Primary market research: how to plan and run it, starting with interviews

Primary market research is information you collect yourself, directly from people in your market, through interviews, surveys, questionnaires, focus groups or visits to competitors' locations. The Hartford's small-business guide separates it from secondary research, which someone else has already gathered and published, and notes that primary research usually costs more and takes longer.

Because it costs more, plan it around questions that published data cannot answer. For most early questions, start with a small round of interviews to learn how the work is done and why. Add a survey only once you know what you want to count.

A worked example

Suppose you sell practice-management software to dental offices and are deciding whether to build a tool that follows up on unpaid insurance claims. This example is hypothetical.

Published sources can tell you roughly how many dental practices exist. They cannot tell you who in a practice chases unpaid claims, how long it takes or what the office already uses. Those are primary research questions.

Turn the decision into research questions

Write the decision at the top of a page: "Build a claims follow-up tool this year, or not?" Then list the facts that would change it. GOV.UK's research planning guidance suggests turning your team's assumptions and opinions into research questions, and focusing on the ones that matter most.

For the dental example:

1. Who in the practice follows up on unpaid claims, and how often?
2. What do they do today: phone calls, the insurer's website, an outside billing service?
3. What happens to claims that nobody follows up?
4. Who would approve paying for a tool, and what do they compare it to?
5. How common is each current approach across practices?

The first four ask how and why. The fifth asks how many. That difference decides the method.

Match each question to a method

The Hartford describes two kinds of primary research. Exploratory research is open-ended, usually long interviews with individuals or small groups. Specific research is more structured and follows up on a problem found in the exploratory stage.

GOV.UK says a round of interviews usually needs four to eight participants, while surveys need hundreds of responses to produce clear findings. That is another reason to interview first: you can learn a lot from a few conversations, and a survey with poorly chosen answer options wastes hundreds of responses.

Choose people with firsthand experience

Ask each question of the person who does the work or makes the decision. In the dental example, that might be the office manager or billing coordinator who chases claims, the dentist-owner who approves spending, and someone at an outside billing service who sees many practices.

Include practices that handle claims in different ways, such as in-house billing and outsourced billing, so you do not mistake one setup for the whole market. Market research with customer, supplier and operator interviews covers how to map these viewpoints, and how to interview B2B buyers, users and champions covers the approvers.

Run the interviews in small rounds

Plan one round of four to eight interviews, then stop and review before starting the next. GOV.UK recommends several smaller rounds over one large one, so you can adjust between them.

• Build the interview around a recent, specific event: "Walk me through the last claim you had to chase." Customer interview questions has wording you can borrow.
• Take notes in the same format for every call so they can be compared later.
• After each round, mark each research question as answered, still unclear or contradicted, and rewrite the next round's questions.

If round one shows that most offices send claims to an outside billing service, the next round may need more billing-service staff and fewer office managers.

Add a survey when you know what to count

Once interviews show you the three or four ways offices handle claims follow-up, you can write a short survey that asks which one a practice uses. Without the interviews, you would be guessing at the options. Interviews vs surveys explains the trade-off in more detail.

Turn findings into the decision

Go back to the decision at the top of the page. For each research question, write what you learned, from whom and how confident you are. A customer research decision memo gives you a format for that.

If you need interviewees you cannot reach through your own network, the operations professionals in dental services directory page shows the kinds of people you might invite. You can also search for people by describing the experience you need. Instant Expert finds people whose work matches, you review them, it sends your invitations and you pay for each call that gets booked.