Delivering Insights That Drive Organization-Wide Action

While the pandemic drove insights professionals to respond to many rapid changes, one thing has remained consistent: the vast, organization-wide audience for insights.

According to the GRIT 2022 Business & Innovation Report, insights deliverables have a circulation of approximately seven functional areas. Insights and Marketing groups are typically collaborators in generating deliverables, and the executive team, Analytics, Product Management, and R&D departments are the groups that most frequently receive deliverables and use them to guide their decision-making. Additionally, Operations and sometimes Finance departments may receive learnings from insights deliverables and apply them.

The GRIT Report describes the audience for insights as broad and influential, and the authors emphasize the importance of ensuring each stakeholder group “is happy with the deliverables because dissatisfaction could have unforeseen consequences down the road.”

The consequences of dissatisfaction with insights may include audience disengagement, decreased trust in future deliverables, and–most significant of all–a decrease in using insights and data to drive business decisions.

So how do you avoid dissatisfaction? The key is to eliminate friction for your audiences. All stakeholder groups should be able to easily access insights, understand key takeaways and next steps, and trust that the information is up to date.

At Bloomfire, we have seen our customers eliminate friction by centralizing insights in a platform that all stakeholders can access and packaging deliverables in digestible formats that their busy stakeholders can easily consume. In some cases, insights teams will tailor different key takeaways for different stakeholder groups, ensuring their audience members can quickly understand the impact on their business area and get clear recommendations and next steps.

We have also heard from some of our buyer-side customers that they have reduced friction by providing educational resources for stakeholders who don’t have a background in market research or data analysis. They may lead training sessions on data literacy and market research basics or use their knowledge management platform to publish self-serve resources on insights and research topics.

Ultimately, insights professionals on both the buyer- and supplier-side must keep their different audiences in mind as they package and deliver insights–and consider that different formats and takeaways may behoove different audience segments. By speaking to each of these audiences, insights professionals can increase the influence of their work and promote organization-wide insights usage and action.