If you engage with a market research agency to do a study for your company, you get lots of benefits. Access to research experts. Learnings from their extensive experience with similar studies. Confidence that professionals with appropriate skills and credentials are working on your behalf. But working with any type of consulting agency requires some level of project management on your part. There are many risks when conducting market research; know them to mitigate them.

1. How to Manage Market Research Project Risk:
Managing Your Agency Partner
If you engage with a market research agency to do a study for your company, you get lots
of benefits. Access to research experts. Learnings from their extensive experience with
similar studies. Confidence that professionals with appropriate skills and credentials are
working on your behalf.
But working with any type of consulting agency requires some level of project
management on your part. There are many risks when conducting market research; know
them to mitigate them.
There are several points in a market research project where you, as the client-side
manager, need to be particularly cautious. Here are two of the big ones:
1. Risk: Ignoring sample quality. If your project is one where the agency is
providing sample sources, you need to know what sources and something about
their quality. Ask how many sources the agency intends to use, what they are,
and their experience with each source’s quality. A professional agency will be
able to give you a clear, credible response. If you get a vague, confusing response,
beware.
2. Risk: Not previewing final deliverables. Ah the big day! The research agency is
sending a sharp, knowledgeable professional to present your findings. The
mistake? Not looking at their presentation at least 3 or 4 business days ahead of
time. It is totally appropriate for you to have a chance to preview and approve the
presentation. Don’t do it and you risk these very real scenarios:
• The presentation includes some conclusions that your colleagues, as experts in
their market, know can’t possibly be correct. There goes the entire project’s
credibility, all because of 1 or 2 poor slides.
• The presentation uses language that you just know will antagonize people. I am
not saying you hide bad results; I am saying that you know your company culture
and know how to present “bad news” in a productive way.
• The slides contain obvious errors. Alas, it happens. The agency was swamped
with deadlines the week your report was due, and insufficient time was spent
checking your slides. I know a research director from a Fortune 500 firm who
bumped into a presenter in the parking lot 30 minutes before an executive-
presentation; the speaker was still creating slides in the rental car!
Want more tips? Please check out the book on Amazon, “How to Hire & Manage
Market Research Agencies.” OR, access a free chapter here: FREE.

2. Author Bio:
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Have a market research question? Kathryn Korostoff is president of Research
Rockstar, a company that delivers online and in-person training to busy
professionals seeking market research excellence. Kathryn is a market
research professional with a special interest in how organizations acquire,
manage, and apply market research. Over the past 20 years, she has
personally directed more than 600 primary market research projects and
published over 100 bylined articles in trade magazines.
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