From Million-Dollar Insights to Billion-Dollar Insights

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, we speak with Rogier Verhulst, Head of Market Research at LinkedIn.

As organizations grow, so does the importance of well-researched decisions. 

But how can you ensure that insights continue to make an impact, as the stakes and complexity increase? 

Digging deeper into the problem space, honing your sense of intuition, and maintaining conviction are all key for continuously turning insights into action.

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by Rogier Verhulst, Head of Market Research at LinkedIn and author of The Business of Marketing Research. 

They cover:

• The role of intuition in generating insights from data in an imperfect world
• How the insights function evolves as an organization grows
• Mapping out challenges to uncover opportunity 
• How LinkedIn has leveraged insights to solve business problems 
• The importance of the 3 C’s: creativity,  curiosity, and conviction
• Why research often fails + how hypothesis-based approaches and issue trees can help
• How to tackle both the “So what?” and the “Now what?” 
• Why exposure to real-world use cases is essential for the insights leaders of tomorrow
• What insights teams can do to push the status quo 
• Why it’s crucial to hire a variety of skill sets when building an insights team 

If you’re interested in digging into practical ways to integrate insights and fuel business growth, listen to this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast.

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or use the RSS feed with your favorite player. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor Olof Philogène: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast. Today, I'm super excited to have an incredible insights leader joining me for what I know will be a great conversation. 

Rogier Verhulst has more than 20 years of experience in data analysis and market research, working for agency and client-side organizations such as WPP and Microsoft. Currently, he is the Head of Market Research at LinkedIn, a strong advocate of turning complex data into simple and compelling stories. 

Rogier has co-authored a textbook, The Business of Marketing Research, providing a highly practical approach to market research. Rogier, thank you so much for joining me today.

Rogier Verhulst: Yes, thanks for having me, Thor. It's really a pleasure to be here today and hopefully, I can say some interesting things to your audience. Looking forward to getting into it.

Thor: Let's get to know you first, Rogier. Could you take a couple of minutes to tell us a bit about yourself, your journey, and how you came to work in the role you're in today? How did it all start?

Rogier: Yes. I was born and raised in the Netherlands. I grew up in the era when the internet really started to take off. I finished my degree in Economics from Tilburg University in the Netherlands and then soon found out that I really had a passion for research and great curiosity and I really enjoyed that process of researching. 

Then at the same time, seeing the internet take off, the two factors led me to Silicon Valley, if you will. I wanted to be part of that first initial dot-com boom and I saw all these companies exploding, and lots of small companies really jumping on the internet and what was possible.

I picked up my suitcases and rather than starting at a boring bank in the Netherlands, I jumped on a plane and went to San Francisco. Part of that is also my nature, I tend to be fairly independent and chart my own course and so I didn't want to fit a particular mold. 

I went out there and I had some connections in San Francisco from my professor who made a move there as well, whom I had a good relationship with. He invited me to come work at a market research agency. So I did a lot of work for large and smaller companies at the time to help them understand how to capitalize on the internet.

Working at an agency in the early days really gave me a great foundational understanding of research methodologies and what you can do to solve problems for companies large and small. 

I really enjoyed being in San Francisco at the time. As an agency, we started to develop a good relationship with Microsoft as well. After having worked at an agency for a few years, I made the jump over to Microsoft and worked in their central market research group for a number of years.

That was a great experience too because it allowed me to understand how big corporations operate and how to navigate the complexities of large organizations, and having to influence people at different levels in the organization. A big part of being an insights professional is to take your insights and get other people to take action on it. 

That gave me a really good understanding of how to communicate and how to keep work insights in a way that's most compelling back to your stakeholders. 

After having done that for a few years, I got the four-year itch, in 2008, that's the time when the Web 2.0 movement started. You saw a lot of companies starting to realize that when you create social networks and you create networks, you can build all kinds of interesting solutions on top of that. 

Many companies didn't quite know how to make money from that but it was a really interesting concept to connect people on the internet and to stay connected to them to these networks.

LinkedIn was about to take off at that time. I always wanted to work at a startup and I felt like that was the right time for me to make that move. I joined LinkedIn when it was still fairly small and we didn't really know what business we should be building. 

That was a great experience too because it allowed me to understand how big corporations operate and how to navigate the complexities of large organizations, and having to influence people at different levels in the organization. A big part of being an insights professional is to take your insights and get other people to take action on it. 

When I started, it was really about helping them build a B2B sample business and potentially become a resource to the research community or to hedge funds to provide expert access or create an expert network if you will.

