If nothing else, they are unlikely to have the time to delve in-depth into data to identify the insights that matter most to their domain.

So, before pushing your results out there internally, take the time to be sure you are sending the best findings to the right users. Solicit feedback regularly so that you can continually develop your sense of what each departmental user values. Make it easy for stakeholders to take themselves off research report releases. Or, consider setting up a report catalog that lets individuals self-select what data they access.

Effectively disseminating insights through the organization can be foundational to enterprise success. At the same time, it can also help everyone to understand and appreciate the common goals they can work together to achieve.

About Jeff

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