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We are excited to welcome Tim Hoskins today. Tim is the President of Quester, an insights and strategies company. He is joining us today to talk about his journey and driving business results.
Tim’s journey
While in college, Tom needed a job, so he answered an ad for a lead-generation specialist at an information security startup. He worked there for two years while he was in college, and then post-college, he got hired by the same company and started as a sales rep.
In the startup world, you get to do everything, and Tim did not like not knowing all the answers, so he read the entire manual. He also started taking all the developers out to lunch to pick their brains, and that led to him becoming the Sales Engineer. His final role there was as a Product Manager.
A consultant doing some work for Quester reached out to Tim, so he left the startup world to join Quester. He did not realize at the time that the company was, in fact, a forty-year-old startup. There, he worked in client services, became the head of sales and marketing, and about five or six years ago, he got promoted to President.
The history of Quester
Dr. Charles Cleveland, the founder of Quester, was a professor at Drake University. He started the company as a communications company with a foundation in linguistics, and they spent years doing qualitative research. They always applied linguistic analysis techniques to help drive communication.
The founder’s dream was for executives on the client-side to look at a qualitative insight with the same confidence as a quantitative insight, someday.
Dr. Cleveland passed away suddenly in 2005. The company was then purchased by three partners who kept on pushing forward with the technology and the same vision. In 2006, they launched the first, simple version. In 2007, they started to develop artificial intelligence, and the team has been working on that ever since.
The current technology at Quester
Today, Questor’s technology fully automates a one-on-one interview of up to forty minutes with a consumer. Those interviews are chat-based, or consumers can leverage the voice-based software on their phones.
What their technology does
Their technology analyses people’s responses and identifies a key or interesting idea that they are communicating. It then delivers a contextual-based follow-up question to find even more information.
2011
In 2011, the industry was not ready for artificial intelligence.
Proving themselves
There are always clients out there who know that you can’t solve the same problem with the same solution every single time. Those people give companies like Quester a chance to prove themselves. And that gives the rest of the market the confidence that those companies can do what they say they can do.
The culture
The average tenure of a Quester employee is seven years. Their culture is one of a family, and they do their best to have the mentality of a startup every single day.
Insurgent mission
The book, The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth, helped Tim and his team to focus on finding their insurgent mission and the reason for their existence.
Driving business results
They came to realize that their mission was not about the technology or the linguistic and qualitative analysis. It was about driving business results for their clients. You can’t have a business result unless you have strong and differentiated insights. And you can’t get strong and differentiated insights unless you have a different methodology to collect and analyze data.
The company that delivers business results
Tim and his team decided that they wanted to stand for the company that delivers business results. Behind every business result is a great strategy, and behind every great strategy is a consumer-centric insight.
Changing in one year
In 2018 and 2019, they changed their marketing. They doubled down on strategic insights, and they empowered their team by hyper-focusing them on micro-battles.
The results in 2020
In 2020, Tim and his team have more success than they have had in all the other years that Tim has been with the company in terms of client feedback and business results.
Sales
The sales team at Quester has the title of “Client Services”, and they are essentially strategists. They are trained and highly talented in understanding everything about the business, the questions, challenges, objectives, and identifying and working with the research teams to propose the right solutions. They stay with the project from front to back.
New accounts
They got ingrained into the conference circuit for bringing in new accounts. About two years ago, they decided to change the format of their presentations. Now, they try to spend thirty to forty percent of any presentation at a conference talking about the facts and figures of their business results. Those business results combined with conferences and the traditional outreach has been how they have acquired new business.
Involvement in industry associations
Tim believes that involvement in industry associations is vital for your personal and professional development. And everyone should get involved to the extent that they want to be committed to growing personally and professionally.
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Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn, and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as she does, subscribe on iTunes, and don’t forget to leave a rating and review!
Book mentioned:
The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth by Chris Zook and James Allen