It was really interesting to build that business from the ground up within a small startup. This was just one of many things that Reid Hoffman wanted to pursue. I mean, his philosophy was very much around “Let's plant lots of seeds and see what ultimately grows into a big flower.” 

Obviously, it was an interesting experience but we quickly realized even though we were pretty successful that there wasn't going to be a massive business. 

We abandoned that business and I think that was really good at that time for the company to just say, "Look, we've got all these other things going on, let's just really double down on the things that we believe are going to turn into billion dollar markets."

We gave up on that concept and then started to build a talent, marketing and sales solutions business. We started to use our capabilities that we built and use them more for internal purposes. 

That also gave me a chance to do something different within the company. One of the things in the early days that we recognized as we didn't have - people didn't really understand the solutions that we were trying to build. In many cases, we were trying to revolutionize existing industries.

If you think of the hiring industry up until LinkedIn came around, it was very much based on “post and pay”. I mean, you went to Monster.com as a company, you posted a job, and then you just waited for people to reply to it. 

It required a lot of education and insights as well to drive the sales behind that. It allowed me to learn a lot about how you create databases, how you use data, extract data and then turn it into insights essentially, in the beginning really to help support the growth of the business. 

Whereas we were trying to come at it from a very different angle which is to say, “We provide you solutions and tools that allow you to access a big network of people, so that you can proactively reach out to candidates that may be a little bit passive for any of the jobs you're trying to fill.” 

That was a very novel concept. It required a lot of education and insights as well to drive the sales behind that. It allowed me to learn a lot about how you create databases, how you use data, extract data and then turn it into insights essentially, in the beginning really to help support the growth of the business. 

We coined the term “data-driven sales“ at the time. It also allowed me to see different aspects of the business. From there, I took a stint in product management and product operations and got to experience that aspect as well.

Then ultimately, when the company started to become bigger and bigger in 2016, there was a realization that we needed to get more serious about just creating more formalized groups that do very formalized work. 

At that time, we started to have a pretty large group of customers. One of the things that we wanted to understand is just how satisfied they are with our solutions and how much loyalty we are creating. The company started to ask the more bigger company-type questions that then required us to create more of a formalized market research group. 

In 2016, I founded the research function at LinkedIn, and ever since, I've been doing that and so really came full circle if you will, because that's how I started out, the agency side, and ultimately got the chance at LinkedIn to develop that function.

That's been my journey so far and I'm really enjoying it with the team right now. We started with a small group of people and we have 40 people now. We're a centralized function, supporting all market research for the company with the exception of USI, that's a very specialized field. We work very closely with those folks as well within the company and have a great time.

I remain very bullish on LinkedIn. I think the mission and vision is very strong. The culture they've created is something that's really long-lasting and people tend to stick around and learn quite a bit as well from people that are fairly experienced and know what they're doing. 

Yes, I've been really enjoying it so far and I continue to enjoy it. I think my motivation for continuing to be in this field is just to really advance the field and promote the field of market research and consumer insights because I think it is a really important function in any company.

Building the insights function at LinkedIn

Thor: Rogier, this is such a fascinating journey that you've had to get to where you are today. I would agree, even from the outside, I think LinkedIn is an amazing company, and definitely, I'm impressed by it. 

Let's dig maybe a little deeper about the function that you founded. I know you've worked at LinkedIn for more than 13 years now across a variety of different roles, as you pointed out. 

What really strikes me as super interesting for our listeners is how much LinkedIn has grown and evolved since you joined, right? Could you tell us what it was like setting up that insights department in the earlier stages of LinkedIn?

Rogier: Yes, I mean, I was obviously very privileged to see the entire evolution or close to the entire evolution of the company. When we started, it was just a few hundred people, and today, we're close to 20,000 people. In the early days, I think research and insights was really primarily used to drive that education awareness of what we were trying to achieve. 

As I mentioned earlier, we really tried to help customers understand what their footprint already was on LinkedIn and how they could take advantage of that footprint they already had on LinkedIn. 

They had a company page, their employees were on LinkedIn, how to turn that into an asset whether they were trying to promote their company or whether they were trying to hire people, attract talent, or whether they were trying to advertise themselves. 

That required quite a bit of convincing that they should be investing on LinkedIn, they should be buying us, they should be buying our solutions to help them hire the best talents.

The focus was really on building the platforms and getting the insights out. In many ways, with LinkedIn, the point at the end of the day is data, and data is the currency that flows through the entire economy.

