Keep it Brief
True or false: Our competitors also pitch partnerships to gain advantages on competitive surveys.
TRUE
Which pulls will the highest match quality experts come from & why?
The calls project
What does DEAP stand for?
DROP EVERYTHING AND POKE
Several quotas on your competitive survey closed overnight, and you still have 300 experts on sent/partial. How can you quickly audit the tab to only poke your relevant leads?
Download the CSV, input the company list to delivery GPT to have it parse out companies from the closed quotas, input this back into excel and highlight duplicate values, and mark these IDs not right on the survey tab.
Who is AlphaSights' largest competitor?
You're briefing with a repeat survey user on a project. How could you use their experience with surveys to your advantage when explaining AlphaSights' value proposition?
This user will have a better grasp of the difference quality makes on the back end.
When is the best time to send out pre-poke messages?
Several hours before launch – if the survey is launching in the morning, poke experts the night before, if the survey is launching in the afternoon, poke experts the morning of
What are two ways to ensure a faster click-in rate from experts?
Pre-poking, text poking/DEAPing after launch
Which other panels have the ability to target experts by vendor-usage?
None
Which two competitor panels have appeared on the most surveys so far in 2025? (Hint: It's the same for both McK and Growth)
GLG & ROI
You're briefing with a client on a buy-side due diligence on Celerion. They mention they're interested in collecting responses from Australia in addition to the US and Europe, and that they're focused on SMB customers. They do not give you any information on quotas – what quotas could you predict you may end up in oversample for?
Australia for geography, SMBs for company size
What are four factors that would make an expert Tier 1?
Match quality, past survey experience, responsiveness, project topic activity
Which quotas should you focus on filling first? Provide an example.
The easy quotas! Low-hanging fruit (ex: non-users, ENT/MM, US geography, etc.)
IntelliSurvey just asked the client if they'd like to implement Cheatsweep. What do you do? How can you use this as a moment for client education?
Just wanted to break out separately about Cheatsweep - typically, McKinsey teams do not implement CheatSweep for AlphaSights responses, given our vetting process, as we pre-vet every expert before sending the survey. The software can sometimes wrongly tag qualified responses as fraud. While the survey is live and in the field, we’ll go through and complete our own data checks of all completed responses from our panel to check that experts are answering the survey thoughtfully.
What's an easy way to make sure you can quickly identify client emails in your inbox? Why is this particularly useful on competitive surveys?
Labeling! If you're in a meeting or after hours waiting for a launch, the label will imediately flag the client's launch and prevent it from getting lost amongst expert emails.
You're briefing with a client on a survey for N=200 customers of CROs, and you quoted N=100 for AlphaSights. The client mentions that they're planning on looping in 5 additional panels for fielding – how do you respond?
Seek first to understand: why does the client want to loop in so many panels? Are they on a tight timeline? Is there a tricky screener we missed that will limit feasibility? From here, reassure client of our panel's strength, explain the extra logistics and costs of looping in additional panels, and suggest looping in just one to two other providers.
You're working on an N=200 survey targeting Director+ IT decision-makers across all industries and geographies. There are two other panels and we do not have a headstart. How many experts would you want to aim to have on the tab ahead of full-launch?
400-500
You're PL-ing a survey for N=300 ITDMs that you expect to fill quickly, it's 6pm and you have big plans this evening that require being offline. What do you do?
Check in with your project team and Katie first, then ask the broader team channel. In order to facilitate a smooth handoff, send the person watching your "after hours checklist", and clarify what time they'll be watching the survey until.
What are two industry quotas you'd generally predict to fill quickly? What are two industry quotas you'd expect to fill slowly?
Quickly: Software/Tech, Healthcare, Finance, etc.
Slowly: Government, Retail, Food & Bev, etc.
What is the median number of panels on Growth Projects in 2025? What is the median number of panels on McK PE projects in 2025?
Growth: 2
McK PE: 3
Before even getting on the survey brief, what are 3 resources you can leverage to flex your understanding of the space and differentiate our service quality to the client?
Live syncing with the calls PL, reviewing the calls project, using delivery GPT, referencing previous projects in the system, talking with experts, and connecting with other survey PLs who have worked with the client before.
What are two ways you can use labels on day 1 of a project to simplify oversample sourcing on day 10? Why might this be extra important on a competitive survey vs. a non-competitive survey?
Labeling with the key quotas in mind: vendor usage, industry, company size, etc.
This helps the PL and deliverers to organize a higher volume of leads, and to quickly pivot as quotas close, which happens more quickly on competitive projects.
Your competitive survey is soft-launching after hours but you need to have the team mark experts for SL while they're online, and you don't know what the N for SL will be. How many experts should everyone mark?
2x the Soft-launch N, divided by the number of deliverers
You're running a project on ERP that's in oversample for Acumatica customers. You're neck-in-neck with GLG after an efficient full-launch, but they're starting to pull ahead in last-mile. What are 3 AlphaSights-specific resources you can leverage to the team's advantage?
Sync with the calls PL, reference the data from past ERP projects to identify users, use featured customers to make a company list, ask your PL or Katie to sync to brainstorm research strategies, etc.
How many B2B survey providers are there in the current market?
50+