Which research activities does your product marketing team do internally, and which research activities do you outsource?

It's a healthy balance of both. We do smaller, qualitative user feedback sessions mostly internally -- especially with customers who are in beta programs for our new features. 

But broader market research initiatives that require greater scale, we often bring on great partners like Forrester, YouGov, Suzy, and other survey/analytics tools to get us the level of responses we need. 

Research is top priority for my team so we are responsible for driving it from start to finish. While we certainly get input from sales and help from teams like customer success or service to source candidates but I strongly push for as much ownership and tactical execution being done by my team. This starts with creating the detailed research scope, a clear outline of approach and methodology, as well as the question or conversation guide. We also conduct all the research and provide a wrap up documenting the outcomes and any shareouts.

The once exception to owning this in house is when my teams have engaged in pricing and packaging research. Those are larger studies that tend to be owned by multiple stakeholders and often involve an external or expert research firm. In those cases, PMM serves as the point of contact and primary project manager.

For gut checks on messaging, or for unguided surveys like pains and gains I do it myself via SurveyMonkey or Wynter. $600-$1200 will get you 50-100 answers from folks that meet your target market (you can choose qualifiers like industry, title, seniority, location but each will shrink the size of your pool).

The thing I love most about these tools is 1) you can ask a qualifying question to eliminate anyone who’s never even heard of your category, or doesn’t do the work you aim to improve, for example. And 2) you’ll get your fully results back over a weekend. In my experience surveymonkey is faster but I have a little more faith in the quality of participants via Wynter.

For things that I plan to use in external comms like a report based on survey data I’ve used ESG. For very high stakes research like pricing or roadmap I’ve used consultancies that specialize in jobs to be done research. You can get 5 high quality 60 min interviews for around $2k.

and finally for win/loss research I always outsource—Clozd is a good vendor for these. I personally think you’re more likely to get higher quality feedback with a third party conducting the interview.