The focus was really on building the platforms and getting the insights out. In many ways, with LinkedIn, the point at the end of the day is data, and data is the currency that flows through the entire economy.

And so we coined a phrase of the economic graph, where you have members, you have customers, you have companies, you have universities, you have all kinds of notes in the graph, and we're trying to connect those and then have the capital flow effectively through that graph.

To visualize that and make that clear, you actually need quite a bit of insight and that's what we really focused on. One of the cool things I think we developed early on was these insights that were fairly unique that the world hadn't seen and were unable to see up until that point. 

We created things like talent flows. We were able to see which companies were hiring and which companies were losing talent, but more importantly, we were able to see who they were losing talent to, or who they were gaining talent from, and these were very powerful ways for executives at corporations to see where the attrition issues were or where the attention challenges were.

That was just one example of insights that we could bring to the table or understanding how the talent is distributed across the country or the world, where the people are with specific skill sets? Are they concentrated in certain areas? As a hiring professional, if you try to go after talent, where should you be looking? 

All of that required quite a bit of insight and so it was a really exciting time to be part of that.

But everything happened haphazardly as well, as you can imagine the data only got more interesting as the network started to grow and what was possible in 2008 was little compared to what's possible today, as the penetration of LinkedIn is so high in many different markets today, particularly internationally. 

That's where we get most of our engagement from these days versus in the beginning, it was mostly from the US. 

Obviously even in a smaller company, things happen very haphazardly and there's hypergrowth and there's not always rhyme or reason to things but it was a very exciting time and so yes, that's how the company has evolved from a smaller company to a bigger company where you have more formalization.

Evolving ways to work with research and insights

Thor: That journey is of course fascinating because you've really been able to do many more things with the data as the company's grown bigger of course and that graph has expanded, but I'm also curious to understand how the way you work with market research and insights, in general, has changed as the company has grown.

Rogier: In the early days, we had a very short-term focus and it was very much focused on what do we need to know in the next 30 days to make a decision versus doing research that helps us understand what's going to happen in two years from now or build a strategy for the next two years. 

I think as we got bigger and bigger, you're going to start to add more process, you have more formalized roles and more organization, and obviously, when you get to a certain stage, you go from a few thousand customers to tens of thousand customers, you start to lose sight of, you start to get further removed from how customers actually really feel about you?

As you start to create products that become different from when you launch in year one to two, three, and four, you start to also hit different types of customers than the early adopters or more customers are a little bit more conservative, but have different needs. I think you start to see that gets a little bit more attrition. Customers are maybe not renewing as much. 

Then you start to ask as an organization different kinds of questions, moving from “Where can we grow and mark penetration?” to more questions around “How can we retain customers or how can we grow or share a wallet with existing customers?”.

Suddenly now you're talking about products that are billion-dollar products versus products that started off in the hundred thousands range. 

Then you need to be much more careful about that next feature you're launching or that next product you're trying to build. The risk suddenly becomes so much higher. You're starting now to make not million-dollar decisions, now you're making billion-dollar decisions.

That actually then will lead to “How satisfied are they?”, or “How loyal are they?” and you start to do more of the research that's more the basics of what you see in larger companies as well of typical CSET or NPS type research as a basis and foundation.

Then from there, it's like new product innovation and you become a little bit more deliberate about how you think about these decisions, because suddenly now you're talking about products that are billion-dollar products versus products that started off in the hundred thousands range. 

Then you need to be much more careful about that next feature you're launching or that next product you're trying to build. The risk suddenly becomes so much higher. You're starting now to make not million-dollar decisions, now you're making billion-dollar decisions.

I think the organization recognizes that at that point, it's probably important that you have a little bit more intelligence behind the decisions you're making. That's how I think the insights function has changed over time is that as the stakes go higher, there's more emphasis on investing in teams and doing the right approaches to understand that you're making the right calls. 

You then start to hire more people with a specific background, and as the company becomes bigger, then also now you have competition and so you need to understand the competitive landscape, but you also need to understand how your positioning compares to others out there.

You start to invest a lot more in branding and marketing and then understanding the brand perceptions and you start doing advertising, start spending money there, so then you need to understand how effective that spend is, and then you need to do research around that. 

That's how I see the evolution of we're doing, quite frankly, things more on gut instinct and intuition when there are a few hundred customers, to becoming much more data-driven and scientific about what you do when you have thousands and thousands of customers, and obviously, you have the means then to tap into a much larger collective group of customers and get more wisdom from a larger hub.

