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RESEARCH
Primary Research — Valuable Insight for Your Firm’s Future
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By Reagan Branham, CPSM
DOMAIN 5
Each firm in the A/E/C industry is unique. Primary research is an in-depth tactic that can result in tailored data sets that shine a light on your firm’s uniqueness, allowing you to clarify your firm’s differentiators. Conducting primary research provides first-hand insight that your firm can use to make informed strategic and tactical decisions.
Many firms – very likely even your competitors – are conducting primary research and gaining the competitive edge that comes with it. The amount of work required for this endeavor is extensive,
but the benefits are enormous.
- Gain insight into the awareness and perception of your firm
- Understand your market position against your known and unknown competitors
- Receive honest feedback about your firm’s performance
- Understand market trends and growth opportunities
- Uncover potential market risks
- Entering a new geographic market
- Considering expanding to a new project typology
- New or increased competition
- Repeat business has declined
Quantitative Research
Quantitative research provides numbers-based and measurable data sets. This information answers questions of how many, how much, and how often. “Which of the options below are the most important qualities you consider when hiring a structural engineering firm?” “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to hire us again?” “What percentage of your projects do you bid competitively?”
Online surveys are a fast and inexpensive tool to gather quantitative information from large numbers of people. With surveys, you’ll gain aggregate information that is relatively easy to coalesce into digestible charts and graphics. This type of research enables you to ask numerous questions and yields more objective findings.
While you can certainly gain insights with this data, there are limitations. The results provide a 10,000-foot view of your firm, but it may be more difficult to recognize specific themes and relationships with quantitative data alone. A critical piece of information that can be obtained through quantitative research is your Net Promoter Score, a metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Net Promoter Score
Barton Malow is a century-old construction firm that prioritizes client feedback throughout the lifecycle of its construction projects as a vital form of primary research. To measure satisfaction and proactively address potential challenges, they employ the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. Barton Malow asks clients on a scale of 1-10 how likely they are to recommend the firm to someone else. The responses are categorized into promoters (9–10), passives (7–8), and detractors (0–6), generating an overall score on a scale from -100 to +100.
While they initially used third-party software to collect this data, Barton-Malow’s marketing team discovered that response rates significantly improved when surveys were sent directly from a Barton Malow email address and reflected its own branding. As a result, they developed an in-house feedback platform using Microsoft Power Apps paired with an integrated Power BI dashboard. The improved solution allows for real-time updates, streamlined usability, and robust reporting capabilities. Barton Malow can analyze and act on client insights more effectively and continuously improve their service delivery.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research provides subjective data that requires interpretation. Answers to these open-ended questions help us understand the why and how behind behaviors. “What are the biggest challenges your university is facing?” “What are new technologies you will be implementing in the next year?” “What is your favorite part about your new fire station?”
Online surveys –
allow for qualitative questions, though many people’s patience for thoughtfully answering open-ended survey questions is limited. Rather than long, thoughtful answers, you may receive unanswered questions, one- or two-word responses, or people dropping out of the survey altogether.
Interviews or focus groups –
either in person or virtual – are more common ways to gather qualitative information to better ensure you receive the in-depth answers you’re seeking. This research is much more focused. You’re asking fewer questions but gaining deeper, more thoughtful results.
In the early months of the pandemic, Cline, a 120-person architectural firm in North Carolina, embarked on a listening tour to help prepare themselves for the challenges that Covid would bring to the built environment. The firm targeted 10 developers and conducted mostly in-person meetings to better understand how to prepare for these changes and gain their perspectives on a 5- to 10-year outlook. The immediate result was a summary report shared internally and with participating developers. The information reinforced and clarified ideas that the firm’s leadership was already considering themselves.
The report was expanded upon for an article in the Business Journals, demonstrating the firm’s expertise and forward-thinking approach.
