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One thing we’ve learned from our years of studying marketing in the professional services is that firms that conduct business research are more likely to grow faster and be more profitable.
Think about that for a minute. Faster growth and more profit. It makes you start thinking of research in a different light, doesn’t it?
There are, of course, many types of business research options out there. Which ones do high-growth firms do most often? Here’s what we found in the 2025 study:
This may start you thinking about what kind of research your firm might do and how it could help it grow. In our experience, client research is among the most valuable. Why? Because it allows you to get specific insights into your target audience that you can use right away to adjust your messaging, your services and the way you market your firm.
What are the big questions you should ask? While your industry and circumstances will affect how you design your survey, there are a few broad questions that almost any firm will benefit from answering. To this end, we’ve put together a list of the top 10 business research questions with the potential to deliver greater growth and profitability:
1. Why do your best clients choose your firm?
Notice we are focusing on the best clients, not necessarily the average client. What do they find appealing about your firm? And why did they choose you over competitors? Their answers may surprise you—and spur you to rework your messaging and pitches.
2. What are those same clients trying to avoid?
This is the flip side of the first question and offers a valuable perspective. The answer may keep you from being ruled out during the early rounds of a prospect’s selection process. It can also shape your business practices and strategy.
In our 2022 research on professional services buyers and sellers, we found that the buyers most want to avoid hiring a service provider that won’t do what it promises, puts low-quality staff on the project or communicates poorly—among other concerns.
These concerns reflect the broad professional services market, so your clientele could have a somewhat different set of worries. If you understand how your prospects think you can do a much better job of turning them into clients.
3. Who are your real competitors?
Most firms aren’t very good at identifying their true competitors. When we ask a firm’s staff to list their competitors and ask their clients to do the same, there is on average about a 25% overlap in their lists.
Why? Sometimes, it’s because you know too much about your industry and too readily rule out competitors you deem inferior. At other times, it’s because you are viewing a client’s problems through your filter and overlook completely different categories of solutions that your buyers are considering. For example, a company facing declining sales could easily consider sales training, new product development, or a new marketing campaign. If you provide new product development consulting, the other possible solutions are all competitors, even if they don’t fit neatly into your idea of a competitor.
4. How do potential clients see their greatest challenges?
The answer to this question helps you understand what is on prospective clients’ minds and how they are likely to describe and talk about those issues. The key here is that you may offer services that can be of great benefit to organizations, but they never consider you because they are thinking about their challenges through a different lens.
They may want cost reduction when you are offering process improvement (which, in fact, reduces cost). You may need to connect the dots, or you will miss the opportunity. This is similar to the dilemma of understanding your full range of competitors addressed by Question 3 above.
5. What is the real benefit your firm provides?
Sure, you have a good idea how your services can help clients. But what is the greatest value your clients get from your firm? Many providers are surprised to learn the true benefit of their services. What attracts a client to your firm initially might not be what they end up valuing most after working with you. For example, you might have won the sale based on your good reputation, but after working with you, your client might value your specialized skills and expertise most. Or they might find themselves relying on you to advise them in tough situations.
When you understand what true value and benefit you offer, you’re in a position to build upon it—or even develop new services with other true benefits.
6. What emerging trends and challenges are you interested in most
Where is the market headed? Will it grow or contract? What services might be needed in the future? This is fairly common research territory in large market-driven industries, but it’s surprisingly rare among professional services firms.
Understanding emerging trends can help you conserve and better target limited marketing dollars. We’ve seen many firms add entire service lines, including new hires and big marketing budgets, based on little more than hunches and anecdotal observations. Decisions like these should be driven by research and data. Research reduces your risk associated with changes of this magnitude.
7. How strong is your brand?
What is your firm known for? How strong is your reputation? How visible are you in the marketplace? Answers to each of these questions can vary from market to market. Knowing where you stand cannot only guide your overall strategy, it can also have a profound impact on your marketing budget. When you understand your brand’s strengths and weaknesses you can better grasp why you are getting traction in one segment and not another.
8. What is the best way to market to your ideal clients?
Wouldn’t it be nice to know where your best prospective clients go to get recommendations and referrals? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew how they want to be marketed to? These are all questions that can be answered through systematic business research. The answers can greatly reduce the level of spending needed to reach your best clients. This may be one of the reasons that firms that do regular research are more profitable.
9. How should you price your services?
This is often a huge stumbling block for professional services firms. In our experience, most firms overestimate the role price plays in buying decisions. Often firms are told that price is the reason they don’t win an engagement. It is the easiest reason for a buyer to share when providing feedback. But is that the real reason?
When a firm hires an impartial third party to dig deeper into why it loses competitive bids, it often learns that what appears to be price may really be a perceived lack of expertise or lower perceived value. We’ve seen firms lose business because of typos in their proposal — while attributing the loss to their fees. Pricing your services right is critical. But so is positioning your pricing by the way you write and talk about the value you deliver.
10. How do your current clients really feel about you?
How likely are clients to refer you to others? What would they change about your firm? How long are they likely to remain a client? Questions like these can help you fine-tune your procedures and get a more accurate feel for what the future holds. In some cases, we’ve seen clients reveal strengths a firm knew nothing about—or thought was unimportant. In others, they have uncovered important vulnerabilities that need urgent attention.
The tricky part here is that clients are rarely eager to tell you the truth directly. Many dislike having difficult conversations or are worried that they will make matters worse by sharing their true feelings. This is perhaps the biggest drawback to doing your own client research. You will get much higher quality answers if you hire a third party, one that will keep respondents’ answers anonymous and inspire trust. Even at Hinge, where research is one of our core services, we hire an outsider to conduct research on our own clients.
Understanding the key questions discussed above can have a positive impact on your firm’s growth and profitability. That is the true payoff of well-designed and professionally executed business-to-business research. What’s your strategy to understand your buyers?
Related: Do You Really Understand Your Business Competitors?