Defining an insight

Thor: I think that makes a lot of sense, but let's get back to basics there for a second. As an insights leader, how do you define an insight?

Rogier: For me, an insight is a deep intuitive understanding about a group of people or a thing, but it needs to be based on an effect or a data point. 

Now, what I see a lot of people confuse or are getting confused is like they say, they talk about data, they really mean insights or they equate data with insights and I think those are two different things. 

Data in and of itself in my mind is not an insight and there's this really famous quote, "God we trust, all others bring data," but in my mind, it should be, in “God we trust, and all others bring insights”, but the point is that data only is as good as the data you have.

There needs to be an element of when you don't have the data, there needs to be an element of intuition that you have to bring to the table. You have to use common sense or judgment to fill in some of these blanks and recognize that you can't always have perfect data of everything.

There needs to be an element of when you don't have the data, there needs to be an element of intuition that you have to bring to the table. You have to use common sense or judgment to fill in some of these blanks and recognize that you can't always have perfect data of everything.

That's why I make distinction in data and insights, but it is really important because insights to me is something that's a little bit a mix or blend of what I'm observing, what the facts are, plus what my judgment or intuition is around those particular data points. That ultimately then gives you that deep understanding that you then need to make a decision.

That's also what I think is important about insight. Insights actually needs to give you an idea of what the next step should be, “what should I do based on this particular insight”, and if we can articulate that, then it's not in my mind an insight.

Integrating insights to fuel innovation

Thor: I just love the way you use the word intuition. I just love the way you bring that idea of actually looking at it as a puzzle and then understanding how they fit together.

Maybe if we spend a bit more time on that, and maybe you could give me a couple of examples. Actual live examples from your time at LinkedIn, when you and your team have integrated an insight that has fueled innovation or perhaps allowed you to build a better product, build a better project, and walk us through the whole flow. 

What was the insight that created the opportunity? How did you identify the insight? What was the end result? Walk us through that.

Rogier: I think one of the things early on in LinkedIn's trajectory, we were really focused on selling into large enterprises and we believe that early members that joined LinkedIn tend to come from enterprises, but what we quickly started to notice is that as the network started to grow, we didn't have a lot of participation from smaller businesses, particularly on the B2B space. 

We weren't as penetrated as we should be in the small businesses, and it could have been part a function of how we evolved and grew, but we didn't quite understand why they wouldn't participate in this economic graph as strongly as the larger enterprises.

The executive team asked us some very specific questions around that and we did our research. We initially started doing social listening because the challenge was we didn't have small businesses on LinkedIn and the ones that were on LinkedIn were a little bit atypical, so we didn't have a great source to tap into.

But what we did have is the internet at large, and so understanding small businesses at the internet at large and listening organically to the conversations that are happening was a very powerful way for us to understand, “What are the challenges that they're having? What are the pain points they're having when it comes to starting a business or growing a business?”

When we started mapping out the challenges, we started mapping out the opportunity, we started to understand what was missing in our own products. When we started to bring all of those views together, it started to lead to some really powerful insights around what we needed to do. 

It helped to map out the conversation that's happening on the internet at large but listening to specific forums or going to specific sites that we knew SMBs were attending, we were starting to get a really good sense of what their challenges are. 

Then we did some soul searching to understand, okay, “What do we have today? What are the assets we've created today? How are we maybe not addressing those challenges and pain points that those SMBs are seeing?” that then led to particular insights and opportunities. 

We also learned throughout that process and so we did social listening, we also did depth interviews. We did qualitative and then quantitative research ultimately to verify whether the challenge and pain points by and large applied to a large set of SMBs. 

What we learned is that they had this misconception that LinkedIn was just for large enterprises. It wasn't a place where they belonged or where they felt like they should be. On the same token, they also felt like they saw the opportunity. They saw the possibilities and they saw their customers and prospects on LinkedIn and the companies they wanted to sell into.

When we started mapping out the challenges, we started mapping out the opportunity, we started to understand what was missing in our own products. When we started to bring all of those views together, it started to lead to some really powerful insights around what we needed to do. 

We also discovered, for example, that they were using personal profiles. Oftentimes they did have a profile-only team. They just didn't have that company be presented well but they would use their personal profile to promote a company at the same time. That led us to build company pages that were more geared towards communicating what their brand or their company stood for. 

