The Skills Your Team Needs to Power Your Insights Engine

If your research team is generating valuable insights but struggling to get them in front of the right decision-makers at the right time (or struggling to get decision-makers to act on your findings), it’s time to build an insights engine.

The Harvard Business Review defines an insights engine as a function that doesn’t just field market research requests and supply data, but also distills insights and makes strategic recommendations. In other words, your team members need to be researchers, strategists, effective communicators, and knowledge managers. When your team is skilled at not just conducting research and generating insights, but also guiding stakeholders in making data-driven decisions, you become a true source of competitive advantage for your organization.

Building an insights engine requires your team to possess the right mix of skills and knowledge to increase the accessibility and visibility of insights, ultimately empowering stakeholders to make customer-centric decisions. Below, we’ll take a look at some of the key skill sets you should be hiring for and cultivating on your team.

A mix of analytical and creative thinking

Market researchers tend to be highly analytical: after all, most probably got into the industry because they enjoy working with data and synthesizing insights about customers or consumers. But a successful insights engine requires both analytical and creative thinkers: people who can analyze data, uncover insights, and present those insights in ways that resonate and stick with non-researchers.

It’s important to keep in mind that analytical and creative thinking are not mutually exclusive, and someone who is stronger in one area can be trained in the other. For example, your team might gather for brainstorming sessions where everyone is encouraged to pitch new and creative ideas for presenting key findings to stakeholders. Or you might organize a cross-functional workshop where insights team members and representatives from other departments brainstorm ideas to improve sales based on data.

The ability to connect insights to business goals

In organizations with a traditional market research model, the insights team receives requests from line managers and delivers on them. The organization primarily views the insights team as a provider rather than a strategic advisor.

Teams that want to establish an insights engine need to break outside of this mindset and provide strategic recommendations that are tied to business goals. Leading organizations are already doing this: Kantar Vermeer’s 2020 study found that 75% of high-performing firms believe their insights teams are business-focused, compared to just 50% of lower-performing firms.

Insights team members need visibility into business goals and should be trained on how to establish research priorities and present the most relevant findings based on those goals. While the entire organization should be unified around a set of shared business goals, insights team members may still need to tailor their insights delivery to resonate with different stakeholder groups.

For example, while all departments might be focused on goals around the customer experience, a customer service leader might be most interested in insights into the perceived amount of effort for customers reaching out to their contact center, while a marketing leader might be more interested in insights about touchpoints before a consumer becomes a customer.

A storytelling and marketing mindset

Insights team members need to think of themselves as internal marketers. It’s their responsibility to identify the right channels, timing, and messaging to deliver insights to their customers (i.e., the decision-makers who can benefit from their findings). And if team members don’t think of themselves as natural storytellers or marketers, it’s time for them to start developing those skills.

One way for team members to improve these skills is to study the structure of a story and think about how they can apply it to their research. Team members might practice presenting their findings as stories to one another before presenting to a larger audience. This will give them an opportunity to get more comfortable with storytelling and to get feedback on different elements (e.g., whether the transitions are clear, whether the story has a compelling hook).

Your team might also experiment with different marketing channels and mediums to determine what resonates best with your stakeholders. For example, rather than just delivering your findings in a slide deck, you might share a series of short videos where each one highlights a different key takeaway or host workshops where you encourage stakeholders to ask questions and engage with your insights.

An understanding of knowledge management

A key component of building a successful insights engine is making insights easily accessible to stakeholders, and that requires an understanding of knowledge management. Your team members need to understand where knowledge and insights are stored, how information flows across the organization, and what they can do to help stakeholders access, engage with, and use insights.

If your organization has a centralized insights management platform, your team should get in the habit of publishing reports and all other finalized documentation there so that stakeholders can access them on demand. They should also consider how they can present this knowledge in ways that encourage engagement. For example, they might add a bulleted list of recommended actions alongside a report to make it easy for different stakeholder groups to understand the next steps. They might also encourage stakeholders to ask questions or add comments within the insights management platform, creating a feedback loop that the insights team can use to further refine their approach to knowledge delivery.

A successful insights engine starts with people

An effective insights engine ultimately requires the right combination of skilled people, processes, and technology to increase the accessibility, visibility, and usability of insights. If you’re considering adopting new technology or implementing process changes to increase the impact of your insights, it’s essential that you also focus on cultivating the right insights sharing skills on your team. Help your team members develop their skills and they will help your team become a strategic advantage for your organization.