Every mid-market and upper-mid-market PE firm will tell you primary research is critical to their diligence process. And yet, the way most deal teams actually run it — a handful of hastily scheduled expert calls crammed into a two-week exclusivity window — leaves enormous value on the table.
The problem isn't intent. It's execution. Deal teams are stretched thin, juggling multiple workstreams, coordinating with management, reviewing data rooms, and building models. Primary research gets squeezed into whatever time is left. The result: undercooked insights, confirmation bias dressed up as "validation," and decisions that rest on thinner evidence than anyone would like to admit.
This guide is a practical playbook for doing it properly. Whether you're an Associate running your first solo diligence or a Principal overseeing the process, this is how to structure primary research that genuinely drives conviction — or kills a deal before you waste another month on it.
Step 1: Define What You Actually Need to Believe
Before you brief an expert network, schedule a single call, or commission a survey, start here: what are the three to five things you need to believe for this deal to work?
This sounds obvious, but most deal teams skip it. They jump straight to "we need to talk to customers" or "get us some industry experts" without articulating the specific hypotheses they're testing.
Good primary research starts with a clear set of investment hypotheses — not topics, not themes, but falsifiable statements about the target business.
For example:
- "The target's 95% gross retention rate is real and driven by genuine switching costs, not inertia."
- "The core end-market is growing at 8–10% annually, and the target is gaining share."
- "Competitors X and Y are not investing aggressively in the target's niche."
- "Customers would accept a 10–15% price increase without churning."
Each hypothesis maps directly to a diligence question. Each diligence question maps to a specific research method. Skip this step and your research becomes a fishing expedition — lots of conversations, very little signal.
Step 2: Map Hypotheses to Research Methods
Not every question is best answered the same way. PE teams that rely exclusively on one-on-one expert calls are leaving gaps. Here's how to think about matching methods to questions:
| What You Need to Know | Best Research Method | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Customer satisfaction & willingness to pay | B2B customer survey | You need statistical breadth, not one-off anecdotes. Surveying 30–50 customers gives you a defensible read. |
| Competitive dynamics & market positioning | Expert interviews (competitors, industry veterans) | You need nuanced, qualitative perspectives from people who've watched the market evolve. |
| Revenue quality & sales pipeline durability | Customer interviews + channel checks | Talk to actual buyers and intermediaries who see real purchasing behaviour. |
| Market size & growth trajectory | Expert interviews + secondary data triangulation | Combine top-down estimates from experts with bottom-up data to stress-test the TAM. |
| Operational benchmarking | Expert interviews (former executives at target or peers) | Former operators can tell you where the bodies are buried — margin levers, cost structure realities, integration risks. |
The key insight: the best commercial due diligence uses multiple methods in combination. Expert calls give you depth and context. Surveys give you breadth and quantifiability. Channel checks give you real-time market signal. You need all three working together to build genuine conviction.
Step 3: Design Your Research Before You Start Scheduling
This is where most deal teams go wrong. They fire off a request to their expert network — "get us five calls on [industry]" — without designing the research upfront.
Designing your research means:
For Expert Interviews
- Define your expert profiles precisely. "Someone in healthcare IT" is not a profile. "A former VP of Sales at a mid-market revenue cycle management company who sold into 50–200 bed hospitals in the Southeast US between 2019 and 2023" — that's a profile. The tighter your spec, the better your conversations.
- Write a structured discussion guide. Not a loose list of topics — a sequenced set of questions that maps back to your hypotheses. The best discussion guides start broad (market context), narrow to the target's positioning, and close with specific competitive and pricing questions.
- Plan for triangulation. You're not looking for one expert to tell you the answer. You're looking for patterns across 8–12 conversations with different vantage points: customers, competitors, former employees, channel partners, and industry analysts.
For B2B Surveys
- Define your sample frame. Who exactly needs to respond? What's the right job title, company size, and geography? If you're surveying the target's customers, how do you reach them without tipping off the market?
- Keep it focused. A 40-question survey on everything you've ever wondered about the market is a recipe for low completion rates and noisy data. Fifteen to twenty well-crafted questions tied to your core hypotheses will deliver far more value.
- Decide your sample size in advance. For most PE diligence contexts, 30–60 qualified respondents is enough to see meaningful patterns. You're not publishing an academic paper — you're making an investment decision.
For Channel Checks
- Identify the right channel participants. Distributors, resellers, brokers, procurement consultants — whoever sits between the target and its end customers.
- Focus on observable behaviour. Not opinions about the market, but what they're actually seeing: order volumes, pricing trends, competitive wins and losses, customer complaints.