From there we started to also understand that one of the biggest challenges we have was just growing the business and connecting them to potential prospects. We started to build features and functionality that allowed them to launch campaigns straight from some of their pages. 

All of that was based on some of the rich insights that we uncovered through all of the work and the research we were doing, but a lot of it also just came down to voice and tone and just shifting the perceptions.

It led to a lot of understanding of how we needed to talk to them and how we needed to ask them. A lot of these small businesses were very stressed, were very strapped for time but we needed to strike a much more empathetic tone in how we talked and communicated to them. 

All of that was based on all the rich insights that we were able to glean through a number of different ways of looking at the problem.

Tackling both the "So what?" and the "Now what?"

Thor: I think this is so fascinating. Knowing how powerful the product is today and seeing how what you just described enabled you to develop the product into what it is today is just fascinating. 

I also love the fact that you talked about soul searching because you talked about the researcher as a human being and also talking about that empathetic tone.

Let's dig a bit deeper into this. I've listened to a couple of your previous interviews and I've really enjoyed how you've previously talked about looking at problems holistically. I think it ties to what you just said. You've talked about tackling the “So what?” and the “Now what?” together. Could you maybe give our listeners a bit more about that approach that you follow here?

Rogier: I'm a big fan of hypothesis-based approaches and issue trees. I think a lot of research fails because we are failing to understand the exact problem we're trying to solve. 

I don't think a lot of practitioners spend enough time in the problem space really, truly articulating what is it specifically what the problem is and oftentimes that's a why question or how question. You need to bring the whole organization together before you start your research to try and understand, “Okay, what do we already know about this? What is the fundamental issue that we're trying to solve?”

What's really interesting about that process or step is that oftentimes, you'll find that people really can't quite articulate the problem well enough. 

It will go something along the lines of, "We want more small businesses." "Okay. Well, why do you want more businesses?" "Because we want to get revenue. We want to grow the business." "Okay, why do you want to grow your business," and so you start to dig deeper and deeper into what the core problems are.

I think a lot of research fails because we are failing to understand the exact problem we're trying to solve. 

I don't think a lot of practitioners spend enough time in the problem space really, truly articulating what is it specifically what the problem is and oftentimes that's a why question or how question. You need to bring the whole organization together before you start your research to try and understand, “Okay, what do we already know about this? What is the fundamental issue that we're trying to solve?”

Once you have the different problems and that different hypothesis, then you can build out this whole tree. It's where there's a lot of divergent thinking that goes on in terms of like, "Well, I think the reason that small businesses aren't on LinkedIn is because they're just not aware of LinkedIn," and so you can build out that whole issue tree or that branch of the tree.

Or “They may be on LinkedIn but they're just not engaging very well.”, maybe the reason is that we just haven't got a good product market fit with them. “Maybe our pricing is too high.” You start to unpack what the problem is that then leads to a set of statements that then you can go research.

In some of these statements, you can say, "Well, we already have this data, we don't need to do new research," or, "We can get this from this study we did last year," to then ticking off what needs to be net new research to then fill in the gaps. 

I think when you take that kind of approach and you look back at what you get back, it's garbage in garbage out. If you don't do that really well, then you get garbage. 

But if you do that really well, then you get insights back that now neatly tie to the issues that you were trying to address with the hypothesis you were trying to test, and it gives you a set of very clear “So what?”-s, where you can almost write executive summary before you even start the research project, where each of the issues or each of the branches in the tree become your headline or your bullets.

That then leads to very specific actions of what the company needs to do to address those. That's how I get to the “So what?” and the “Now what?”. 

You spend a lot of time obviously fine-tuning that, making sure that you really are clear on what it all means and what the implications are, and you need to spend quite a bit of time there and then you need to spend quite a bit of time making sure you internalize and bring the whole organization along so they really truly understand what it means and what they need to go do next.

That's the approach that I've been promoting quite a bit. I talk a lot about this in this whole section, in the book as well that talks about this approach and how you can apply it. I think it is something that gets overlooked quite a bit, unfortunately, in the world of research.

Essential tools for insights professionals

Thor: I think it's really powerful. I think it's a very crisp message. Now that you've given us some advice on how to think to support a successful market and research and insight strategy, could you also share some tools and some tooling that you believe is essential?

Rogier: I think about tools along three categories. I think there are tools for exploration. Once you have your data set, these are the tools you use to explore and interrogate the data if you will. 

Obviously, you have the historical package like SPSS, R, you can do some of that to PowerBI or Tableau but these are the tools to really understand the relationships between the data and use multivariate analysis.

