B2B vs. B2C Market Research: Key Project Differences

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The components of a B2B vs. B2C market research project are very different. From the sales cycle, to the buyer’s journey, to the customer base, to pricing models, to the product complexity and more, almost every aspect of a B2B product is different from B2C. Here’s how those differences result in different strategies and approaches when conducting B2B market research.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name’s Sean Campbell and I’m the CEO of Cascade Insights. If we were to crack open your average B2B market research project and look at it from the inside, and we were to contrast that with the B2C market research effort, we would notice a lot of differences. And those differences are driven by market dynamics, like how B2B purchases and engagements play out versus B2C.

So I want to talk about a few of those because they drive a lot of the decisions you make when you’re designing a B2B market research study.

The Buying Committee

The first one is the buying committee. In a B2B purchase, a buying committee is typically going to be at least five to six people. You’re going to have C-suite. You’re going to have stakeholders. You’re going to have line-of-business people. You’re going to have technical people. You’re going to have procurement people.

So this buying committee’s going to be at least five to six people. It might even be ten. Now, when you contrast that with a B2C purchase a lot of times it’s just an N of one. I mean, maybe you have an influencer or two. But for example, if somebody goes out and buys Halo Infinite, that’s kind of an individual purchase, right?

I want this game for my console. And sure, they might be influenced by someone, but at the end of the day, they’re the one making the decision with their money. On a B2B standpoint, though, you always have a bunch of people signing off on the decision. For example, instead of buying Halo Infinite, if you were to buy a Boeing 737, there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to weigh in on that decision.

So the other thing that tends to drive kind of study design beyond this, who do we interview in the buying committee? Do we interview everyone or do we exclude certain roles? You know, what’s kind of our decision tree on that? Is this idea of an impulse buy versus something that might take months or years to come to fruition.

Length of Buying Cycle

In B2B, most purchases don’t happen overnight. They don’t happen over the span of a few weeks. In many cases, they take months or years to happen. And there are certainly some exceptions to that. Like, for example, some software as a service cloud services can be purchased fairly just right away.

But the evolution of that organization using that service more and more, and it propagating throughout the organization to the point where hundreds or thousands of users are using it. Even there, that’s going to take a few months. You contrast this with a B2C purchase where again, to go back to Halo Infinite, this is pretty much an impulse buy.

You can be sitting on the couch, decide you want to play it, put in your credit card, and minutes or hours later it’s downloaded and you’re smashing the buttons and playing away. Right? So, it’s a very different kind of time pattern that you’re dealing with. For example, when you’re conducting a research effort in B2B, you need to have the ability to kind of walk somebody through a purchase process that might have taken months or years. So, there’s a lot of probing to do there, just even from that standpoint alone.

Pricing Complexity

Then there’s this issue of pricing complexity. When we go buy a gallon of milk, we don’t have to bring a spreadsheet along with us to figure out what the milk is going to cost. But the same isn’t true for a B2B purchase.

Almost any purchase in B2B comes along with the complexity of a spreadsheet and multiple options. And what’s our price versus someone else’s price based on who we are as an organization and how many users we, or you know our usage pattern for the service and things like that. And certainly there’s some publicly stated prices in B2B, but what you find very quickly is that those are usually pretty quickly discounted for almost anybody.

So whatever you see as a public price might not really be the price that’s being paid. So if you’re trying to understand, for example, competitor pricing, it’d be kind of dangerous to just assume the public price is the price. So, obviously this leads to some design choices when you’re thinking about B2B market research.

Product Complexity

Another factor is product complexity itself. So there’s this issue of just the product by itself is just a lot more complicated. When you think of a video game or a video game console. By definition these things are not that complicated. I mean, sure they might be challenging depending on what game you’re playing, but they’re not complicated to implement or set up buying a passenger jet.

Completely different experience. You have so many different people that have to be involved in making sure that that aircraft is airworthy and that your pilots know how to fly it and that you have basically the right facilities to maintain the aircraft and all of that kind of stuff, right?

And so if you’re going to do research on a business to business space, very typically you need to actually know the space pretty well. You can’t just go from one project where you’re working on something for a candy company to then working for something for a pharmaceutical company and then go do something for high tech.

It just doesn’t really work that way because you can’t really plumb effectively the complexity of that when you’re engaging with a research participant. And if it’s not about more of a qualitative approach where you’re engaging directly, the same thing’s true when you’re trying to design a survey instrument or something like that.

You wanna have it be something that really resonates and addresses the needs of that audience. So you’re getting at real world problems and then you can develop real world solutions.

Target Population Size

And then perhaps the final thing, and this is huge when it comes to designing B2B market research studies versus B2C, is just the size of the target population.

