Champion Market Research as a Do-or-Die Investment

Marketing research is not just an expense; it’s an invaluable investment in the future success and sustainability of your business. Market research informs decision-making, mitigates risks, and helps identify opportunities.

When it comes to research, you need a great deal of objectivity. In fact, your ability to create a marketing strategy that generates a strong, predictable ROI requires miles and miles of objectivity. And the best way to achieve this objectivity is to leverage an outsourced research team that comes in completely bias-free. If you are not in a position to outsource your market research, conduct your own, ideally with an external, objective advisor to help you identify the bias in your research. But don’t pick and choose only the research elements your team has the time or expertise to execute. It’s more important to complete the research in full than for it to be perfect. You cannot shortcut market research and have any hope of reliably predicting outcomes.

The Cost of Discounting Market Research

Over the last two decades since opening the doors to RedRover, we’ve worked with more than 300 clients, and we’ve tracked a variety of statistics across those clients. One of these stats is the percentage of marketing investment, in the plan we inherited from them, that was wasted due to lack of sufficient market research. In other words, what percentage of their total investment did the research suggest could be shut off without impact? On average, 60% of these clients’ marketing budgets were wasted. In fact, in the early days, we used to cut off the investment to these poor performing channels and wait the length of their sales cycle to see if there was any impact. 95% of the time, there was no measurable impact.

So, odds are, you too are wasting 60% of your marketing investment a year. If you spend $100,000 annually on marketing, that’s $60,000 being wasted every year, and a $300,000 misspend over five years. You can outsource this entire research protocol for roughly $40,000, and most of it will last you, on average, three to five years depending on how dynamic your industry is. The bottom line is you can’t afford to skip market research. It’s the primary driver of your ability to drive strong, predictable marketing outcomes.

For most of you reading this blog, you are wasting a full 60% of your marketing investment a year. You can’t afford to skip market research. It’s the primary driver of your ability to drive strong, predictable marketing outcomes.

The majority of marketing leaders and CEOs I’ve worked with over the years came to the table skeptical about the need for market research. I’ve heard hundreds of variations of “Why wouldn’t I just put that money into execution?” I get it. If you haven’t seen the power of market research firsthand, disbelief is natural. If you cannot let go of that thinking, however, and embrace quality research as the linchpin to predictable marketing, your odds of success drop substantially.

Market Research Protocols: Qualitative & Quantitative

There are two types of research protocols—qualitative and quantitative—and utilizing both gives you the greatest advantage when building an informed, results-guaranteed marketing strategy.

Qualitative research is used to determine the scope of beliefs about your brand and its place in the market that must later be vetted against a statistically valid audience size or across the market at large—which is your quantitative research. This quantitative vetting is necessary to ensure you have sufficient clarity and ammunition to craft a strategy with predictable outcomes. Think of qualitative research as the perceptions, opinions, and viewpoints that must be validated statistically through the hard numbers, which are your quantitative methods.

Qualitative Research Protocol

Internal and External Stakeholder Interviews

Stakeholder interviews—both internal and external—are the essential foundation of qualitative research and a core expression of Battle 3 from The 12 Battles™ Framework. These interviews uncover where perspectives align and diverge across leadership, frontline employees, customers, and prospects. They reveal hidden insights about competitive position, brand perception, messaging gaps, and growth opportunities that internal teams can’t see on their own.

To ensure rigor and objectivity, best practices include creating role-specific interview guides, prioritizing open-ended questions, practicing active listening, and gathering diverse viewpoints. Done right, these conversations expose critical truths that inform deeper quantitative testing and ultimately lead to sharper, evidence-backed decisions. Skipping them means guessing—at your own risk.

Competitive Surveillance Including Reputation Scan and Indexing

Competitive surveillance is a critical and often underused component of qualitative research. To outmaneuver your rivals and win market share efficiently, you need more than intuition; you need hard data on how they’re showing up in the market. This includes tracking SEO performance, website traffic, social content, email strategy, and brand sentiment through accessible, low-cost intelligence platforms.

By translating these insights into a reputation index, you create a clear-eyed, channel-by-channel view of your competitive landscape—revealing not just where your competitors are strongest, but also where they’re absent. Those gaps? That’s where strategic opportunity lives. Championing research means not just understanding your buyers, but also your battlefield.

Value Proposition Comparison

A strong value proposition isn’t just marketing fluff—it’s the backbone of whether your strategy resonates or falls flat. But it’s not enough to believe you’re differentiated; you have to prove it through structured comparison. Using a value proposition grid, you can objectively rate your company and competitors across the factors that usually matter to your target market—like price, speed, service, or innovation. When paired with qualitative insights from real customers and, ideally, B2B mystery shopping, this exercise strips away internal bias and surfaces the hard truths about where you lead, where you lag, and where you need to pivot. Championing research means pressure-testing your positioning—because your assumptions don’t win deals. Your relevance does.

