5 Steps to Finding Your Goldilocks Zone as a Research Consultant
Tips on identifying the right clients and delivering value if you decide to go it alone
If you’re considering a freelance research career, the good news is there’s plenty of opportunity out there. The not-so-good news is that there’s a lot of competition and it can take a while to find your feet if you haven’t tried it before.
The doom and gloom of tech layoffs has hit researchers particularly hard in some industries, and freelance consulting may be top of mind for many. I want to share some tips that I could have used when I started out as a research consultant. This isn’t a comprehensive list of problems and solutions, but I hope it acts as a useful primer for anticipating common obstacles at the start of the freelance journey.
Step 1: Do your research (you’re a researcher!)
It’s natural to want to find clients as quickly as possible when you start out as a research consultant. But realistically, before you can secure a paying client or deliver value, you need a strong understanding of the landscape of research needs outside your comfort zone.
I’ll go into more detail about finding your niche in Step 2 below, but it’s essential for your own sanity and energy that you’re able to anticipate as many basic surprises as possible at the beginning. If you jump blindly into client conversations, you’ll waste a lot of avoidable trial-and-error time, and you’ll waste connections by not understanding what the industry actually needs from a research consultant. How do I know this? Well, a lot of this newsletter is just me telling you everything I’ve done wrong in the past so you don’t have to.
A strong baseline understanding allows you to be clear about the value you can offer, and your general aim is to present yourself as a much-needed research expert in a specific business space. So if you’ve spent your life in academia or aren’t too familiar with business fundamentals, you should first learn the basics of what other consultants in your space do, how much money they charge for it, what your business structure should look like, what business acronyms like ROI/P&L/KPI/B2B etc actually mean, and so on.
When you’ve nailed the basics, you can get to the more creative research identifying which problem spaces you want to target. I’ve found a few activities to be particularly helpful here:
Investigate what techniques or methods research agencies in your industry use to target your problem spaces.
Look at case studies on prospective client websites to understand how they work and what problems they generally want to solve.
Go to conferences/networking events to build new connections and find inspiration for important research problems.
Join formal networks (e.g. research societies) and informal networks (e.g. LinkedIn groups) to see what people in your industry are talking/complaining about.
Have 1:1 conversations with research consultant connections to ask for their advice and feedback (feel free to contact me if you think a chat might be helpful).
Step 2: Find your goldilocks zone
Based on your research, settle on what service you want to prioritize as a consultant. As with any product or service, you want to provide value that people actually need, but this can be challenging in two specific ways:
You could be offering something that’s either unwanted or so revolutionary that nobody agrees they need it
You could be offering something so commonplace that your prospective clients already have it
Your ideal world lies in a goldilocks zone between those two extremes. If you need an astronomy refresher, the goldilocks zone is the habitable range in the solar system that is just the right distance from the sun to prevent you from boiling or freezing to death. The business-focused goldilocks zone I’m suggesting is not so different: it’s just the right distance from obviousness in research value to prevent you from being eaten by competitors or stonewalled by potential clients.
Ideally, you want to offer the kind of value that makes people say “oh we were just talking about how great it’d be to find an expert like you”. You want to avoid selling the kind of value that makes people say “I’m not sure we need this right now” or “yes, Ipsos is already doing that for us”. What falls under “obviousness” is constantly evolving of course, but at any given time as a new research consultant, aim for the center of the balance below:
There are situations where revolutionary or unremarkable value can be sold but they tend not to favor researchers who are new to the market. Unremarkable value is sold by people with huge pre-existing networks of prospective partners and clients, since they have a head start on relationships and/or a respected brand that clients trust. Revolutionary value is sold by people who have a lot of time and financial runway for experimenting with concepts and providing free pilot sessions that demonstrate their groundbreaking idea. The rest of us rely on our goldilocks zones and finding freshly burgeoning needs for our skills (though please don’t let me scare you away from a groundbreaking idea if you truly have one!).
When I started consulting almost 10 years ago after my PhD, I found my own goldilocks zone in providing behavioral science and neuroscience expertise to small market research agencies. They were great at traditional qual and quant methods but found many of their clients expressing an interest in wider academic methods that weren’t common in industry at the time at a reasonable cost. So I positioned myself as the person to provide that service for them.