That's also something that researchers tend to get stuck on, the descriptive analytics of “Here's a cross step and here are the things that I'm seeing”, the percentages and percentages, as opposed to asking “What's the relationship between all these data points”., and that's where you use more of the multivariate analysis. Tools like R and SPSS are really lending themselves to do that.

That's one category, the tools for exploration, and then there's the tools to essentially get the data and collect the data, which is your survey programming tools or the tools that you have or maybe the insights communities you've built. A lot of companies nowadays build in-house panels if you will, but these are all the sources and the techniques you use to get to the data.

It could also be a syndicated data practice. Sometimes we have someone who's fully dedicated to getting syndicated insights, so getting insights that are existing in the broader world.

Then the last categories, the tools to communicate your findings. This could be a combination of the visualization tools which can also be Power BI or Tableau or the many other visualization tools out there can help you bring things a little bit more to life.

We do a lot through audio and video clips and those kinds of tools. Then, obviously, just a traditional presentation and PowerPoint which still many organizations use as the main way of communicating but that has a lot of pitfalls as well but it's still a way of communicating and getting a message across. 

We've recently also started to look more like one-pagers and really try to force the researcher to really boil it down to the essence as opposed to trying to hit up your stakeholders with 50, 60 pages of PowerPoint and that by PowerPoint. Those are some of the things, and I think knowledge management is part of that as well. 

Obviously, you have to organize and create this body of work so that you can tap into that at a later time and communicate your insights, or go back to maybe prior work you've done so they can really connect the dots and compare and contrast these new findings compared to things you've done previously.

In some cases it also creates benchmarks. When you do concept testing, is this compared to a concept we tested two or three years ago, and is this potentially more powerful or less powerful?

Those are the three categories, the tools for data exploration, tools to get to data, and then tools to communicate your findings.

The story behind The Business of Marketing Research

Thor: I think this it's a very good way to structure that thinking. Of course, I'm a big believer in knowledge management, but before I ask more talent-focused questions, I'd love you to share a bit more about your book, The Business of Marketing Research, and this practical approach to market research. Who's the book aimed at and why did you create it?

Rogier: It's a book we wrote a few years ago now and it was really geared towards students. We really want to create a textbook for the academic world for universities to adopt. 

We also built a number of course materials around it, but really the impetus for writing the book was as we started to scan the landscape of what was out there, we felt like a lot of the books out there or micro research tend to be very theoretical, but they weren't written around specific use cases. They weren't written around real-world problems that most organizations are being faced with.

Early on, I talked about the need to understand your loyalty with your customers or satisfaction with your customers, the need as you get larger as an organization of what your brand positioning is and how do you do research around understanding how you build a strong brand architecture.

We started to scan the landscape of what was out there, we felt like a lot of the books out there or micro research tend to be very theoretical, but they weren't written around specific use cases. They weren't written around real-world problems that most organizations are being faced with.

So I’m really trying to marry the dry techniques that you use in market research and in the insights profession to solve real-world problems and make it much more applied, but as a whole method around like quality innovation and how do you use research to understand product innovation?

We spend quite a bit of time talking about that in the book as well and just make it very clear that it's not just about doing the research, but what's more important often is, how do you communicate these findings and how do you tell stories around those findings? Storytelling is a really big aspect of the book as well, and so it goes in great depth into that.

Then lastly, we also felt like a lot of the textbooks are a little bit outdated. I think the market research profession is much broader now than it is, demands are much larger. You need to know a little bit about data science. You need to understand how you write algorithms and how you can use algorithms to do, for example, a drive analysis or director beyond traditional regression-based techniques.

We also spend a lot of time covering neuroscience and neuromarketing. There's a lot of advances in recent years around using neuroscience to understand how people make unconscious decisions about products or things that may be hard to explain in a survey. 

We spent some time around that, particularly around topics like eye tracking, but also talking about ECG and other techniques that are being used in that space.

Obviously, we've seen a lot of advanced text analytics, it's natural language processing. Obviously, a lot of the information we're getting today is in an unstructured format. 

That requires users, practitioners to pick up new skills, to understand how you can use the unstructured data then to drive insights, categorize and classify that data in ways that were perhaps impossible to do with the technology we have today.

Those are the main topics that we call in the book. It was written by myself, having spent most of my career on the client side, the other person, Marco Vriens, is coming from the academic world, and then Douwe Rademaker who is working on the vendor side. 