When we think about video game consoles, it’s probably fair to say that not everybody has a video game console, but lots and lots and lots of people have video game consoles. If you’re going to do research on a new game or a particular console, your issue really isn’t, does someone have one?

Your issue really is what slice of that market, you know, from a demographic standpoint, do I want to zero in on? And certainly if you make that narrow enough, it might be hard to find, uh, enough people that have a console with that demographic, but you don’t have this fundamental problem that not enough people have consoles to begin with.

You contrast this with B2B, you may have scenarios where an organization only has a couple hundred or at most a thousand customers because they’re very invested in their customers’ organizations, and they provide a very complex solution. For example, passenger jets are only sold to so many airlines around the world.

You know, certainly it’s more than a couple hundred, but we’re not talking about a million airlines. And so you have this kind of narrowing of the market that automatically impacts a lot of things. It impacts market research, recruiting. It impacts the kind of research effort you might be able to do.

Maybe you wanted to do quantitative, but you don’t have a large enough population that you’re targeting and you have to think about doing qualitative instead. And you just don’t typically run into this nearly as often with business to consumer research.

To sum up there’s a lot of things here that can impact a study design, and you have to know this going in. And if you know these things, you can be really well set up to design a well-crafted B2B market research study that’s going to drive really good business outcomes.

4 market Research Studies Every BioTech Startup Needs

4 Market Research Studies Every Biotech Startup Needs

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In 2020, the biotech industry experienced a boom in venture capitalist (VC) funding. Of course, that increase was spurred by the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. But even after vaccine rollouts, funding continued to climb in all areas of biotech until 2022. This year, funding dropped nearly 40 percent.

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4 Ways B2B Buyer Persona Research Supports the Sales Process

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What was the last movie you watched? Maybe it was Top Gun: Maverick or Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now, imagine that you’re a cast member on the set of one of these movies. If you have the movie script, you’re going to understand each character’s role in the movie, what their lines are, and what motivates them. In fact, if you understand the story well enough, you might just improvise an iconic scene. However, if you show up to set without a script, you won’t know what the story is, what your lines are, or how you should even respond to the characters around you.

The same idea applies to B2B sales. Fundamentally, you need to understand how the buyers and stakeholders in your target accounts talk to each other and how they embark on and conclude a buying journey. Buyer personas give you a sense of how these conversations start, end, and what type of “dialogue” each character uses. Most importantly, buyer personas give you a broader view of the decision making process.

Don’t Fast Forward Through Your Buyer Personas

One of the most common mistakes salespeople make is the failure to recognize that there are several decision makers involved in the buying process. In fact, Gartner reported that an average of six to 10 people are involved in most buying decisions. Our experience shows that many sales teams struggle to even identify five roles involved in the decision making process.

Moreover, Buying Facilitation author Sharon Drew Morgen calls out a key point about sales when she states, “a seller is in a unique position to serve a buyer by helping them discover the how, what, when, where, and why needed to solve a problem within the parameters of their culture.” She follows a bit later in her book with this key point as well, “[a single] buyer cannot know all of the answers to your questions because the odds are huge that they have a decision team working with them.” 

So, how does a seller go from not knowing an organization to understanding their culture? How does a seller go from knowing one member of a buying team to understanding the needs of the entire buying team? 

First, sales teams need to slow down and ensure they are meeting the needs of each stakeholder. The best way to do this is to establish some baselines as to what a typical stakeholder for your product or service might want from a vendor.

Secondly, sales teams need to be certain that the messages they are sending align with the needs of the buyers. Similarly, marketing teams need to ensure that any account based marketing (ABM) content or broader based content addresses these needs as well. 

Third, marketing and sales teams need to understand how a stakeholder makes decisions over time. In nearly all cases, some members of the buying committee have a role to play at the start of the journey, middle, end, and a limited number will be involved in the project from start to finish.

For example, when a movie starts, we might have some sense of the climactic battle, but we don’t know the role that every actor might play. Is the character we meet in the opening scene going to be with us throughout the entire movie? Or will they “be brief and be gone”? Is the character we meet towards the end the true person our hero has to defeat in the end? Or is there someone lurking in the shadows who is even more powerful?

We see this idea play out in the Hobbit movie trilogy. It might be obvious as the first movie begins that Frodo is going to be with us through the end of the story. But Sam is the real surprise, as without his help, it wouldn’t be possible for Frodo to defeat Sauron.

The key takeaway: If you fast forward through the entire movie, would you really understand the plot (sales process)? You might understand how the battle (or sale) was won or lost, but you wouldn’t really understand how it happened. You wouldn’t understand which actor (or persona) was critical to the story, and you wouldn’t understand who was rooting for the hero (the seller) or against them. 