Setting You Up for Success
Consider conducting primary research as an investment in your firm’s future. The foundation is an understanding of what questions you need answered. The steps along the way require thoughtfulness so your investment can grow to maximize potential. The resulting payoff is the insight that allows your firm to grow with confidence.
You will have many decisions to make in the steps along the way prior to achieving payoff:
Do you conduct the research yourself or hire a consulting firm?
A third-party firm will guide the process, serve as a neutral party to obtain more accurate results, and allow your staff to stay focused on billable work. They also likely use analysis software to better understand the survey results. However, that also comes with a price tag and still requires your involvement.
Who do you survey?
Online surveys allow you to contact large groups of people, but who to survey should be guided by what information you’re trying to gather. Valuable sources of data include recent clients who know your firm’s work, potential clients with upcoming projects, and potential clients who have worked with your competitors. A shotgun approach may yield more results but less informative data.
What questions do you ask?
The best surveys include a combination of qualitative and quantitative questions. Combined, the answers paint a more complete picture. As you craft the questions, be sure to avoid leading questions – ones that subtly nudge your respondent in one direction or another. Examples include: “Which of our services did you find most useful?” “Most students think in-person learning works better. Do you agree?” “If you found our services beneficial, would you recommend it to others?”
At HERA laboratory planners, we conduct post-occupancy evaluations internally one year after project completion. The research may be done in person, but more typically, it is an online survey. We ask users specific questions about the functionality of their laboratories, and the resulting data informs future project work. We also gather client satisfaction quotes during the survey. The results and extrapolations from the results are shared with the entire firm. The one-year time frame is important because it allows users time to adjust to their new environment and provides the project team time to analyze the results more objectively.
Post Survey Analysis
In a good news/bad news situation, the survey will provide a mountain of data to wade through. What does it all mean, and what insights can your firm learn from it?
The quantitative data will be easier to tackle. Extrapolate the raw data into a form you can manipulate. That may be as simple as downloading it into an Excel file, which you can then use to create simple visuals: bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, or histograms, for example, to share with your firm leadership.
Analyzing qualitative data offers more of a challenge but ultimately provides more meaningful insights. As with quantitative data, qualitative data should be organized. That could be in a spreadsheet, or you can upload it into a feedback repository such as Dovetail or EnjoyHQ where the data is researchable and taggable.
Next, the data should be coded and themed. Essentially, you search for similar answers or threads throughout the survey and regroup the data. Read them together, and those answers may offer valuable insights. Again, there are software options powered by AI to help with this process. Thematic, Delve, NVivo, and ATLAS.ti are a few.
With all the analysis, it’s tempting to throw out the outlier answers and focus on the averages. Fight that urge because those fringe answers may be indicators of emerging trends. In a few years, the fringe answers could be the average, but you will have missed the window to be ahead of that curve.
Using the Data
The best data provides actionable insights. Let’s look again at the benefits of primary research and now also think about further questions to ask.
Gain insight into the awareness and perception of your firm.
Are survey respondents aware of your firm? Do their perceptions align with your expectations? What marketing campaigns can build on or reshape this perception?
Understand your market position against your known and unknown competitors.
Are you comfortable with your market share? What tactics can you deploy to neutralize competitors and gain market share?
Receive honest feedback about your firm’s performance.
How can this information improve future results? How can these results translate into new or repeat business?
Understand market trends and growth opportunities:
Where are the opportunities? How can your firm leverage the insights to maximize growth?
Uncover potential market risks:
How comfortable is the firm with the risks? Are there markets to avoid altogether or strategies to minimize our risk?
Primary research enables your firm to obtain specific information that cannot be found elsewhere. The investment of time and resources is significant, but so is the competitive advantage the data provides.
Reagan Branham is the chief marketing officer at HERA laboratory planners, a national and international lab planning firm. With more than 25 years of experience in A/E/C marketing and journalism, Reagan’s diverse background includes writing, editing, graphic design, social media, and product design.
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