In Sell the Survey it may have seemed I was focusing just on telephone surveys but selling your survey applies to any survey methodology. In Online Research Under Fire light is made of the recent case where a story posted in Advertising Age outlines how a number of online surveys when replicated were producing contradictatory results.

The are a number of aspects being blamed but the key problem as I see it is just about anybody can build an online survey and just about anybody does. Poorly designed questionnaires and poorly worded questions result in a negative user experience, a high non-response error and invalid results. So when I say “Sell your Survey”, the precursor to this is that you actually have something worth selling.

Sometimes I feel being a marketing researcher feels a little how a writer must feel. Just because someone can write does not mean that they can write well. And just because someone can write a question does not mean that they can write good question. While I am not here to sell the benefits of using an experienced and trained researcher to design and build surveys, the main benefit of using an experienced and trained researcher is that it is most likely they have already made the mistakes that the novice is about to.

In summary, sell your survey to your sample, but make sure you have something worth selling first.