Overcoming the Most Common Barriers to Insights Team Maturity

Your team has access to a wealth of market research data and the skills to uncover insights that impact your business. But how often are decision-makers across your organization actually applying your insights?

For the average insights team, the answer is “not often enough”. A 2015 benchmarking study from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that only 20% of enterprises had mature insights functions, with their insights teams serving as a strategic advisor or a source of competitive advantage. The remaining 80% had teams that were viewed as business contributors, with limited budget control and a focus on short-term innovations, or traditional research providers, with a focus on uncovering existing trends and a limited scope of influence.

There are indications that insights teams have been increasing their influence since that 2015 study. In a 2021 study that Bloomfire conducted with 451 Research (a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence), 35% of surveyed business leaders said that most of their organizations’ customer experience (CX) decisions are backed by data. However, 38% said that only some or a few of their CX decisions are data-backed, and only 12% of respondents were confident that their organizations support almost all their CX decisions with data.

So what’s stopping insights teams from increasing their influence with business decision-makers? Let’s take a look at some of the most common barriers – and how to overcome them.

1. Lack of a clear vision

It’s hard for insights teams to increase their influence if no one is clear on their purpose and top priorities. Insights team members and leaders must understand how their contributions support their organization’s North Star. Not only will this help provide clear direction on every project, but it will help team members articulate the impact of their work to the stakeholders who can benefit from it.

Documenting a team charter (if you haven’t done so already) is a good place to start. Your charter should include your team’s vision, mission, roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. It can be valuable to meet with different stakeholders across your organization while you’re developing your charter so that you can better understand their priorities and how insights can help them achieve their goals. From there, you and your team can start documenting how your activities will impact business outcomes.

Once you’ve finalized your charter, store it somewhere that your team members and stakeholders can easily access. (If you have an insights management platform, that’s a great place for your documented vision to live.)

A clear vision is more than just a nice-to-have for insights teams – it helps guide a team’s work and increases organizational buy-in. CEB (now Gartner) reported that insights teams at one of the companies they worked with created such a compelling vision of its business function that it earned a 55 percent increase in its budget year over year.

2. No executive champion

BCG notes that if insights teams don’t have buy-in from the CEO or other top-level executives, they’ll have a hard time becoming strategic advisors or sources of competitive advantage.

This might sound discouraging: After all, you don’t necessarily get to pick a CEO who’s also a huge advocate for customer insights. But even if your company leaders don’t completely “get” the value of customer insights now, it is possible to increase your influence over time.

Start by identifying and engaging with the stakeholders who do understand the value of customer insights. Even if they’re not top-level executives, they can be valuable partners and help you to move insights initiatives up the business agenda.

As you start to communicate more with your stakeholders, be proactive about collaboration. For example, you could offer to meet with other teams to help educate them about the research you are doing, where they can find research reports, and how they can apply insights to their decision-making. This will help you get the attention of other department heads and even senior leaders.

When you do have the ear of senior leaders, you need to tell a story that will hold their attention (for example, lead with a selection of stories shared by real customers, or introduce a finding that goes against prevailing assumptions). Show them how taking actions based on the insights your team has gathered will lead to positive business outcomes. This is your opportunity to paint your team as a valuable advisor.

3. Limited insights sharing

In many cases, insights teams are producing great research reports – but they’re not communicating and distributing their findings as well as they could be. In some cases, teams may present their insights to a limited number of stakeholders through a slide deck that is never revisited, or send out emails that quickly become buried in inboxes. In other cases, insights teams may store their reports and other documentation in various research repositories, but stakeholders may be unsure how to access them or find the specific information they’re looking for.

The best way to address this challenge is to adopt a searchable platform that can serve as the single source of truth for research and insights. All internal stakeholders should have access to this platform so that they can revisit existing insights and find answers to their research questions as needed.

If your team is going to be rolling out a new insights management platform, you should put your marketing hats on to make sure your stakeholders get familiar with the platform and are excited to use it. You might conduct a roadshow to different departments to introduce them to the platform, hold a launch event, or start sending out weekly newsletters with the latest content published on the platform. You can also tailor the content in the platform to make it as valuable as possible to different stakeholders: for example, some of our customers add a bulleted recommendations section above their reports so different teams can quickly identify action items based on the research.

Moving your insights team forward

Increasing your team’s influence starts with being honest about where you are today, what barriers you’re facing, and what steps you can take to overcome them. The good news is that business leaders are increasingly recognizing the importance of embedding customer data and insights in decision-making, giving their insights teams new opportunities to step forward and drive strategic thinking, rather than simply responding to reactive business needs. And as insights teams continue to prove their value to their companies’ decision-makers, they’ll increasingly become sources of competitive advantage.

A version of the preceding article was originally published on the Bloomfire blog under the title “What’s Stopping Your Insights Team From Increasing Its Influence?”.