Market insights professionals typically have to make a lot of decisions around how to optimize a limited budget with high (and ever increasing) demands for insights. Which stakeholders? Which projects? Which methodologies? Which vendors? Which tools? The decisions facing market insights leaders are tough ones, and prioritization is an imperative.

Unfortunately, what often doesn’t get prioritized is the evaluation and development of the market insights organization’s own capabilities! Without investing in itself, market insights runs the risk of getting stuck in a vicious cycle:

In the past months, Forrester has researched and analyzed how market insights professionals can turn this around. We have just published the first six chapters — and an executive overview — of the Market Insights Optimization Playbook. What steps and guidance are shared in these reports? They will help you:

  • See where you need to be. Forrester provides you with a vision of what market insights can become, and what it needs to become, in order to keep its stakeholders customer-aligned and ahead of competitive disruptions.
  • Identify winning business models and challenges. Forrester provides a landscape view of market insights business models and what is needed to evolve to better models.
  • Learn how to gain bigger budgets. We get that your budget is already spread too thin to support a big investment in building out market insights. So we show you how to make the business case to gain more budget.
  • Identify your present maturity. Yes, we know this is a very sensitive topic, but you need to do a non-emotional assessment of your present capabilities in order to know where you’re really at and how long of a journey you have ahead of you.
  • Build out your plan. You wouldn’t start a project without a plan, so you’d better have a clear strategic plan for your evolution! Forrester shows you what needs to happen first as well as how to prioritize your present workload and all of the requests you’re getting hit with so you can evolve and meet your work requirements.
  • Map out resources and requirements. This is a long (likely two- to five-year) journey, and you’re going to need to optimize resource loads and your own efforts so you don’t lose steam and get stuck. We provide you with a road map that shows you the key success criteria at each stage of evolution so you can focus your efforts — and keep your sanity.

Forrester believes market insights can be more (and should be more) than a back-office cost center. Our profession has some great examples of successful and influential business drivers. Now it’s your turn. Forrester clients can read more here.

Here’s wishing you a successful journey!