4 steps to baking an elite shopper insights learning agenda

As the leaves start to turn and pumpkins begin to appear on porches, insights teams everywhere embark on a time honored tradition: crafting next year’s shopper insights learning agenda.

Now hopefully you can have some pie while you work, but if the thought of having to put pen to paper on your plans gives you more heartburn than Thanksgiving dinner, let’s break it down and make it more manageable.

In this article, we’ll cover four tactics that will help you create a learning agenda that gives your organization pumpkin to talk about!

The basis of any learning agenda is simple: ask a lot of questions (and I do mean a LOT).

First, ask every stakeholder to start submitting questions. Technology can be your friend here. To make this process easier, try using interactive tools like a Miro or Trello board, or to keep it simple, even just a google form or email (using BCC of course, your list should be long and you don’t need a reply all to slow you down!).

Whichever format you choose, you’re going to need to make sure you capture key information, such as what the question is, who’s asking it and what they plan to do with the answer.

That last one is going to be very important. Knowing what they plan to do with the answer will help you determine things like whether it's part of a sales story or better suited for an annual customer planning session. Who will be using the answers? Are there any hard timing constraints?

At this stage in our shopper insights learning agenda journey, there are no wrong questions, and there’s no reason to worry over the quality of questions. Just capture as many questions as you possibly can from all of your stakeholders —from leadership down to analysts and from marketing to sales.

After your stakeholders have submitted their questions, chances are, you're going to have a ton to review. Quite possibly in the hundreds!

To make your life easier, you should begin to group them. Again, this is where Miro or Trello can come in handy, but for the less technologically savvy, I’ve also seen this done well with just a stack of sticky notes!

Once you begin grouping, take note of how many questions fall under similar categories. For example, do you have 15 related to pricing? Are there 10 on front-end innovation? Or do most fall under shopper journeys?

Look for that unifying theme among your questions — it doesn’t have to be labeled in a detailed manner, they can simply be marked as “pricing” or “front end”, whatever helps you best organize the information you’ve gathered.

With your new themes in hand, go back to your organization and discuss priorities.

Ideally you will have several conversations with groups of stakeholders who are critical to your final agenda. Consider meeting in small groups to facilitate organic discussions around competing priorities and the business impact of each of these themes. This is where who is asking, what will be done with the answers, and any potential timing constraints come into play. For example, if you learn your biggest customer wants to know something before annual planning, that may become a high priority for you and will need to be completed within the first half of the year. In other words, big customer = big priority.

Use these conversations to decide what will have the biggest impact on your organization, and align on the tradeoffs for the year. Not all the questions will be answered right away, but that’s okay! They just might be a lower priority or need additional funding to address.

Your focus here should be nailing down what the high priorities are for the shopper insights learning agenda — then come back to the others.

I’ve saved the most fun for last — funding.

In an ideal world, your shopper insights team is already working with all the money they need to fund the most impactful projects...

Okay, here in the real world, budgets are always an issue. So this is where you get creative! Do you have questions from several customers that ladder up to one theme? Does each team have some money they can chip in?

Answering these questions in themes is often more cost efficient than answering separately for each customer (even with quotas for each of them). You may be able to help your dollars stretch further by answering them together.

This will also help you create a more unified company perspective, which you can use to help out in places where you don’t need a customer-specific answer. If you have truly aligned the organization to the priorities of getting their needs met, they may be more open to contributing a portion of their budget to the collective funds needed to get those results.

To get a head start on your plan, it’s a good idea to sync your shift in thinking towards next year’s shopper insights learning agenda with the changing of the leaves.

By giving yourself time to collect what you need from stakeholders, organize the information, have the right conversations and address your budget, you’ll be on track to create a learning agenda your organization can’t wait to feast their eyes on.