In 2017, Eli Diament started Azurite with one goal in mind—revolutionize the world of B2B market research.
After successful stints as a senior management consultant at both McKinsey and Oliver Wyman, Eli walked away with two elements that became core in the foundation of Azurite. The first is that the consulting model could be applied to an industry like market research to achieve a step change in insight and research outcomes. And the second was that the quality of the research he was seeing in his daily work was not nearly as good as it should or could be.
He knew there must be a better way–and set out to create it.
At the center of Azurite’s value proposition was an entirely new way of recruiting respondents–one that was never outsourced to a legacy expert network or panel providers.
We sat down with our Founder and Managing Director, Eli Diamant, to get a deeper understanding of why he built Azurite and why he’s so passionate about changing the reputation of surveys.
Management consulting meets market research
Most businesses hire a market researcher without realizing how much of the actual research process is contracted out. In some cases, the research provider is outsourcing everything: survey design, coding, recruitment, quality control–even presentation creation.
“Every time the process is segmented, you get further away from a unified and useful output,” Eli explains. Even if each outsourced partner is the best in class at their particular segment and role in the process, when every detail of the research process is not managed collectively, it’s easy to lose sight of what clients want to learn and how those learnings will be applied to business decision making.
As Eli puts it, “there’s an opportunity to infuse management decision making into research, and then design every step of research around delivering against that objective.” Without an end-to-end research design process, clients lose that opportunity and erode the insight potential.
Better partner, better results
When research doesn’t deliver insight, businesses start to blame the tools and the survey and don’t realize it’s the result of a flawed process.
“I knew the process was broken–not the humble survey itself. We need to help clients reimagine what research can do for the C-suite,” Eli says. “I’m inspired by taking what many people consider to be a stale, old tool and elevating it to become a critical asset used by the C-suite for strategy.” He and the team at Azurite have been working hard to change clients’ perceptions through results.
“By bringing the entire data and insights process under Azurite’s roof, we’ve been able to open clients’ eyes regarding the power of surveys.” Azurite manages and executes every part of the research in-house. The team of data scientists, coders, machine learning experts and business consultants all work together to deploy intelligently designed surveys and deliver powerful insights that answer critical business questions. Most importantly, unlike other research firms, Azurite’s respondent pools are recruited from scratch, selecting fresh decision makers and users with only the most relevant and recent experience in their field.
The resulting data Azurite delivers has clients quickly changing their opinions on the potential of surveys. “Now major deals—$1 billion investments or greater—and business decisions rely on the data we collect and the insights we derive. It’s motivating to see clients switch from naysayers to survey evangelists.”
Azurite’s keys to success
There’s no single part of market research that’s more important than the other. The key to success is making sure every element and every step hums together in tune.
Eli says “you need to write the right survey. You need to ensure that you’re finding the right respondents. And you need to ensure the respondents are answering the questions the way you intended and that you fully understand the industry when developing analysis. If any single step goes astray of the research objective, the process fails and ultimately the client doesn’t get the insight they need.”
The team at Azurite brings a level of attention and experience to the entire research process that clients can’t get elsewhere—no one else guarantees insight from every survey. The reliability of their work has resulted in Azurite becoming one of the fastest growing firms in the industry, and the go-to partner for major Private Equity, Enterprise and Hedge Fund clients.
