Editor's note: Gerry Katz is executive vice president at Applied Marketing Science Inc., a Waltham, Mass., research firm.

A few years ago, I was approached by Ralph Oliva, the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) at Penn State University. The ISBM is a consortium of nearly 100 business-to-business (B2B) companies that meet several times a year to address some of the unique problems of B2B companies. He wanted me and Professor Abbie Griffin to put together a two-day general-overview market research course specifically for non-researchers at these types of companies.

This sounded like fun! But what particularly caught my fancy was his request that we include a unit on how to be a good client (i.e., how to be a smart purchaser of market research services). Most consumer products companies already have a formal market research function staffed by experienced market research professionals. But many B2B firms do not. And when it comes to the development of new products and services, where extensive market research is usually required, that decision will often be made by a project team leader who may have little if any experience in dealing with market research vendors.

While Oliva’s request was certainly sensible, for me this was almost cathartic! I’ve spent just about my entire near-40-year career on the vendor side. And for anyone who has ever worked on this side, we all know the things that our clients do that make us crazy and too often detract from the quality of the final product. Much has been written about how to be a good vendor and what pleases clients. But here was my chance to tell a group of potential clients how I wish they would behave, something I’ve almost never had the nerve to tell them to their face!

So, as requested, Professor Griffin and I put together a unit in our course that addressed all of these issues. Some members of that first cl...