Supporting Actors Need to Understand Everyone’s Role

We once worked with a client who had successfully built relationships with leadership at several universities. This client wanted to develop buyer personas for university c-suite roles to inform their marketing strategy and related materials. The goal was to take a role-based approach rather than leading with a product-first strategy.

To make this pivot successful however, the sales and marketing teams in our client would require a deeper understanding of the needs of key buyer personas. In particular, our client was focused on the needs of a VP of Research and a Chief Academic Officer in a university setting. 

In a typical university, a VP of Research and a Chief Academic Officer have different responsibilities. A VP of Research is responsible for directing the university’s mission, focusing on policy issues, and establishing community relations. A Chief Academic Officer ensures academic quality in all departments, programs, and services within the organization.

Our client learned that each persona would need to hear a different message if they were to develop an interest in our client’s solution. The sales team would best be able to develop rapport with the Chief Academic Officer by discussing fundraising in academia. Similarly, the VP of Research might be interested in communicating to the student body about research grants or new partnerships. 

The key takeaway: Buyer personas give you an essential look into the motivations and needs of each buyer you’ll meet on the journey to a successful sale. 

Buyer Personas Tell You When It’s Time to Say Your Lines

We recently conducted a buyer persona project for a client who sold a SaaS solution of interest to law firms. They learned that law firms rarely make any recommendations to clients about what software to use because they don’t want to be liable for anything. 

However, Chief Legal Officers or General Counsels who work for companies about to go public might be interested in the software. 

As a salesperson, this discovery shows that you can’t always rely on referrals from every market segment you might touch. Without this information, a sales team’s outreach efforts would be fruitless. This knowledge allowed our client to utilize B2B buyer persona research to create extremely targeted outreach — maximizing the use of their sales and marketing team’s time. 

The key takeaway: You can’t always rely on existing clients to evangelize for you. Sometimes, you run into people who aren’t interested in your services whatsoever. But with buyer persona research, you’ll be able to maximize the value of your efforts and minimize wasted opportunities.

Buyer Personas Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Famous movie duos aren’t always in agreement throughout a movie. Take Maverick and Rooster, for example. Throughout the better part of the movie, Rooster resents Maverick after learning that Maverick pulled Rooster’s application to flight school, setting him back from his peers.

However, after Maverick gets shot down in an effort to distract the enemy jets, it’s none other than Rooster who risks his own life to save Maverick. The dynamic duo then steals an old enemy F-14 aircraft and barely makes it back to the base alive.

The beef between Maverick and Rooster created a riff across the entire team. This tension almost cost the entire flight crew their lives as they trained for the dangerous mission.

The same idea holds true for sales and marketing teams. When everyone is clear on what personas you’re going after you can provide unified sales and marketing content without confusion.

The key takeaway:  It’s frustrating for a buyer to get different messaging from sales and marketing teams. Being in alignment internally creates a better outcome for your buyers which is the ultimate goal. Aim for cohesion, not confusion.

Be the Hero Your Buyers Deserve

In Top Gun: Maverick, Hangman only gets 35 minutes of screen time. (In contrast, Maverick gets 113 minutes, and Rooster, 66 minutes.) Although Hangman is an integral part of the jet fighter squad at the beginning, he isn’t selected for the death-defying mission. However, just as Maverick and Rooster are about to be shot down, Hangman comes in and saves them in the most heroic way possible.

The moral here for B2B sales teams is clear. Even the characters with the least amount of screen time can make a big impact. It’s easy to focus on the stars and forget that other actors can help you achieve your goals. Like Frodo and Sam, or Maverick and Hangman, you need to understand all the key personas, not just the ones with the biggest titles or the most screen-time if you want to win the deal.

Finally, don’t ask your sales team to win a deal without giving them the knowledge of all the players that matter, especially those folks who seem to be merely a supporting actor at first glance. We can help you get that early first look at the script of the buyer’s journey so you’ll know before anyone else how the story turns out in the end.

 

With 15 years of experience in B2B tech market research, Cascade Insights understands the value in knowing your buyer personas. Learn more about our sales services here.


Special thanks to Sean Campbell, CEO, for advising on this piece.

Buyer Personas

Why B2B Organizations Need Buyer Personas

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Buyer personas are table takes for any B2B organization. These are the times when it is particularly crucial for an organization to procure buyer persona research.

Video Transcript

Today I want to talk to you a bit about why an organization embarks on buyer persona research, either for the first time or to update an existing set of buyer personas. And I would say if you break it down, there’s really two major reasons an organization embarks on this kind of initiative. The first is sales-focused.

