Article

Sharing research findings

Turn interview notes into a six-slide deck senior leaders will green-light in minutes.

Introduction

Your team just completed five customer interviews and surfaced language that could reshape landing pages, pricing decks and retainer proposals. Yet insight left in a private folder helps no one. The only interviews that move pipeline are those whose findings reach copywriters by Tuesday and growth managers by the next sprint.

In fifteen years of growth work I have watched brilliant quotes die in slide twenty-eight because no one knew what to do next. This chapter shows how to share research so it ships. You will build a tight insight deck, map actions in a two-by-two matrix, hand over tasks inside the team’s daily workflow and head off stakeholder questions before they slow momentum.

The process works for a boutique marketing agency pitching upsells, an IT consultancy adding managed security, a legal firm refining retainer tiers and a single SaaS platform tweaking trial flows. Follow the steps and every verbatim quote will track to a measurable change, not a forgotten transcript.

Part 1

Build the insight deck

Open a blank deck and resist the urge to document everything. Four sections suffice: the growth problem, the interview method, the themes you heard and the actions you recommend. Delete boilerplate headers, decorative icons and long agendas; stakeholders skim slides, they do not study them.

Lead each theme slide with the customer’s exact words in quotation marks, followed by a one-sentence headline in the same language. For example, an agency client may say, “I dread month three because reports read like jargon.” The headline becomes: Month-three reports feel like jargon. Under the quote, bullet the metric at risk, in this case retainer renewal rate, and the proposed fix, such as a plain-English dashboard.

Use imagery sparingly. A single heat-map of drop-off or a screenshot of the confusing report outperforms stock photos. The goal is clarity, not decoration. Limit the deck to ten slides. If a theme does not merit space it probably lacks impact or supporting evidence.

End the deck with a bridge slide titled What happens next. This prepares stakeholders for the action matrix you will build in the following step.

Part 2

Fill the action matrix

Copy each recommended action from the deck into a two-by-two grid. The vertical axis measures expected revenue impact; the horizontal axis measures effort to implement. High-impact, low-effort items are quick wins: an IT consultancy might swap technical acronyms for benefits-first copy on its proposal cover. Low-impact, high-effort tasks, such as redesigning an entire onboarding flow, fall to the backlog unless they unblock larger goals.

Colour quick-win cells green, strategic projects amber and low-return ideas grey. Next, assign an owner to every green or amber item. For the agency example, the head of accounts takes the jargon-free dashboard task; for the SaaS team, the product manager owns a shorter in-app tutorial.

Add a sprint date or deadline beside each owner. Without time boxes actions drift. Share the matrix in Notion or Trello so anyone can check progress in real time.

With priorities locked, you need to deliver them where work already happens, which is the focus of the next section.

Part 3

Handover

Skip email attachments that vanish under inbox clutter. Upload the insight deck and action matrix directly into the team’s primary workspace. Agencies often live in Notion, consultancies rely on Asana and some SaaS teams prefer http://monday.com/. Use the tool your colleagues open first each morning.

Schedule a fifteen-minute walkthrough. Start with the problem slide, skim themes and land on the action matrix. Resist the temptation to reread every quote. Instead, ask each owner to confirm the next step in their own words. This verbal commitment turns static insight into live accountability.

Lock the theme slides from editing to preserve wording integrity. Allow comments on action steps, so channel leads can fine-tune copy or deadlines without altering the evidence.

Once handover is complete, anticipate the follow-up objections that often stall execution, covered in the upcoming section.

Part 4

Anticipate stakeholder questions

Stakeholders will test the research the moment tasks touch budget. Prepare a single slide with concise answers to the three questions you will always hear. First, sample size: note interviews conducted and why they represent the buying committee. Second, bias control: explain how recruitment included current, churned and prospect voices. Third, validation: point to quick checks such as support ticket counts or a one-day PPC test that confirmed the biggest claim.

Offer access to raw transcripts for anyone who wants to audit quotes. Store them in the same workspace, clearly labelled. Transparency builds trust and short-circuits suspicion.

Finally, schedule a check-in two weeks after handover. Use the session to review completed actions and early metrics. Closed-loop feedback shows the research cycle works and secures support for the next round of calls.

With objections addressed before they surface, insights move unchallenged into copy, campaigns and product tweaks, letting you conclude the sharing phase.

Conclusion

Conclusion

Research only counts when it changes behaviour. You built a ten-slide deck anchored by verbatim quotes, plotted recommendations on an impact matrix, handed tasks over in the team’s daily workspace and neutralised common objections in advance.

Results now travel from customer mouths to measurable experiments without detours. Monitor the first metric shift and credit the interview that sparked it. The loop is closed, and your next research cycle begins on solid ground.

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Article

Sharing research findings

Turn interview notes into a six-slide deck senior leaders will green-light in minutes.

Customer research