Marketing Research Blog

Building Trust with a Client is Similar to Building a Little League Baseball® Team

Thinking back to the days of coaching Select A, AA, and AAA Little League baseball®, for teams my sons played on, there was a lot of preparation ahead of games and tournaments—aside from stressing proper nutrition (which can be difficult when dealing with kids suffering from candy & junk-food addictions), getting proper rest, being mentally prepared, and being baseball-ready at regular practices.

As a coach, I gathered information on the opposing team’s players and coaching staff from every source available. This information came in many forms:

• Game books that we kept from prior games against an opponent
• Box scores from their past games against other teams
• Apps like LeagueApps or TeamSnap that document player stats
• Even conversations with other coaches who had faced a particular opponent

The information gathered provided valuable insight into our opponents’ strengths and weaknesses from coaching tendencies to their individual players’ talents, tendencies, and trends to developing a winning game plan that played to our strengths, while allowing us to capitalize on their weaknesses to get the win.

Similarly, doing your homework and preparation reaps dividends on initial calls with a potential first-time client, too. The research agency landscape is increasingly competitive, so the more you know about a potential client and their company, the more likely there will be meaningful conversations and perhaps the beginning of a working relationship with the client. In addition to any client-provided information you may receive ahead of the call, additional sources that may provide some direction on their business issue(s) are:

• A company’s 10-Q and/or 10-K Filing and Annual Report (if they are a publicly traded company) provide an audited, comprehensive overview of their finances and projections.
• Transcripts of their quarterly earnings calls provide a shorter-term view of this information.
• Recent press releases from the company can provide information on current activities and initiatives.

These filings and reports often paint a picture of an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and trends so that you can tailor your approach to your prospective partners and be more consultative throughout the process. At the same time, it’s just as important to know this same information about their key competitors. This information provides a working knowledge of where opportunities or “white space” may exist.

In addition to these sources of company information, the individual with whom you will be speaking probably has a LinkedIn presence. It’s always wise to check their social media to gain a deeper understanding of their background, education, experience, and who they are so that you can tailor your approach to best connect with them on a professional level and possibly a personal level if you share common interests outside of the workplace.

Being an industry expert is critical. The more you understand about a client’s business – be it automotive, retail, or construction/home improvement – and the better your understanding as a consumer, the better your work will be. Embrace learning opportunities with every shopping experience, product usage experience, every time you interact with or see/hear an ad, etc. Moreover, each time you complete a research project related to a key industry, you will have not only solved a client’s marketing, messaging, pricing or segmentation problem, but you have also learned more about a key industry in which you personally specialize. Of course, we always honor confidentiality, but your baseline industry knowledge is constantly improving just like a Little League Baseball® team does with each practice and each opportunity on the diamond. It’s all about improving your knowledge and translating those gains into demonstrable skills.

Ultimately, there is more than enough information at our fingertips. It’s up to us to tap into it and decide what we feel will work best. And when we do, we can be smarter in our work and our approach to clients and their business challenges. It allows us to demonstrate that we are not only intelligent, but that we care about their issues and their success. This is the foundation of establishing strong relationships, building lasting partnerships, winning their trust and in turn, their business, now and into the future when other issues arise. We want to be seen as that “Ace” closing pitcher that consistently comes in, saves the game, and secures the win for the Team.

Best of luck with all your research, as well as building a stellar Research Team within your organization, and perhaps your own successful Little League Baseball® Team.

Little League Baseball® is a copyright of Little League Baseball, Incorporated.

Blake Puckett

Vice President

Email Blake

With more than 20 years of experience, Blake’s expertise lies in marketing research project design, implementation, and execution, and in complex logic-intensive problem-solving. His key contributions include consulting with clients to design data-collection instruments, managing projects through their life cycle, providing actionable results and analysis, and broadening clients’ understanding of the research, to enable appropriate strategic decisions-making.