How to present data and influence people: three ways to make your insights work harder

Dale Carnegie’s iconic How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the best-selling books of all time. There’s a reason: he makes it easy to achieve many common goals by laying out step-by-step plans to get there, whether it is bringing in more sales, connecting with others or being a leader. 

How can we take the fundamentals of this approach and apply them to proving the value of market research insights? By mapping out some typical demands on insights teams, we can identify specific goals and the steps needed to accomplish each of those objectives.

The most obvious challenge for insights teams today is to prove value. Businesses are being pressured from all angles to evaluate the profitability of any expenditure, but calculating ROI can be a complicated undertaking for marketing and market research functions. The best way to prove the value of your market research is to make it easy to find the insights in your data, beautifully tell the data stories, and share them with the people that matter. 

Find the insights that will drive your business forward: 

It is the age of information. Data streams are coming at organizations from all directions, and they must be considered holistically to provide a foundation for action. As researchers, we want to dig in and find the stories all that data is telling us. Interrogating the data needs to be fast and intuitive, and the analysis solution must handle all the complexities of market research data. Infotools’ Harmoni platform streamlines analysis with functionality based on statistical models and other critical properties for marketing-related data. This makes it easy and quick to uncover the insights that your business needs - even for last-minute or one-off requests from stakeholders. When you can provide data immediately to answer a pressing business question, more people in your organization will start to see the true value of the insights function.

Report on the data in ways that resonate with everyone:

How many times have researchers delivered a static PowerPoint deck filled with trumped-up crosstab reports? Or miles and miles of spreadsheets? These aren’t very good at showcasing your insights. When data is delivered in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and dynamic and approachable, it is easier for everyone who uses data to see its true value. Harmoni not only brings multiple data sources together, but the platform creates beautiful, engaging reports through an interface designed with the user in mind. These reports are easily updated with the latest data, and easily made - allowing researchers to highlight statistically significant data points, provide explanative labels for each insight, and much more. These capabilities help you give a full picture of the insights that have been uncovered, making them more valuable for organizational decision making, even for the non-research or non-data savvy.

Collaborate on insights and share them far and wide:

As market researchers, we rarely work in a bubble. As they say, two heads are better than one - and most projects have several team members involved. Collaboration is essential in uncovering the best insights that will deliver the most value to a company. Systems that allow team members to work together in real-time result in rich, robust insights developed based on solid two-way communication. Harmoni has new functionality that makes collaborating easy during a project, and you can easily share its resulting online reporting dashboards across the broader organization. With customizable permissions, the platform can grant varying levels of access to provide structure around analysis collaboration and surrounding sharing the beautiful reports you’ve made. This ensures that each person gets the exact information needed to inform their decisions with data — no more digging around for what they need.  

Carnegie writes, “Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.” Just so, only insights that are actually put to good use in your business will prove their value. Implementing an approach that keeps this in mind at every stage of the process will ensure that insights become an essential, influential part of the way your organization operates - winning over stakeholders with clear ROI that everyone can see.

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