With all the Research team members, supplier contributors, and business partners that we deal with every day, we are all sure to run into a few people with whom we find it difficult to work.  An HBR blog recently outlined a few tips for working with people you hate, and I found a few of the recommendations rather actionable:

1. Manage yourself first: don’t think of how they behave, think of how you react
2. Don’t involve others: resist the urge to “commiserate” with others, being negative can hurt your own reputation
3. Work with them more: spending more time with the person may actually help you understand him or her better and develop a better sense of empathy
4. Provide feedback-carefully: share your thoughts if you can outline specific behaviors that the person can control in terms of how they impact your working relationship.  But if you suspect the conversation will not go over well, do not broach the topic.
5. Emotionally Detach: when you have little control over the situation, neutralize the negative feelings by ignoring them

We’ve done the research, and we know that your team environment impacts the quality of your insights.  If you don’t feel supported by your team you cannot embrace the creativity needed to generate great work, so it’s especially important for researchers to figure out how to connect with their colleagues.    Here’s how we can help:

• See how Diageo expands its comfort zone to use a judgment-focus in research
• See how Corning builds a team culture where judgment and unproven hypotheses are accepted and valued
• Access tools to improve communication and consultation with business partners
• Access tools to optimize supplier management

By Anthony Bell

A recent study found that outsourcing customers and providers tend to focus too much on basic service-level activities and not enough on business outcomes. Outsourcing is one of the primary means by which companies attain cost reduction, but most companies fail to capture their full savings potential and incur many unanticipated costs due to inconsistent vendor performance. Leading companies ensure that their vendors are able to meet performance objectives, are motivated to fix process inefficiencies, and are flexible enough to adjust to internal organizational change and new requests.

Our Resource and Organizational Benchmarking Survey found that Research functions dedicate 70% of their total spend to suppliers. With this greater reliance on suppliers, comes greater expectancy of contribution. The MREB has described three areas where progressive companies distinguish themselves and get the most value out of their research suppliers:

• Portfolio Strategy
• Supplier Selection
• Supplier Performance Evaluation

While Market Research functions have made significant advances in managing vendor relationships, our focus on outsourcing management may cost us opportunities to strategically in-source certain activities that create competitive advantage. The MREB explored this in-house vs. outsource decision in our research brief, When is Insourcing Research the Best Option. The brief aims to help Research:

• Determine the competitive advantages of research activities.
• Build a compelling business case for adding in-house research capabilities.
• Breakdown the costs of hiring or training to conduct work in-house versus outsourcing it.
• Assess the risks of outsourcing particular research activities.

Additional Resources

• Supplier Onboarding Protocols
• Risk Based Resource Allocation
• Maximizing Supplier Contribution

Supplier relationship building: we all have to do it.  For Research, we spend the majority of our budget and tons of our time on these partnerships—and we rely on them not only for data but to help us develop strategy and business recommendations for our companies.  But how can we get them to bring the same level of enthusiasm, business context, and research knowledge to their work as internal staff?

Supplier management has been a huge focus for us for more than 10 years, and we have found a few companies that have done just that: deepened individual supplier relationships to the point where suppliers act as an extension of their team.

Unilever, for example, implements a detailed supplier screening process to identify vendors whose innovative ways will have the most impact on business priorities.   And once it identifies the correct suppliers, Reckitt Benckiser (RB) onboards its partners at a level commensurate with new research employees, providing access to internal data and strategy to ensure ongoing, high-quality thought contribution.

MREB members can join us on July 20^th as we discuss these supplier relationship-building techniques, along with Hewlett-Packard’s supplier performance evaluation tool and Prudential’s process for providing benchmarked feedback to its vendors.

Join Us:

• Leveraging Supplier Relationships Teleconference
  20 July, 11:00 AM – 12:00 noon Eastern time

Related Resources:

• Maximizing Supplier Contribution
• Unilever, Norwich Union, and Prudential Financial’s Strategic Supplier Screening Processes
• Reckitt Benckiser’s Strategic Supplier Onboarding Protocols
• Hewlett-Packard’s Supplier Performance Evaluation Tool
• Prudential Financial’s Benchmarked Performance Communication

By Kirsten Robinson

Suppliers take up more than 70% of Research’s budget—yet they too often are thought of only as data providers.

