Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards finalists Microsoft and NewtonX
Editor's note: Microsoft and NewtonX are finalists of the 2022 Client/Supplier Collaboration which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. To find out more about the awards click here.
How do you uphold each company’s mission while collaborating?
Research fuels Microsoft Azure’s customer obsession. Our partnership with NewtonX enables the Microsoft research team to source high quality data points that feed into the insights we provide product group stakeholders for use in their strategic planning process. The partnership has yielded increased trust in the data and enhanced relationships with stakeholders and their strategic use of the insights. For NewtonX, it’s proven a new model of client-vendor collaboration anchored in trust and thought partnership, enabling them to empower clients with the insights to make confident, critical decisions.
What skill sets do you find most valuable in a client/supplier collaboration?
Communication successful partnerships require working relationships built on trust and constant feedback loops.
“It's about assuming good intentions with our interactions along with flexibility to achieve the goals of the engagement. Rarely does everything go right the first time – being able to trust in your supplier partner to to pivot with the curveballs that you're thrown in the field – being able to give crucial, constructive feedback to flexibly adapt when things aren’t going well. That's how our partnership produces trust and carries an engagement forward." – Tracy Wang, senior research program manager, Microsoft.
Agility and flexibility – with quick pivots, unexpected challenges become constructive learnings that strengthen the partnership.
“Our partnership is very metrics driven. The base of any discussion is always: What are the metrics? How many people did we reach out to and how many people responded? How many were screened and how many are passing the screeners? And then we're looking at the metrics and asking, where's the gap? Do we need to increase the volume or search parameters? Or is it that the people are not passing the screener, which means we might need to tweak the strategy." – Leon Mishkis, COO, NewtonX.
How has the collaboration impacted each company?
“We need to leverage our partners as an extended part of our team – leveraging their expertise and knowledge to enhance our own and make us smarter in every aspect of the research process. Partnership means working hand-in-hand; working toward the same goal and those results being better because of it.” – Zoe Dowling, Microsoft’s principal research program manager.
“How do you reach the right people? How do we know that it's not a fraudulent sample? It's such a challenging area within our industry. I can genuinely say it keeps me awake at night – when you're looking at your data and thinking, can I really trust what I have? Because the research that we do matters. It has an impact that goes across the organization.” – Zoe Dowling, Microsoft’s principal research program manager.
“We need to deliver robust insights to enable [the engineering team] to think about their resources and their investment priorities. Our research has both a wide reach and impact within the organization. Ultimately, it matters. This is why we take such a rigorous approach to the research and view our partnerships as critical in achieving high-quality, impactful findings." – Zoe Dowling, Microsoft’s principal research program manager.
“One thing that I really enjoy about our relationship with Microsoft is how they help us, help them. We serve clients across size, industry and geography, and it shows in the results when our relationships are more collaborative than just transactional or task-oriented. Our deep degrees of communication and trust with Microsoft establish the gold standard in our partnerships.” – Leon Mishkis, NewtonX’s COO.