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Securing a Business Mandate in KIT Form

How do you set your insight agenda and plan? Is it based upon what you did last year or on what you think is likely to be coming up? Do you brainstorm with members of  your own team?  

If this is how you work, you’re missing a trick. You are working on assumptions, and that’s highly dangerous. You risk being peripheral and/or reactive. The key facts you need to remember are:
  • You need a mandate from the business – preferably at board level
  • You need to support key decisions
  • Set up meetings with your key stakeholders so that you can get a mandate for your insight plan  
Keep In Touch with KIT
If you don’t take this approach, you risk becoming marginalized. One useful idea that can be adapted for use by Insight teams comes from Competitor and Market Intelligence (C&MI). Their ‘best practice’ approach is to establish Key Intelligence Topics (KITs) – and to get buy-in to these. This idea can be adapted for the insight role by producing Key Insight Topics.
 
Jan Herring, a C&MI consultant from the US, recommends three types of KIT. We have adapted two of these to suit the insight market:
 
1.   Decisions and/or actions
-     What decisions are coming up and when? What are the available options?
-     What specific insight do you need? How might it affect the company?
 
2.   Early warning topics
-     What changes in the marketplace do you want warning of before they happen?
-     What issues or trends do you want to be kept up to date with?
 
Successful planning
The benefits of using these Key Insight Topics as part your insight planning include:
  • Help with your planning – KITs will enable you to allocate resources etc. more effectively.
  • A keener understanding of business issues – Stakeholder feedback often says that they want insight teams to understand the business needs and issues better - and this is a great way of achieving that.
  • Becoming more of a business partner – Rather than being seen as a back-room researcher or analyst.
  • The ability to be more proactive – If you find out what’s coming up in advance, this is preferable to being asked to do work at short notice, on an ad hoc basis.
These attributes can help you to develop your relationship with the key stakeholders, so that you ensure their buy-in and gain their mandate for insight.
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