Who Cares About Your Report?

Who needs to see the results of your work for a customer?

We once had a great client, a national marketing company focused on customer loyalty research. They had an outstanding research operation, with many researchers with academic backgrounds and advanced degrees in research subjects.

This was a second generation company that had served many whale clients. They called us in especially to help them grow their business within some of these large corporate accounts. They were not getting the level of new opportunities in these companies that they expected and wanted.

As we took them through our process for getting new business with current whale accounts, we discovered several interesting features of their work. Their typical client was a research team inside of a very large marketing operation. They conducted customer loyalty research with this client team and for this client team. The people who wrote the final research report were the same people who conducted the research. The research results usually remained within that marketing research operation.

Here’s what was happening. Researchers  conducted the research and reported the research to another team of researchers. All the clients were satisfied, in fact more than satisfied, with the quality of the research. But what was missing was the application of the research to the real business needs of the organization and who was missing was the team of people who could act on that research to solve a business problem or create a business opportunity—senior leaders of business development, sales, customer experience—the company’s senior management team. But the report was not suitable for them—it was too long, too academic, and too devoid of connections to their business issues.

Once we learned the situation, as outsiders we were able to help them redesign both their sales and delivery processes. First, the salespeople began calling on senior executives instead of the research team. Executives wanted the customer loyalty research that they do, so they would commission it. The same researchers from both teams would conduct the research as usual, but then our client’s leadership team would create the final report for the executives. And team that presented the final report had highly developed presentation skills and superior business acumen. Therefore, the report they delivered to management was entirely focused on how what they learned about their client’s customers impacted other business decisions.  In a relatively short time, their repeat business began to grow significantly as a result of these internal process changes.

This story illustrates several sales lessons.

1. Think deeply about where your work had the most impact on the company you are serving. It may not be in the area that hired you. Think hard about who in your company make the report presentation.
2. Be sure that an experienced presenter leads that group and is totally focused on  business outcomes.
3. Work to ensure that you are reporting to the highest-level executive whose problems you are solving or whose opportunities you are creating. Achieving this goal is easier when that is the person who hired you or authorized your project. Even of you haven’t met that person, if your report is written for him or her, you have a very good way of reaching them. Ask for an introduction from the team you’ve worked with, contact that exec’s assistant for a meeting, or simply send them an email with a teaser of what you found and why it matters.