That blend and those mix of experiences I think created a really interesting book. So far, we've sold it to universities, but you can also get it on Amazon. That's the impetus, and the people that are listening today, they can obtain it if you go to Cognella, the website that is just the publisher. If you search for the book and type in DIGGING35 as a code and you'll get a 35% discount.

The DNA of a successful insights team

Thor: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that. We'll repeat it at the end of the show also. You talked about the balance of the authors that you had, one from academia, yourself as a practitioner, and also somebody on the agency side. 

That's the balance of the authors of the book, but if we instead talk a bit more about the industry, we talk a bit about what type of balance do you need for a successful insights team. What is the DNA of a successful insights team?

Rogier: I'm a big believer of variety and range. I see this mistake being made in some instances, where people tend to get uber-focused on “I want everyone who has SQL experience, or everyone who has a deep technological experience”, or “I want everyone to be really good with communication and being able to manage up. As long as they can sell very well, those are the people I want”.

You can over-index on one type of individual too much because then I think you're not going to build as strong of a team.

I think the most successful teams have that variety of skill sets, whether it's okay to have some people who are really strong on methodology, some people who are maybe stronger on communication and organization or more technical, but that blend is really important.

I think the most successful teams have that variety of skill sets, whether it's okay to have some people who are really strong on methodology, some people who are maybe stronger on communication and organization or more technical, but that blend is really important.

I do think that everyone needs to have some behavioral data orientation. They need to understand what's possible with big data and some data analytics, especially in this day and age, because I do believe that if you leverage multiple data sources, you integrate them effectively, you come to better insights and stronger insights. 

I think we've recently just started to employ people that are almost at the cusp of programming software engineers who can automate and create efficiency in the whole process so that we can move much faster because speed is really important.

How do you launch surveys to then get to insights very quickly? There's a lot of technology automation that goes on behind the scenes. That is an important part of how I think I grow the team as well, but I'd say those are the things. Then obviously, it goes down to people needing to be motivated and having curiosity and creativity, which is also key to having a successful team.

The skills needed to elevate insights within an organization

Thor: In your description of the book, you also highlighted how market research has changed. You implicitly also highlighted how different talents are brought to the table that weren't necessarily necessary 10, 20 years ago. 

If we talk more about the insights organization within the organization, what skills do you believe as essential to help in elevating that insights team so it gets more visibility and exposure within the organization?

Rogier: Obviously, we hit on the problem solving skill sets and the ability to take a problem and really define what the problem is, and then try to figure out how you solve the problem. I think that's a non-negotiable to me. 

I think the other areas I would say is you need people who can really synthesize and connect the dots across a number of data sets and be able to see what the patterns are. I think that's really important, but ultimately, I think communication skills and the ability to tell stories is going to be fundamental to then getting the insights or costs in your organization to get people to internalize it.

You need to be confident about what you're seeing in the data, and you need to be able then to get the organization to really act on it. That requires some conviction.

What's for me, personally, been really helpful is that I've played a lot of different roles. In some cases, I've been at the receiving end of research, and sometimes I've been obviously the producer of research if you will, but having seen all the different vantage points helps you build more of an appreciation of actually what you need to deliver for your stakeholders so that they can take action on it.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe in the three Cs which is creativity, curiosity, and conviction. I think that's really important. That last point is because on conviction, you need to be confident about what you're seeing in the data, and you need to be able then to get the organization to really act on it. That requires some conviction.

Where I see a lot of researchers holding back too much or they're too conservative, or they undermine themselves by saying, "Well, I think it may mean this," but standing up and saying, "No, it means this, we need to do these three things," I think shifts the bounds of how the organization should act on it and drive more urgency around it.

Opportunities for insights professionals to challenge the status quo

Thor: I really like the fact that you highlight conviction because it doesn't actually often come up, but many insights leaders that I talk to talk about the 'So what' question. You bring up data and people say, "Hey, so what?" and you've talked about it too, but I think conviction really helps you break through that barrier, so you should do these things.

Talking a bit more about opportunities to do business impact, you've already shared the story of how you at LinkedIn were facing this misconception from the market that LinkedIn was only for large enterprises and there was actually a big opportunity to build a product for SMB, which you did successfully.

If we look at the future ahead of us today, what opportunities do you think there are for insights professionals to make true business impact and to challenge the status quo?

Rogier: I think too many groups, and we're certainly at fault for this as well, are not independent enough to ask the question that we think we should be asking, but rather, we're asking the question that the organization is asking us to ask.