Offer Strategy Evaluation

An effective marketing strategy means little if your offers fail to resonate. Evaluating your offer strategy through the lens of qualitative research ensures you’re not just filling the sales funnel, but meeting your audience with the right value at every stage of their journey. Mapping offers across awareness, consideration, conversion, and post-purchase helps reveal where you may be asking too much, too soon or offering too little, too late. By layering in ascending offer tiers—from free lead magnets to premium VIP engagements—you reduce friction and earn trust over time.

This research-backed structure aligns with the principles of The B2B Marketing Revolution™, which urges B2B leaders to reject generic, one-size-fits-all approaches in favor of intentional, data-informed tactics that deepen customer commitment. And when you evaluate your competitors’ offers alongside your own, you’re not just benchmarking—you’re identifying where strategic upgrades could accelerate conversion and loyalty.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Inventory

Misalignment between sales and marketing isn’t just inefficient. It’s expensive. A sales and marketing alignment inventory helps surface the disconnects that quietly erode ROI, from unclear handoffs to mismatched messaging. This qualitative exercise evaluates how well these teams communicate, whether they share goals and KPIs, how aligned they are on buyer insights, and how effectively tools like content and CRM are used across the funnel. These aren’t just operational questions—they’re strategic ones. The 12 Battles™ Framework calls out the need for internal cohesion as a critical enabler of guaranteed outcomes. Without cross-functional unity, even the best marketing efforts fall flat. Alignment isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement for any company serious about growth.

Quantitative Research Protocol

Marketing Performance Audit

A marketing performance audit is the quantitative backbone of an accountable strategy, revealing what’s working, what’s not, and where to shift spend for stronger MROI. By evaluating performance across all disciplines—branding, web, SEO, content, social, PPC, and automation—you surface the story the numbers are actually telling.

But the value lies not just in measurement, but in meaning. Done well, this audit ties performance to both internal goals and external benchmarks, exposing gaps between effort and return. The B2B Marketing Revolution™ emphasizes that data-driven clarity is non-negotiable for modern marketing leaders; without it, teams risk misalignment, waste, and stalled growth. This kind of audit is about more than analytics—it’s about building the muscle to act decisively and invest with precision.

Customer Transaction Analysis

Customer transaction analysis transforms raw sales data into strategic foresight. By uncovering which products, services, segments, and regions deliver the greatest value—and which underperform—you gain clarity on where your true growth potential lies.

This form of quantitative research helps isolate your most profitable customers, identify buying patterns, expose seasonality shifts, and reveal dormant segments with untapped opportunity. When analyzed across multiple years and segmented meaningfully, this data becomes not just retrospective but directional. As explained in The B2B Marketing Revolution™, this practice reinforces that growth isn’t powered by guesswork; it’s driven by pattern recognition, customer-centric insight, and a readiness to let the data challenge what you think you know.

Current, Lost, and Prospective Customer Survey

Surveys of current, lost, and prospective customers are necessary for quantitative validation, turning your hypotheses into statistically reliable insights. This step doesn’t replace qualitative interviews; it strengthens them, confirming what patterns are real and which outliers can be ruled out.

Done right, a survey helps decode customer behaviors, preferences, and decision drivers at scale—offering a data-backed lens on where your brand is winning and where it’s falling short. To avoid skewed results, survey design must follow best practices: clean sampling, neutral phrasing, meaningful incentives, and clear structure.

In line with the 12 Battles™ Framework, this form of research reinforces a core truth—strategy should be grounded in what customers actually think, not what we hope they think. If you’re not testing your assumptions with statistical rigor, you’re not de-risking your strategy; you’re gambling with it.

Qualitative + Quantitative Research = The Right Mix

A high-performance marketing strategy isn’t built on instinct or numbers alone. It requires a deliberate balance of qualitative insight and quantitative validation. Stories from interviews offer context, texture, and human truth, while data provides the scale and statistical certainty to act with confidence. Lean too heavy on one, and your strategy risks being either emotionally resonant but unscalable, or data-rich but disconnected from what truly drives decisions. When integrated, these two lenses create a complete picture—one that reflects both the nuance of individual experience and the broader market reality. This balanced approach is at the heart of any strategy built to withstand scrutiny, scale with confidence, and ultimately deliver results that can be guaranteed.

By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution™: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes