The interview team

When deciding on conducting the interviews, you can choose to source the interviews to a specialized third party that does market research, or you can choose to commit the manpower and resources from your own organization to conduct market research. Of course, there are obvious benefits of using a third party. They will be able to free up the amount of time you and your organization will have to commit to this initiative, and they also have expertise in formulating questions, interviewing customers, asking questions, and documenting customers' responses.

While this is certainly a viable option for a lot of companies with more financial resources than personnel, I generally do not recommend it (and no doubt you do not either, as you are reading this book). If you use a third party to do your customer research, you may be missing out on insights you may have gleaned if you held the interviews yourself. Typically, the market research teams are very knowledgeable about interviewing...