Stakeholder Research & Insight
It’s so easy to become inward facing. Listening to your stakeholders - your clients, partners and other supporters - is the most useful exercise you can undertake to understand your business, from the outside in. A powerful catalyst to help you confidently shape your future direction and deliver your mission with greater impact.
On listening
If you see your business from the outside in then your direction becomes much clearer.
Whether it’s business strategy, service development, a new brand and website or your marketing, comms and content strategy, the single most useful thing that you can do to inform your marketing, and indeed your whole business, is to invest in this research.
Organisations that really connect with people put their customers at the centre of all they do. How do you do that? By talking to clients and other stakeholders, asking them the right questions and listening hard.
The benefits of listening
Outsiders see things more clearly. Your customers and stakeholders are the best people to tell you where your sweet spot lies. Often what you think you’re good at is not where the real value lies. This will give you a whole new perspective.
Their words, not yours. There is nothing more powerful than hearing your service described in your customers’ own words through direct, qualitative feedback.
People like to be asked. Most people welcome a request for feedback. The listening process makes them feel valued and builds deeper relationships. This often leads to new opportunities and gives you a reason to connect.
They’ll tell you how to develop your service. You’ll get ideas on how to take the organisation forward, what works best now and what elements could benefit from further development.
They’ll tell you how to market to people like them. Your customers know how they want to be communicated with and what information they like to receive. This will help you develop your business development and communications strategy.
Align your team. Listening to those inside the organisation will flush out good ideas and help to bring people on the journey with you.
Boost your confidence. I’ve conducted this process for many organisations and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Any criticism is wholly constructive. Good feedback is a welcome boost for everyone.
My stakeholder research & insight service
Using an experienced independent researcher like me will help you to get a clearer picture. Stakeholders tend to be much more open with someone unconnected with the service. This insight will provide a wealth of valuable qualitative data for you to call on and feed into your strategy and communications. (You’ll also get some great quotes / testimonials to help you demonstrate the value you deliver too).
“Sonja engaged brilliantly with stakeholders and clients to develop a deep understanding and powerful insights into the company. She helped us to understand ourselves better.”
What people say.
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“Working with Sonja was exactly what we needed. The research and insight gave us the foundations and confidence to develop our proposition and message in a way that would resonate with our key stakeholders and network.”
— Nick Gardham, CEO, Community Organisers
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“Sustrans has been around for over 40 years and much has changed along the way. As part of our recent strategy review we wanted to understand our audience and what people think about us. We didn’t want to rely on assumptions so we hired Sonja to give us that objective view through a series of telephone interviews with our stakeholders and rigorous analysis. This resulted in quality conversations with a really wide range of people, and extremely valuable insight. The work has helped us to better communicate our purpose – what we do and why we do it – with clarity.”
— Becca Massey-Chase, Head of Strategy & Governance, Sustrans
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"The interviews were a real game changer for me when repositioning my business. They gave me a huge boost. And the language to write with, using their words, not mine. The feedback idea felt exposing, vulnerable at first, but it's a very positive experience and absolutely worth it if you want to make bold, confident decisions for your future."
— Sue Bush, founder of The Co-Foundry
How it works
Here are the steps I’d recommend to deliver your listening project. I’ve set out the jobs you’ll need to do, as well as my role.
Research design
Together we’ll devise the right set of questions to achieve the goals of your project and elicit the information you need from the calls.
We agree a list of people you'd like me to call.
You invite them to participate in the process (I have a draft set-up email I can give you to tailor). You’ll get best results if the person with the relationship makes contact and requests their involvement.
Interviews
Once they’ve agreed, I’ll arrange the calls directly.
I’ll call them up, ask questions and listen hard, letting your interviewee speak. With their permission, I’ll record the call (verbatim feedback is communications gold dust!). Usually these calls take c. 20 – 30 minutes but if the interviewee wants to talk further, I let the conversation run.
I’ll write up a full transcript of each call. Having a record of the exact words is useful. These transcripts can be useful for creating case studies in the future too.
The output: Analysis and Insight Report
You’ll receive an insight report and recommendations based on their feedback including:
Patterns, statistics, overview. Highlighting recurring themes in the feedback - your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
Who you are for. A clear picture of who you best serve, your ideal clients’ and customers’ world and challenges, and why they need you. Their world, their challenges, their hopes and fears.
Where your value lies. An outside in view of what you’re best at and where your true value and opportunity lies.
Your content opportunity. What your clients and other stakeholders would like to see from your content.
Words used to describe you. How are you perceived by your stakeholders? What story are they telling? What do they say? These are the sentiments, words and phrases you can use in your communications and content strategy too if you want to connect.
Key testimonials. Quotes you can use in your marketing, and the foundation material for awesome case studies.
Recommendations, based on this evidence, in line with project goals. I’ll present insights in a format that helps everyone see the big picture clearly, and take action.
This insight will help you to take bold decisions on your business direction, brand message, website and marketing approach - setting your strategy on firm foundations.
Nick Gardham, CEO of Community Organisers
“The 1:1 listening work was invaluable to understand the organisation from their perspective. I am convinced that is why our brand is so strong in the eyes of our network. They can see themselves in it. It is their words, their images and their perceptions reflected back at them.”
About me
I’m a consultant, trainer and research partner, helping leaders and teams to unlock what it is they want to say and showing them how to create valuable content to get the word out.
I’m co-author of the award-winning book, Valuable Content Marketing - how to make quality content your key to success (Kogan Page 2013, 2015).
My practise is drawn from 20 years of research and successful on-the-ground strategic brand, website and content programmes, delivered for organisations large and small, including the Met Office, Google, Sustrans, Nationwide Building Society and universities across the UK.
Want to see your business from the outside in?
If you’re looking for a research partner to see your business from your audience’s perspective, I’d love to see if I can help. Get in touch by email and we can arrange a time to talk it through.
“Listening is a powerful act: you have to put yourself out to do it.”
- David Hockney