The Four Questions We Ask Every Potential Client

A researcher asked a roomful of Gen Z participants: if this brand were a person, who would it be?

This is a classic exercise in qualitative research: brand personification. It allows participants to unlock and verbalize their feelings, associations, and opinions about a brand in ways that straightforward questioning might not elicit. By nature, it encourages participants to reach for archetypes. Sometimes, but not always, that can tip over into stereotypes.

One participant saw that risk from a mile away. So she refused to participate in the exercise.

The participant made it clear that she was afraid of stepping into sensitive territory and being judged by her peers in the room. Hearing this, the researcher sensed that this fear might spread to the other participants — or, at the very least, that the room was growing uncomfortable with the whole situation. Trust, the key to good qualitative research, was dangling by a thread.

There was nothing she could say to reassure this participant. But continuing the exercise would mean losing the room. So she pivoted.

“Let’s think of it another way. If this brand were a world, what would that world look like?”  

Just like that, the tension dissipated. Not only because the researcher addressed the participant’s misgivings, but because the entire room could see that she had their back.  

Trust was built from a precarious moment. But that was possible because of an additional layer of trust working in the background: trust between the researcher and her client.

Experienced researchers expect the unexpected and switch things up in the moment. But they’re unable to do that if clients mistrust them. When the focus group gets precarious, the possibility that the CMO might step in from the backroom only adds to the uncertainty.  

This is especially true if the moderator appears to be pivoting away from the client’s goals; insights-seeking is a process, and moderators need to know that their clients understand this. But that means it goes both ways: researchers must make it clear that they know what they need to get out of the room, and that they’re focused on that goal.

In a years-old client agency relationship, this is a non-issue. But how can clients tell if a new research partner is trustworthy?

It comes down to knowing that the researcher understands the client’s goals, has a clear idea of how to achieve them, and is aligned with the client on how involved the client wants to be in the process. That’s why, at Sylvestre & Co., we start every engagement with four key questions.

Can you bring the brief to life for me?

By the time a brief lands in our inbox, it’s gone through countless rounds of internal discussion and has likely changed hands more than once. That’s why we treat it as more of a conversation starter. It answers one question: “What is the deliverable?” Whereas clients themselves can answer the question that really matters: “What is actually driving the project?”

Conversation is where a client can be upfront: “This is what really matters to my VP.” Or: “This is an area we’ve struggled with.” Maybe even: “This is an insight we’ve been really focused on that we’d like to move on from.”  

Giving the CMO or the insights chief a chance to tell us about a project in their own words opens up the floor to tell us about their company, their stakeholders, and the actual must-haves for everyone involved.  

The researcher can also challenge or stress-test the brief by asking the client whether they’ve considered certain angles or flagging potential dead ends in the stated goals. Really, it’s about starting the client agency relationship on the right foot: the researcher gets to understand the client’s goals and challenges, and the client susses out how the researcher will pursue those goals and address those challenges.

What's the one thing you need to walk away knowing?

Research projects often include multiple objectives. But they don’t all carry the same weight. There might be one question that must not go unanswered.  

Meeting this objective might mean definitively walking a key stakeholder away from a troublesome line of thinking. It might mean establishing alignment for an indecisive team. It might mean helping a decisionmaker with something to prove finally, well, prove something.

That’s context that doesn’t appear in a brief. It might not even appear in the client’s words, but rather their tone or their level of engagement while answering. This is where the researcher’s capacity for empathy comes in handy: not just moderating participants, but clients, too.

Less dramatically, this question can be an opportunity for the client to guarantee that they speak unequivocally. Whereas the brief and all its baggage might send them down the road of reiterating how they got here, this question allows them to speak in no uncertain terms.

How do you want to learn?

This is the question clients tell us they have never been asked before, and it is our most important one.

Some teams are visual. They want to feel something before they analyze it: a video reel, visual aides, footage of participants revealing key insights. Others want to do their own homework and pore through an appendix so that they have a thorough frame of reference when questions from leadership start coming in. Some clients want to learn alongside us, while others prefer a full reveal once the complete picture has taken shape.

A researcher who does not know which one they are working with risks producing a deliverable that is technically correct, but doesn’t connect. Research that does not get used is research that did not work.

This question, again, goes beyond the brief, as a plainly stated deliverable doesn’t necessarily convey what the client needs in order to move forward. It’s an opportunity for the researcher to show that they are a partner who will shepherd findings into action.

How do you want us to work together?

Most clients and agencies are accustomed to setting expectations. How often do you want to check in? Do you want to observe fieldwork live, or review recordings afterward? How comfortable are you sharing about internal politics and organizational pressures?

But this question, following the others, does more than that: it determines whether we operate as a vendor executing a scope of work, or as a genuine partner who understands the full weight of what a client is trying to figure out.  

In our view, the best research relationships are collaborative. Take the story with the Gen Z participants: the client in the back room isn’t there to watch over the researcher, but to experience firsthand what their target audience feels, what they worry about, and what makes them feel supported and empowered.  

Whatever the final deliverable is, by having shared in the steps it took to reach it, the client can take action that much more quickly and confidently.

Nonetheless, even if the client prefers to be hands-off, the researcher benefits having defined the relationship at the outset.

The client-agency relationship is made before the work begins

Trust between a client and a research agency is established in the first real conversation: in the quality of the questions asked, the preparation behind them, and the degree to which the researcher demonstrates that they are already thinking about your problem as their own.

The four questions above are not a prescriptive formula that every agency should follow. Every agency’s go-to questions will tell you about how they approach clients and their challenges. For Sylvestre & Co., insights seeking is driven by empathy, cultural fluency, and experience, and presented in direct and innovative ways.  

If you are evaluating a research partner, the questions they ask might just answer all of yours.