In other words, try to find a niche rather than generic need for your research expertise to give yourself the best chance of convincing clients they need you. Go deeper than just “I can do user research for you”. Find a specific angle that your clients already crave that isn’t being met by their other resources. That’ll be the quickest and smoothest route to early wins.
Step 3: Talk to people in your goldilocks zone
When you’ve hit upon an interesting opportunity that you think fits into a goldilocks zone, it’s time to get on LinkedIn and find the right people to contact. In my own early consulting, over 90% of my client relationships started with a LinkedIn message asking someone if they’d like to chat about the overlap between our work.
This is no time to be shy, but in the headline for this section, I use the word “talk” rather than “sell” because you should avoid sounding spammy at all costs. Generic sales messages are immediately noticed as spam (so much so, that I can’t believe they ever work), and you don’t want to add to that pile. Be highly targeted about contacting people who directly care about the service you’re offering and show them you’re interested in a genuine conversation. It helps to present yourself as an individual expert learning about diverse business needs and how you can support them, not a company with a first-time customer offer.
In any case, many people won’t respond to you and that’s ok. Use failures as an opportunity to revise your messaging, and learn from any conversations that don’t run as smoothly as you’d hoped. A working message formula that I’ve used in the past for contacting prospective clients included the following elements, but you should feel free to find your own optimized style:
What excites me about their work/company
My background and expertise
A brief summary of what I do and how it has helped/could help a company like theirs (focusing on the goldilocks zone)
A polite invitation to chat about their latest projects and learn about their biggest challenges over a video call/coffee
Step 4: Be patient and adapt
Getting final commitment from a client requires patience and adaptability. The patience is needed because most people aren’t going to be interested in your idea, and you need to keep building new connections until you find the person who is. The adaptability is needed because it’s unlikely that the first version of your offering will be the optimal one. Based on feedback from your conversations, you’ll need to revise and adapt what you’re selling, how you’re selling it, and whom you’re selling it to. It might take several major iterations to find the right formula.
It took me a long time to attract my first clients and I quit consulting at least once before I finally did. I got distracted by job opportunities appearing in my feed offering me real rather than imagined income, and I accepted one of them, losing several promising consulting leads I had built along the way. Patience and resilience aren’t easy when the future is uncertain and you have bills to pay, but there’s no getting around the fact that it takes time and hard work to find your niche, especially if you lack a strong network of prospective clients at the outset.
Step 5: Deliver value and prove impact
Although I found it difficult to secure new clients (especially the first), I found that once I did, 100% of them wanted more work after our first project. You no longer need to sell your value when you’ve proven it with a live project. So once you land your first role, be hyper-focused on completing it to a high quality and proving to your client that your input delivered profitable returns for them.
What insights did you deliver that your client wouldn’t have had without you? How did those insights support their success as a business? Why should the people you worked with say wonderful things about you to their broader network?
It’s especially impactful if you’re able to prove that your input on the project moved important sales or user metrics. Try to identify what those might be from the beginning of your research planning with a client so that you can measure them and make them the centerpiece of your final reports and debrief presentations. Depending on the specific project or client, it may not always be possible to generate precise, measurable outputs. In those cases, just focus on what goals you agreed on with your client, why those goals were important for their business, and how you met those goals to a high standard.
To give one example of how this played out in one of my previous projects, I worked with a market research client on creating new behavioral markers to measure customer memory in ad development. They wanted a more direct measure of memorability for various ad features than simply asking people in interviews or surveys, so I developed a behavioral experiment that could do that for them. After completing the project, my impact story in a written output report and a verbal project debrief focused on three things:
How the new behavioral experiment was a more reliable way of measuring customer memory than previous methods.
How much money the behavioral experiment saved by cutting down on participant costs.
How the data quickly and reliably allowed the client to distinguish between memorable ads and forgettable ads.
Top Takeaways
Getting up and running as a freelance research consultant takes immense preparation, patience, and adaptability.
For the path of least resistance to your first client, find your goldilocks zone of research problems to solve for clients. Target a balance of obscure and obvious to minimize competition pressures and client frictions.
Be proactive in talking to other research consultants and prospective clients through LinkedIn as you identify leads and optimize your proposals.
“The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.”
~ Confucius
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