IC08: How to Build an Insights Department Inside an Agency by Serena Chaiban (Right Formula)

• You need to switch your thinking to individuality and believe in yourself.
• The environment and leadership team need to be encouraging.
• First of all, you need to understand your business and language internally.
• Conduct interviews with department heads in your business and try to understand what kind of data they need and how to connect to their objectives.
• Do your own research on the industry, sector, and competition.
• When you get a full picture, internally and externally, then you can start with planning, go step by step.
• Internally explain and show what you can do with research.
• You need to work on yourself a lot.
• To start and get some quick wins, they've used secondary data.
• With client research, start small to gain trust and then scale up.
• After 3 months they've started winning client research projects.
• They've used the first projects to build great case studies.
• When choosing a type of research, cost-effectiveness plays a big role in agency setup.
• You need to find a balance between what is needed now and what you can do in the future.
• In the beginning, you need to proactively find ways of implementing research within your clients.
• For a start, they relied on secondary data and social listening. Later on they introduced advanced primary research.
• You must make the insights department profitable and make sure that it brings in money.
• It's important to set up your research framework for your team to use it, but then also to continuously improve it.
• While expanding your team, you need to lead from the ground up, meaning you need to do research by yourself.
• Focus on the story rather than on the data.
• Don't overreact to resistance and avoid getting lost in small details.
• Market research agency experience background is great for a challenge like this.
• After around 6 months, they've felt that the research department is operating successfully.
• Key things to make it happen: trust yourself, break your old thinking, be flexible, customize your proposals, be patient, and don't forget your team. 🚶🏼

Check the full recording here 👇🏻