The Consultant's Guide to Diligence Surveys

As a consultant working with institutional investors, your goals change from project to project. Whether you’re diligencing an investment target, optimizing pricing for a new portfolio company, or preparing for a new product launch, primary research is always essential. 

Note: this is the prologue to our series: "The Consultant's Guide to Diligence Surveys."  You can download the full guide here.

Surveys are an important piece of the consultant toolkit - tapping into relevant consumer or industry expert groups can offer profound insight and understanding of niche markets. 

Some of the most common data points that surveys seek to uncover include:

• How large is the market for a product or service?
• How does the target brand compare to competitors?
• What is the net promoter score (NPS) of the target relative to its competition?
• How much are likely buyers willing to pay for a product or service?
• How important is an investment target’s product or service?

However, while surveys can deliver crucial data to help you build a recommendation for your client, there are significant challenges when using them during due diligence: 

• Time restrictions—private equity clients often need a recommendation within 2-3 weeks, leaving little margin for error.
• Data integrity—it can be challenging to ensure survey responses and target audiences are genuine.
• Programming complex logic— it’s frequently difficult to translate complex logic recorded in your internal Word document into programmed survey logic.
• Managing stakeholders—juggling your client, survey platform engineers, and multiple respondent panels is time-intensive and frustrating.
  

With these challenges in mind, we've worked with our team of seasoned Survey Directors to craft a holistic guide to running a diligence survey. This guide will teach you how to overcome common challenges and more seamlessly incorporate a survey into your research process, unlocking structured and statistically significant aggregate data to help you build your client decks.