Step 4: Execute Efficiently — Time Is the Constraint
In PE diligence, you rarely have the luxury of time. Exclusivity windows are tight. IC dates are fixed. You need primary research that delivers in days, not weeks.
Here's how to compress timelines without sacrificing quality:
- Run workstreams in parallel. Don't wait until expert calls are done to launch a survey. Design and kick off both simultaneously. Survey results can validate (or contradict) what you're hearing in calls — and vice versa.
- Front-load the hardest-to-find experts. The most valuable experts — former C-suite at the target, heads of procurement at key customers — take the longest to recruit. Start sourcing them on day one.
- Synthesise as you go. Don't wait until all 12 calls are done to start drawing conclusions. After every three to four calls, update your hypothesis tracker. What's confirmed? What's challenged? What new questions have emerged?
- Set a clear "kill criteria" upfront. What finding would cause you to walk away from the deal? Define it before you start. This prevents the common trap of rationalising away negative findings because the team is already emotionally committed.
Step 5: Synthesise Findings Around the Investment Decision
The output of your primary research should not be a stack of call transcripts and a spreadsheet of survey results. It should be a clear, structured synthesis that directly addresses each of your original investment hypotheses.
A strong synthesis document answers three questions for each hypothesis:
- What did we find? Summarise the evidence — from calls, surveys, and channel checks — in plain language.
- How confident are we? Rate the strength of the evidence. Did 11 out of 12 experts agree? Or was it a 6/6 split? Did the survey data corroborate the qualitative findings, or contradict them?
- What does this mean for the deal? Translate findings into implications for valuation, underwriting assumptions, and post-acquisition strategy. This is where primary research earns its keep — not as a compliance exercise, but as a tool that directly shapes how you price risk and structure value creation plans.
Step 6: Use Primary Research to De-Risk Post-Close, Not Just Pre-Close
Too many PE firms treat primary research as a pre-close checkbox. The smartest firms use diligence-stage research as the foundation for their first 100-day plan.
If your customer survey revealed pricing power, that informs your post-close pricing strategy. If expert calls flagged a specific competitive threat, that shapes your commercial roadmap. If channel checks uncovered a new market segment the target hasn't penetrated, that becomes a growth initiative.
The best diligence research doesn't just answer "should we buy this?" — it answers "and what do we do with it once we own it?"
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Relying on management-provided customer references. Of course they'll give you their happiest customers. Your research needs to reach beyond the reference list to get an unbiased view.
- Treating expert calls as data collection. A 30-minute call with a former industry executive is not a survey. Use calls to explore nuance, test edge cases, and probe for things that don't show up in data rooms.
- Ignoring disconfirming evidence. The whole point of primary research is to challenge your assumptions, not confirm them. If two out of ten experts flag a serious risk, that's not an outlier — it's a thread you need to pull.
- Doing research too late. If primary research starts in week three of a four-week exclusivity period, you've already lost. The earlier you start, the more time you have to follow up on surprises.
- Asking your deal team to do it all themselves. Associates and VPs are already buried in model work, management meetings, and data room review. Asking them to also schedule, conduct, and synthesise 15 expert calls is a recipe for shallow research and burned-out team members.
The Build vs. Buy Decision for Primary Research
Every PE firm faces a choice: do the research internally, outsource it to an expert network and do the calls yourself, or hand the entire process to a done-for-you research provider.
Here's the honest tradeoff:
- Doing it fully in-house gives you maximum control but requires significant time from your deal team — time they often don't have.
- Using a traditional expert network (GLG, AlphaSights, Third Bridge, etc.) gets you access to experts, but your team still does all the work: writing discussion guides, conducting calls, taking notes, and synthesising findings.
- Using a done-for-you research provider means you brief the team on what you need, and they handle the entire research process — sourcing, interviewing, surveying, and delivering a finished synthesis. You get the output without the operational burden.
The right answer depends on your team's capacity, the deal timeline, and how central primary research is to your underwriting. For firms doing multiple deals simultaneously — which is most mid-market PE firms — the math on outsourcing the execution usually makes sense.
The Bottom Line
Great commercial due diligence isn't about checking a box. It's about building — or deliberately not building — conviction in a deal based on real evidence from the market. The firms that consistently win in PE are the ones that treat primary research as a core capability, not an afterthought.
Structure your hypotheses. Choose the right methods. Design the research before you start. Execute in parallel. Synthesise around the investment decision. And don't be afraid of findings that challenge the thesis — that's the entire point.
The deal you walk away from because primary research revealed a hidden risk is worth just as much as the deal you close with confidence. Often more.
