How to Do Market Research in 5 Minutes

As a B2B market researcher, I spend a lot of my time speaking with extremely targeted, senior decision makers at Fortune 500 companies.

Or at least, I spend a lot of my time trying to speak to these people. The truth is, I spend only a small portion of my time actually speaking with them.
There’s a good reason for this discrepancy. Senior decision makers are very difficult to get a hold of and have a high opportunity cost for the time they spend dropping knowledge. If a CFO makes $800k per year, they’re not likely to be enticed by a $10 Starbucks gift card.
It’s not that they’re jerks and don’t want to help. It’s just that they want to do it in 5 minutes, not the 30-60 minutes I ask for.
That’s where a 5-minute “elevator interview” is an essential weapon for a market researcher’s arsenal.

How to Do Market Research in 5 Minutes: Elevator Interviews

Senior executives rarely have 30 minutes to burn on your B2B market research interview.
Rather than telling your target interviewees it’s half an hour or nothing, it pays to think ahead of time about the most basic information you want to learn from an interview — the information that you would pass on to your boss in a two-sentence email; the information where if you don’t end up getting it, the interview was a total waste of time.
Generally, in B2B technology, we’re dealing with legacy processes being displaced by new disruptive ones. Therefore, the three questions I always want to answer are:

• What is (was) the status quo?
• What are you considering (did you consider) as an alternative?
• Why?

More specifically, I’m typically working on one of two projects on behalf of our portfolio: buyer research — to better understand who buys our product and why — or partnership research — to discover mutually beneficial technology and service partnership opportunities.

Sample 3-Question “Elevator” Interviews

Here are two examples of what to do if you only have 5 minutes with your interview subjects to work with. My three-question elevator interview for each of the projects I mentioned above might look like this:

Buyer Research

• What was the problem you were having that prompted you to search for a new solution?
• What were the different solutions you evaluated?
• Why did you make the choice you did?

Partnership Research

• What sort of partnerships do you currently have?
• What are you looking for in a strategic partner?
• Do you see a fit with industry X?

Of course, there are many more questions I’d like to ask, and I do ask them when I have the time.
Sometimes, this comes in the same interview — an elevator interview can break the ice for a longer, more in-depth conversation that the interviewee would never have agreed to up-front. Or sometimes, you have to take the quick responses at face value and fill in any background information you can by other means.
Either way, knowing the three most important pieces of information I’m looking for and having them at the tip of my tongue is essential, especially when I know my target is a hard-to-reach C-level executive who likely won’t have a lot of time to burn on market research.
Is lack of time/availability one of your top challenges for market research? I’d love to hear your feedback, so try out this approach and let me know how it goes.
What other hurdles are you dealing with?