Buy the right thing: Identifying the research tooling needs of your team

For starters, it’s something that you do infrequently, maybe once a year, more likely once every couple of years. This means you don’t necessarily have a lot of experience in running this process, or it might have been a long time since you’ve done it before.

It’s also high stakes: if you buy software which doesn’t solve your team’s problems, or doesn’t work with your other software, or doesn’t meet your security or legal needs, then you’re going to be at a loss.

Making the wrong decision can be an expensive lesson to learn.

One way we’ve previously talked about is to get your team to prioritize what they need via a checklist, where they indicate what features are most important for them prior to doing a vendor assessment.

Another way to reduce the risk of making a bad decision is to run a stakeholder survey.

A stakeholder survey is a way to identify the needs and views of everyone who is involved in a project. This method is best used in the early stages of a project to better understand background from different perspectives and define requirements, roles, and goals.

A well-executed stakeholder survey helps ensure every voice is heard, building trust and setting your team up for success.

Identifying what your stakeholders need in a vendor is a perfect use case.

Let’s say you’re in the market for a new customer research tool. If you’re a researcher, you probably have an idea of what you need; maybe you’re even comfortable enough to create a shortlist of vendors.

But how confident are you that your shortlist will align with what your fellow research and research ops teammates have in mind? And what about your non-research stakeholders, the folks on your team who do research or need research, but aren’t researchers by trade. From product managers and marketers to designers and engineers, they’re completely spread out across your org.

To align on vendor needs and pick a tool that’s built to endure your legal, compliance, and procurement processes, you first need to run a stakeholder survey. It will help you evaluate how your stakeholders think about and prioritize:

Survey your stakeholders using the free template below. Great Question makes it easy to customize the survey to your liking, share it with your team, and most importantly, identify what they need in a research tool.