We all know that research teams can save a great deal of time and money by utilizing their supplier relationships to provide strategic insights.  The question is how can we break old supplier management models, and what new system will actually improve the insights we receive from vendors?

We spoke with Chris Frank, VP Global Marketplace Insights at American Express, about the company’s strategy to get more insight and consultative support out of their supplier relationships.

AmEx’s Supplier Management System has four key elements:

1. Assess current suppliers rather than search for new ones to uncover additional capabilities.

2. Provide suppliers with a list of essential questions that all projects must tie into.

3. Refocus vendor time to minimize effort wasted on unnecessary reporting.

4. Enable candid feedback through reciprocal evaluations.

MREB members, get more details about how AmEx extracts greater strategic value from their supplier relationships and read excerpts from our conversation with Chris Frank here.  And for more information and best practices in supplier management, check out the following:

• Maximizing Supplier Contribution
• Supplier Portfolio Strategy
• Supplier Identification and Selection
• Supplier Performance Evaluation
• Supplier Feedback Forum

Related Blogs:

• American Express: Vendor Engagement Strategy
• Research, Leverage Your Specialist Suppliers
• Is Your Supplier a Vendor or a Partner?
• Pay-for-Supplier Performance in Research?

Research suppliers consume more than 70% of corporate research budget, and in an attempt to improve efficiency corporate researchers often turn to large research supplier that provide full-service, end-to-end solutions, particularly for our ongoing tracking studies.

But some research departments have noted that working with these large suppliers can compromise the quality of information and limit the opportunity to experiment and partner with smaller, more innovative companies.  Indeed, having full-service suppliers own a study from design through analysis forces some difficult trade-offs:

• Design Consistency-individual studies are designed according to suppliers’ methods and are housed on their networks, making data integration cumbersome for the internal team
• Administrative Efficiency-even with a single point of contact at each supplier, the internal team manages multiple relationships and multiple partners must be communicated to when business priorities change
• Data Accuracy-although you partner with a single, full-service provider, your fieldwork will often be done by a network of subcontractors, making it difficult to ensure consistent data quality
• Analytic Rigor-in the full-service model, analysis is the first thing to be crowded out by execution delays and approaching deadlines.

How can we mitigate these issues?  Microsoft created a new supplier management model, unbundling the research process so that execution is centralized with a single supplier but more specialized suppliers are selected to design and analyze for key customer segments and research types.  Because they feel that truly differentiated information comes from the quality of analytics and other back-end, value-added services they wanted to build partnerships to help them take advantage of unique analytic techniques.  MREB members, learn how Microsoft dealt with the challenges of unbundling their research process here.

Do you have a model in place that allows you to balance the efficiency of full-service shops while also leveraging specialist capabilities?  Share your thoughts on supplier management in the comments section below.  And for more information on strategic supplier management, visit our Supplier Management Topic Center and these related resources:

• Maximizing Supplier Contribution
• Setting Your Supplier Portfolio Strategy
• Identifying and Selecting Suppliers
• Evaluating Supplier Performance
• Supplier Feedback Forum

By Aaron Field

Insights functions and their research vendors often seem like two countries divided by the same language. We all speak confidence intervals and cross-tabs but do we want the same thing?

If not, it’s a shame. There’s a lot to benefit both sides when the relationship works well. As Rick said to his amused French companion; “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Myth: Money divides us.

Truth₁: Our own, internal customers are not penny pinchers. Board research shows that cost-efficiency is the 17^th ranked research skill (out of 24) according to internal partners. Even more revealing, cost-efficiency has no impact on our internal strategic impact. Check out more here.

T ruth₂: Vendors aren’t trying to short-change us. For sure they care about profit but they also care about long-term relationships and satisfaction. Preferred vendor relationships – based on quality and satisfaction – are repeatedly welcome by vendors.