The problem with that is that a lot of the research they then end up doing is basically just trying to confirm what the organization has already decided they were going to do, and then try to find the data after the fact that supports their decision. 

I think that's a very risky path to be on, creating massive path dependence because you're basically just executing research to sponsor whatever the agenda is of the executive.

I think the research groups that are most successful are the ones that have a healthy balance of time that they're spending on truly asking the more foundational and fundamental questions of, "Why does this business exist? Who are our customers really?" Or, "What do our customers really want from us?" 

You need to go out there and ask some of these bigger questions. You can't just ask what others are asking you to ask. I think that's going to get you ultimately to the real truths. 

I think the research groups that are most successful are the ones that have a healthy balance of time that they're spending on truly asking the more foundational and fundamental questions of, "Why does this business exist? Who are our customers really?" Or, "What do our customers really want from us?" 

You need to go out there and ask some of these bigger questions. You can't just ask what others are asking you to ask. I think that's going to get you ultimately to the real truths. 

There needs to be healthy bounds of things that are self-initiated because every time when we do this, and I make sure that there's always some buffer of things that we initiate, you always come back with very powerful insights that then really start to challenge the status quo. 

Because the status quo is the status quo and people will ask questions to just confirm the status quo. There's massive confirmation bias, there's massive cherry-picking happening in their realm but this requires a certain amount of confidence in your team, in your abilities. 

It also requires you to have these really strong relationships with your partners so that they trust you. That when you come back with something that is maybe a little bit uncomfortable for them to hear, that they trust that you've done all the due diligence and that it is an insight they should be acting on. 

That may be something very different that wasn't on their agenda or the roadmap but they need to face that in order to be successful.

That's how you break down some of the path dependencies that maybe the organization has created but it's not easy. I'll be the first to admit it. I can't tell you how often I see just people taking the report and then just picking only the things that support the agenda versus then. Then ignoring or dismissing or putting aside the things that are maybe a little bit more inconvenient and uncomfortable.

Who Rogier would love to have lunch with in the world of insights

Thor: I think that's such good advice. I think that it resonates really well with what you said before or also, namely the fact that a lot of research fails because we're failing to understand the problem we're trying to solve. I think it ties really nicely to that. 

Unfortunately, we're getting close to the end of this conversation but I have one last question for you. Who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

Rogier: It's interesting. In the world of insights, I was thinking about this. It's a hard question because the world of insight is vast. There's lots of companies that are acting in the insights industry. A lot of money in the industry is around insights. Ultimately, that drives knowledge and that drives, powers economies, that powers innovation, et cetera. 

This may sound strange to you but I would love to talk to Mark Zuckerberg. The reason I want to talk to him is because I just don't understand why he has such strong conviction around the metaverse as being the next evolution of the platform that Facebook or metaverse should be building.

I'm really curious to hear from him  where that conviction is coming from? What is he seeing that I'm not seeing or others maybe are not seeing that makes him believe that we all end up in a metaverse or we all should be spending a lot of time in a metaverse? 

I'm really scratching my head. This may be a little bit of a weird answer. You may not have expected this but this is just one that I'm basically just really struggling with.

Summary

Thor: I love your answer. I promise you when you have that lunch, I will be on the table next door because I'm equally as interested in that answer as you are. 

Wow, this has been such an inspiring conversation, Rogier. I think it's always amazing to hear about how you and how LinkedIn are driving more insights-driven decisions across the organization. Maybe you could remind our audience about the book and the discount code.

Rogier: You can get the book on Cognella. Cognella's website is the publisher. Search for Business of Marketing Research. Then as you order the book, you can enter the code DIGGING35, so DIGGING35, all capital, and that will give you a 35% discount. Always happy for people who want to ping me if they didn't get it or if there are some issues, just let me know.

Thor: Massive. I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today. Just playing some of it back, I think that I'm just fascinated by what you have done, LinkedIn. The groundbreaking understanding you have brought to the world. 

Insights that have helped you understand the graphs but also helped us understand how companies and where companies get talent, how companies and where companies lose talent to, and where the world's talent is located. That was simply not possible before you brought it to the world.

In terms of learnings and things we and the audience can bring with us, I think what you said about how a lot of research fails because we actually fail to understand the problem we are solving and to spend more time on that. What do we know and what exactly are we trying to solve for? 

As advice for all of us as we do this, be more confident. Thank you so much. I'm sure our audience has enjoyed this as much as I have. Thank you so much for joining me today, Rogier.

Rogier: Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show.