It’s just simply harder to sell than it was in the past. So maybe that’s a difference between this quarter and a few quarters ago, or this year and a few years ago. But for whatever reason, it’s harder to sell and you’re not just getting the uptake that you would expect.

Another motivation to conduct buyer persona research is that your marketing isn’t doing as good a job driving leads as it should. So perhaps when prospects get further down the funnel and they interact with your sales team, things are fine. You’re able to convert those people into paying customers. But from a marketing standpoint, you’re not driving the kind of leads that you expected a few quarters ago or a few years ago, and both of these reasons can be very good reasons to consider buyer persona research.

Now, if we pull back a little bit and ask ourselves, what are some of the shifts that are causing these things to happen? Like what’s causing the kind of sales and marketing pain that leads an organization to embark on a buyer persona research effort? Well, there’s a few things. One is on the sales side. So you might have just had a leadership change or a change in tactics and strategies, and it’s just not working like you expected, but you don’t really know why.

A good example of this came across in one piece of research we did once. We had a client who decided to basically ship a bunch of born and raised US sales executives and managers and sales team members over to a particular European market to grow that market for this organization. And what we found is that the cultural mismatch was just so high that the sales team, in essence was getting in the way of closing new business. The product itself was actually pretty good, but customers said the sales team is just not behaving in a way we expect. They’re not following our cultural norms. They’re not engaging with us in the way we want. And so in the end, this organization had to make some very major shifts in the sales leadership in that country, and in the end were much more successful as a result. And all that came out of conducting the buyer persona research and really asking buyers what happens in the journey for you on your path to purchase? What kind of engagement do you want to have with vendors? What’s kind of appropriate for your region or your geography? All those kinds of things. And all of that led to really good conclusions for our client.

Another example of changes that can kind of drive this behavior is that perhaps your product and service mix has just gotten much broader. We see this happen all the time. For example, AWS versus GCP versus Azure. These are major cloud platforms that release a new service what seems like all the time. So if you look at the landscape of the services these organizations provide today, it’s much more vast than it was even just a few short years ago.

So clearly an organization that’s investigating these particular cloud platforms might have a different set of buyer personas that are engaged, you know, perhaps a few years ago, maybe a more lower level buyer was considering one of these platforms, but now it’s a much more strategic buyer. And so those kinds of shifts can happen all the time in tech in particular.

Another example is on the marketing side. Here you might have a scenario, as I alluded to earlier, where the organization just doesn’t have the right set of kind of tactics and strategies and content, and what they do have isn’t visible in the right places. And a buyer persona project can really help here because one of the things that happens in a buyer persona research effort is that you ask a lot of questions about how a particular individual makes decisions about the vendors or the products and services that they’re going to acquire and how they educate themselves on those offerings.

So you get a lot of good intelligence on things like the kinds of stuff they want to read and the kind of platforms they want to engage with to get that content and just even how they want it to be delivered. So that can really shape a set of marketing tactics and strategies very effectively.

Another good place where buyer persona research can come into play is when an organization has decided to shift into, let’s say, a different vertical. So maybe what they were selling before was pretty generalized to the market as a whole. But now they see a really big opportunity, perhaps in education or in healthcare, and they realize that the buying committee in that vertical won’t be that generalized.

It’ll be fairly specific to the vertical itself, and that vertical have its own needs and kind of sources of information and just even just kind of the buying decision may look a lot different in terms of the players that are involved and buyer persona research by digging. And looking at not just key stakeholders, but influencers in the buying committee can help that organization have a much better idea of how to craft sales strategies and marketing strategies and tactics and all those kinds of things.

So that’s just a few of the things that might drive a buyer persona research initiative, but another one. Is competitor activity because frankly, in general, competitors don’t stand still. So they may be producing better content than you. They might be producing better marketing strategies than you, or marketing campaigns.

They may have also structured their sales efforts in a way that they’re a lot more engaging. And obviously there’s a few different ways you could get resolution on a scenario like that. But while you’re conducting buyer persona research, you can. How the people you’re talking to engage with competing organizations or what do they think about the content competing organizations provide, or even the marketing strategies and tactics that these organizations seem to pursue?

And how that represents to that particular buyer. So competitors are also a big influence. And finally, there can just be kind of broad market shifts that mean it’s really time to update your buyer persona. For example, for a number of years now in the technology industry, it’s been known that the IT shop – or the director of IT, or the IT manager doesn’t really hold all the cards when it comes to like what an organization is going to buy or invest in when it comes to software or even sometimes hardware.

