By now, you’ve probably heard about Forrester’s Playbooks. These amazing how-to guides are showing a variety of professionals how to go from vision to best practice to optimization of key Forrester big ideas. And the good news is . . . we’re working on a playbook for market insights professionals!

We’ve been listening to you and have heard your challenges with gaining influence, linking insights to strategic decisions that drive business value, and being able to show how much value market insights add. We know that market insights are a crucial value-add for the business and can help drive smart business decisions — and we’re in the process of creating a playbook to show you just how to do that.

The Insights to Business Value Playbook will walk you through Forrester’s vision for the next-generation market insights organization and then show you, step by step, how to get there. As this is a major evolution of our role, the details will be laid out in 12 separate reports which will allow you to:

  • Discover what a cutting-edge market insights organization is. The first three reports will walk you through the Vision for the next-generation market insights organization, show the Landscape of how far organizations have evolved toward this goal, and help you make the Business case to gain the funding you need to move your organization forward.
  • Plan for what you need to get there. The next three reports will allow you to do an Assessment of your maturity, show you a Strategic plan for this two- to three-year evolution, and then build a Road map of key steps and what’s needed.
  • Act in ways that drive business value. There are reports on three key areas that will help you optimize your Organization (people), Process (approaches), and Tools and technology to ensure that you have all the needed pieces in place to efficiently and effectively create insights that drive business value.
  • Optimize the insights function. The final three reports will help you identify optimal ways to do Performance management, Benchmark the maturity of a variety of insights organizations so you can see how your own organization is progressing, and finally give you the keys to making Continuous improvements.

There you have it: An integrated, step-by-step guide that can help you turn a back-office research function into a top-office insights and business value driver! Look for the first six reports in the coming months, with the full Insights to Business Value Playbook coming out by the end of the year.

The Forrester team is very excited by this holistic approach to working with market insights professionals and would really like to hear your thoughts. Does this align with your needs? Any must-haves that we should consider including in this Playbook? We welcome your feedback and thoughts below.