Myth: Secrets divides us.

Truth₃: The best way to get more from vendors is deep sharing of brand and company strategy. Vendors who have this knowledge produce more relevant reports, collaborate more effectively on survey design, and sometimes even generate original insight. And simple non-disclosure agreements ensure that confidential information stays confidential. (See how Reckitt Benckiser builds this relationship.)

While we’re talking about Casablanca, here’s the most famous quotation straight from IMDB.com.

Rick: You know what I want to hear.

Sam: [lying] No, I don’t.

Rick: You played it for her, you can play it for me!

Sam: [lying] Well, I don’t think I can remember…

Rick: If she can stand it, I can! Play it!

And for more on what suppliers think of us, MRS ran an interesting piece.

This week’s guest blog entry comes from Christopher Frank, Vice President, and Jessica Bernow, Senior Research Manager at American Express.  American Express’s Vendor Engagement Strategy was a finalist in the 2010 MREB Leadership Awards.

While conventional supplier management practices are adequate for collecting accurate and timely data, they typically leave insufficient time for in-depth analysis.

To deliver breakthrough thinking with limited budget, our team at American Express needed to tap suppliers’ insight generation capabilities. This posed two challenges:

•             Challenge #1: Vendors are not close enough to the business to be thought partners

•             Challenge #2: There is a lack of time for analysis and insight generation

To meet business partners’ need for guidance, we shifted from a client service to trusted advisor approach, which requires more time for insight generation and consultation. While the standard vendor partnership delivers on the goal of timely, accurate data, it presents problems for more strategic aspirations. Read More »

What’s your New Year’s resolution?  More staff?  A larger budget?  Restructuring to better support business partners?

Despite early reports that the struggling global economy would pick up steam in 2010, it was a pretty challenging year for business.  Unemployment remained high, previously larger teams continued to do more with less, and consumer confidence remained “so-so.”

As our members close the books on 2010 and start thinking about 2011, we hear a lot of “What will 2011 look like?”  And as Research Heads start to think about what the coming year holds for their teams, we receive lots of questions around budget, spend, team size, and team structure.

One of the best ways that we can support all those questions is through our annual benchmarking survey.  Keep an eye on our site.  Each year, we upload member responses into an interactive tool that allows members to slice and dice the data to compare their own responses to peers across several different dimensions.  Business model, industry, team size, and revenue are all popular cuts.  And once you’ve cut the data—you can download it into PowerPoint to enhance presentations and business cases!

So what did we learn coming out of 2010?  Here are just a few insights from this year’s survey: Read More »

By Anthony Bell

When you examine your project portfolio, what process do you use to determine which research activities to outsource to suppliers and which have reason to stay inside your team? The traditional supplier approach focuses on the who (selecting good suppliers) and the how (lowering cost or building thought partnership). While selection and cost are important, these considerations presume that outsourcing is always the best option.

The MREB has made the argument that strategically insourcing certain research activities may be the best move for the business. Ideal insourcing opportunities include those that:

• Are cost neutral versus suppliers
• Generate competitive advantage
• Produce equal quality to suppliers
• Add no additional risk

Research deconstructs and root causes the Outsourcing decision, but senior executives may misunderstand the research function as a cost function. Read More »

In a recent article on research-live.com, market research trainer Kathryn Korostoff debates whether companies could institute pay-for-performance for research suppliers the way many have for ad agencies.  While she admits that traditional pay-for-performance can’t work because of market changes, project variability, and implementation issues, she does posit three models companies could use to ensure costs better reflect project outcomes:

1. Base plus-compensate suppliers with a base fee to cover expenses plus staff time costs that vary based on client satisfaction with the overall project.
2. Cut of savings-calculate fees based on cost savings provided by supplier innovation.
3. Right of refusal-enter into contracts that allow you to pass on research you are not satisfied with, given the understanding that the supplier can then sell this research to another party, including competitors or media outlets. Read More »