How would you help your product or solutions marketing team overcome lack of data access and finding ways to collect that data for validation?

Even if accessing quantitative data is a challenge, you can almost always find a way to get great qualitative data by setting up interviews with customers or prospects. You can do these over video chat.

Here's a process you can follow:

• Write a research brief that includes goals, target audience you want to interview, whether you will pay the subjects, how you'll recruit them, and the timeline for your research.

• Create a discussion guide for the interviews. This is like a script our outline you'll follow in the interviews, and includes the questions you'll ask, any visuals you might want to show, or instructions for the subject to walk through a prototype and give feedback. It's important that each interview is conducted in the same way with the same words to get clear findings, so follow your script!

• Recruit your participants. If you're looking to talk to a segment of your existing customers, get an email list and send out invitations, ideally including calendly link or similar appointment scheduling tool. If you're looking for prospects you may need to get creative and find people in your network, or even through social media.

• Conduct the interviews. Record them if possible, because sharing excerpts from those videos to support key findings can be very powerful. Be sure to ask permission from the subject to record!

• Reflect on what you heard, review the videos, and summarize your findings. Share with your team.