I outsource most of my research. Not because I cannot do it, and not because the internal teams are not competent. Because the answers come back cleaner.
Usually I want research to support an idea I already like. A new market, a product, a strategy, a tactic. Something with enough of my own skin in it that I am not neutral about the result.
That is the problem. I can execute research. I do not trust myself to execute it cleanly. Like most people I have biases and a deep affection for my own ideas, and those biases steer the work. How I design the questions. Which data I select. How I read an ambiguous result. A hundred micro-decisions, each one nudging the analysis toward go.
Then the project fails and I get to sit with my own hubris.
So I write the questions and hand them out.
The process is simple. I list the critical questions that would prove or disprove the hypothesis. I prioritize them. I hand them to an outside firm and ask for analysis that answers those questions. Then, depending on how persuasive the collective answers are, I decide yes, no, or not enough information yet.
No research is perfect. It is a tool for improving the odds that your hypothesis, or the null hypothesis, is plausible. A decision still has to be made by a person. But my track record on decisions built from outside research is better than my track record on decisions built from internal research, and it is not particularly close.
But our internal team is objective.
Sometimes. In some organizations. I would still make three observations.
Internal teams answer to executives, and executives have positions. Internal teams live inside the same bubble, which means they share the assumptions that need testing. And internal teams carry the political weight of what the answer will mean for their own function. None of that requires anyone to be dishonest. It just bends the work.
Where this shows up in revenue systems.
The same dynamic runs through every assessment of a go-to-market system, and it is more expensive there because the stakes are structural.
The person who built it cannot see it.
Ask the admin who configured your Salesforce org over six years to tell you what is wrong with it, and you get a list of things they already wanted budget for. That is useful. It is not an audit. Every questionable object, field and automation in that org has a story attached, and the person who lived the story is the least able to judge whether it was worth it.
The partner who implemented it has a position too.
So does the one hoping to replace them. Ours included. This is why the questions should be written down before anyone looks at the system, and why the scope of the assessment should be fixed before the findings are known.
Internal assessments arrive pre-negotiated.
By the time a cross-functional internal review reaches leadership, the findings have been through three rounds of softening so that no function looks bad. What arrives is a consensus document, not a diagnosis. The urgent problems and the political problems have been averaged together.
What a useful outside look actually requires.
Write the questions first. What would you have to see to conclude the system is fine? What would you have to see to conclude it needs to be rebuilt? If you cannot answer that before the work starts, the findings will simply confirm whatever you already believed.
Prioritize them. Five questions that decide something beat thirty that describe everything. Most assessment reports fail here: they inventory the org instead of answering a question.
Agree what would change your mind. Say it out loud, in the room, before the analysis. This is the single most useful discipline in the whole exercise and almost nobody does it.
Fix the scope and the fee. An open-ended assessment run by a firm that wants the remediation work has an obvious incentive problem. A fixed scope removes it. Our own assessment work is deliberately built that way, and yes, this is me telling you how I would want to be hired.
The takeaway.
Outsourcing research is not an admission that your team is weak. It is an acknowledgment that proximity is a bias, that enthusiasm is a bias, and that the people closest to a system are the ones least able to give you a clean read on it.
Write the questions. Give them to someone with no stake in the answer. Then make the decision yourself, which was always your job anyway. The same argument applies to the structure of the revenue organization: the people inside a function rarely propose the change that reduces their own scope.
What do you think about external research?
Book a Call
If you like what you see, we think you’re gonna love what you hear. Book a first consultation with us, and together we’ll figure out how to make your life a little better.