Line of business managers have a pretty large influence these days on these purchases. So an organization that was used to selling to that IT director, well now they’re going have to really think about the buyer personas they need to investigate as they step into these line of parts of the organization and maybe now have to sell to the CMO or the CFO or the chief operations officer or the folks that report to these individuals.

And so those kind of broader market shifts can also drive the need for an investment in buyer persona research. In some, you don’t want to fly with a lack of visibility if you feel that your buyer personas have grown stale. It’s a very straightforward project to. It tends to focus on qualitative research more than quantitative and leads to all kinds of great discovery along the way.

So if you have any questions about buyer persona research in general, you can always feel free to reach out to me directly and or to Cascade Insights at www.cascadeinsights.com.

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3 Types of Market Research to Benefit Healthcare Cybersecurity Startups

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It’s no secret that the tech industry has been experiencing some unsettling circumstances recently. Nearly every week, another major tech company announces more hiring freezes or layoffs.

While much of the tech space is entrenched in uncertainty, there are certain segments within it that remain resilient. One such area is healthcare cybersecurity – one of the fastest growing among venture capitalists right now. In fact, the healthcare cybersecurity market is expected to reach $35B+ by 2027, more than triple its size in 2020.

During such a rapid growth period, companies run the risk of making the wrong decisions and quickly squandering any potential success. Conversely, making the right business decisions during this time can help a company to expand and scale sustainably.

B2B market research is a key component to helping a rapidly-expanding healthcare cybersecurity startup grow in the right direction. Here’s how market research – particularly buyer personas, brand research, and competitive landscape analyses – can all be instrumental in setting a new company up for success.
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B2B Buyer Persona Research: Truth Over Templates

B2B Buyer Persona Research: Truth Over Templates

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The power of a strong B2B buyer persona is undeniable. In the past, creating them brought a competitive advantage for companies that used them. Today, it’s more than just a benefit; it’s a necessity. However, if your personas are so generic that you can’t effectively reach your target audiences, you might want to think about basing those personas on a firmer foundation of truth.

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Is Your Buyer Persona Research Written So You Can Actually Use It?

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Buyer persona research should always yield highly useful information for companies. It allows marketers to understand exactly how certain buyer personas make complex buying decisions. With such valuable research in hand, marketers can then go on to create effective messaging that resonates with prospective buyers on a deep level.

To be able to unlock the powerful benefits of buyer persona research, however, marketers first need to ensure that it’s written in a way that their companies can actually use.

Buyer persona research should not be presented as a template that has been filled in with demographic and psychological details. Instead, it should dig deep into buyers’ key motivators, pain points, jobs-to-be-done, the decision making chain, and more. Those are the types of critical insights that companies need to win business.
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5 Risks of Conducting Your Own B2B Buyer Persona Research

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Imagine your company is about to launch a new product. As a B2B marketer, it’s your job to lead the charge on developing buyer personas. You need to gain insights into the people who will be buying your company’s new product.

To begin your research, you scroll through Google and see dozens of guides with instructions on creating your own buyer personas. There are templates you can fill out. They have checklists you can follow. There are sample interview questions for you to ask your current customers.

Initially, this may seem promising. However, given the importance of getting this research right—and the level of risks that are involved—DIY buyer persona research can be added to a growing list of things that are better left for the professionals.

Other projects like updating your kitchen, changing out your snow tires, or cutting your own hair may all seem like things you could potentially handle on your own. However, unexpected setbacks are bound to pop up along the way. These setbacks threaten to leave you with results that range from lackluster (at best) to catastrophic (at worst).

Similarly, marketers who attempt to take on a buyer persona research project on their own can expect to face setbacks that result in a reduced quality of output. These issues can lead to generic, run-of-the-mill, and sometimes even inaccurate information for companies.
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Buyer Personas

Mistakes B2B Marketers Make Without Buyer Personas

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Buyer personas are the multi-vitamin of market research efforts. Without them, companies grow weak sales and marketing efforts. With buyer personas in hand, companies can confidently take on new markets, new buyer types, and new opportunities with ease.

Yet this truth is sometimes ignored by marketers who are taking over a new position. Whether it’s a newly promoted marketer or a marketer at a new company, we’ve traditionally seen these people focusing on brand studies first vs. buyer persona efforts.

We think this is a mistake. While brand research is important, of course, it can sometimes be nothing more than a sugary snack that supports rebranding efforts, especially when compared to the multi-vitamin of buyer personas.

Is choosing a new website palette, a new logo, a new company name, or the design for a new website fun? Yes. However, we suggest marketers not take this step until they understand a fundamental question first: Am I saying the right things to the right people? That is a question that buyer personas are well suited to address.
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