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Creating The Category - An Interview With Matt Ipri

Creating The Category – An Interview With Matt Ipri

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Mid-market marketing is no easy task. Especially if your product is the first of its kind.

However, a savvy marketer knows how to effectively market a product in a new category. Matt Ipri is an expert in doing just this.

As the vice president of marketing and business development at Decision Lens, Matt brings a lot of first-hand experience to the table. In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell chats with Matt about strategic mid-market marketing.

Creating The Category - An Interview With Matt Ipri

Become a Master of Mid-Market Marketing.

Listen To Learn How To:

  • Target multiple industries with your website.
  • Maximize the effectiveness of your current content.
  • Build separate strategies for market awareness and product awareness.
  • Work well with the analyst community.
  • Handle competing with your customer.
  • Reap the benefits of creating a new category.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Stitcher. Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

 

B2B Products

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

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After hundreds of market research projects for B2B tech companies, we know the warning signs that a product will fail.

Before your next B2B product launch, make sure you aren’t experiencing any of the following symptoms.

1. You’re challenging the incumbent without a superior product.

To beat the incumbent, the new product needs to be at least twice as good. Even then, customers may be reluctant to move away from the familiar.

Your new product can’t just be a little bit better than the incumbent. It needs to be a lot better. Feature and price parity alone won’t cut it.

Toppling the incumbent is no easy task. Why do we all still use PowerPoint? Why has no other business networking site come close to taking LinkedIn’s place? Do you honestly expect a serious rival to Amazon’s e-commerce in the near future?

If taking on an established incumbent, product managers must build a product that is so good it can’t be ignored.

2. There are no distinguishing features.

Successful products have something that sets them apart.

Customers need a reason to pick your product from the sea of competing solutions. They shouldn’t all look the same.

Think of how many marketing solutions are out there. B2B marketers have to choose from hundreds of SEO tools, social media trackers, and newsletter platforms. Not to mention analytics.

A new marketing product really needs to stand out from the crowd. And it’s a big, big crowd.

It’s very important to understand your target customers’ “jobs to be done.” What will your customers use your product for? Do other solutions get the job done? Does your solution do it better? If not, hold off on that product launch.

Know the “jobs to be done” your solution aims to solve before you build your go-to-market strategy.

3. The product is hard to use. 

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

To be blunt, B2B software companies are infamous for releasing unusable products. It’s sad, but true.

For example, a well-known Fortune 500 client of ours was hoping to tackle a new market. However, their product required significant time to learn, whereas competitors were turnkey. When interviewing our client’s customers and our client’s rival’s customers, we quickly learned that ease-of-use was causing most buyers to go with the competitor.

Product managers, don’t forget that intuitive use beats complexity any day.

4. First-time-users are intimidated. 

Many larger companies with an established product and user-base fail to consider first-time-use.

Customers who have been around for decades have benefited from experiencing incremental improvement in the product over a period of years. A new customer experiences all the product’s capabilities at once.

In this scenario, you’ll probably get the confusing feedback that established customers love the complexity, but new customers complain that it’s too difficult to use.

This is a huge red flag. It’s a red banner. A red tapestry. It’s practically guaranteed that a startup is getting ready to disrupt you.

Competitors will notice this dissonance. They’ll build a solution that is simple, tuned to meet a few key business needs, and is relatively cheap compared to you.

If you’re in this situation, it’s time to spend that research budget. Interview customers who’ve chosen one of the upstarts. Don’t dismiss startups for being small. They may be providing a more usable solution than you are.

5. The partners aren’t helping. Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Sometimes, the partners matter just as much as the product.

For instance, one of our Fortune 500 clients had a wonderful software product. But their partners couldn’t be trusted to assist customers in deploying it in mission-critical environments. The competition, on the other hand, had a slightly inferior solution but a partner network that was top-notch. Guess which product won? The inferior one.

Don’t underestimate the importance of partners.

Make sure you’re including questions about partner relationships in your market research studies on customers and competitors’ customers.

6. The product aims to do a job that companies can easily do themselves.

Each month, we interview hundreds of people who use technology to solve business problems.

We’re constantly amazed by what a company can do with Excel, people power, and a bit of duct tape. It’s just amazing what developers can do with free, open source tools.

This ingenuity often removes the need for a commercial software solution. It’s very important for product leaders to understand this.

Is your product trying to do what your customers can already do themselves? If so, you’re competing against your own customers. Obviously, you don’t want to do that.

Before you build that product, make sure you understand your target customer base through in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and onsite visits.

7. The product is superfluous.

Don’t exceed the needs of the market.

We see this all the time with tech companies. Our clients are often so innovative that they’re ahead of the market. Way ahead.

This sounds positive, but it’s not necessarily. The product may be awesome, but if there isn’t a real-world use-case for it, B2B customers aren’t going to buy it.

Cool does not necessarily lead to profits. It needs to be practical too.

If you’re constantly giving demos but rarely getting a sale, it’s time to reconsider usability and how customers will use the product in the real world.

8. You’re targeting an extinct buyer persona. Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Buyer personas need updating. This is very important. If your buyer personas haven’t been refreshed in years, you may be building a go-to-market strategy or designing a product launch to target a persona that no longer exists.

There has been so much ink spilled about how tech companies are selling to business decision-makers, how CIOs should think more like business leaders, and the plethora of SaaS solutions being bought directly by business groups within companies.

It’s obvious that IT roles have taken a backseat in B2B purchase decisions.

We find it a little surprising how frequently we have to educate product managers on this fact. An IT leader was a central buyer persona a decade ago. In 2017, the buyer persona that product managers most need to focus on is the business leader.

If you think you’re at a risk of selling to the last decade’s buyer persona, it’s easy to figure out via win/loss research or key buying criteria studies.

The Cure

These blunders are all too common in B2B product management. Luckily, market research can help you avoid these red flags and build products that your customers will love to use in the real world.


This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Have a business problem you need market research to slay? Give us a call at 503-898-0004.

 

an open letter to b2b sales leaders

An Open Letter To B2B Sales Leaders

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Are you losing deals because of your sales team’s actions?

After more than a thousand market research interviews in the B2B tech field, we’ve collected some of the most common mistakes that sales reps make. These insights have been gathered from hundreds of interviews with B2B tech decision-makers, product evaluators, customers, and partners.

Here’s how to recognize and avoid these common sales blunders.

Listen to the B2B Revealed Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Overcast, and SoundCloud

1. Not getting up to speed. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

No prep, no win.

At least half of the lost deals we investigate are due to sales teams demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the buyer.

B2B customers need to know that the company they’re buying from understands their industry. Sales reps need to show either first-hand experience or extensive book knowledge of the customer’s industry.

Actually, B2B sales reps should be so knowledgeable that they could easily skip the first few days of training if the customer were to hire them tomorrow.

Sales reps should also be able to speak their customers’ industry jargon fluently. Sure, it’s okay to ask what an acronym means but no more than once or twice in a sales meeting. More than that and customers will be seeing red flags.

2. Oblivious to why the customer is looking to buy. 

Importantly, B2B sales reps need to know what jobs buyers need a solution to solve.

We often see sales reps who can sing the virtues of their product but have no idea what job customers will use it for. Not good.

B2B sales reps need to be able to explain how their product can satisfy customers’ “jobs to be done.”

3. Over-reliance on the pitch deck.

Real-world sales conversations don’t fit neatly into a PowerPoint or script. B2B salespeople should be confident enough in their knowledge not to panic if the dialogue deviates from the pitch deck.

Great B2B sales reps are always ready to dive right into the demo. We’ve literally never heard a complaint that a vendor gave a proof-of-concept or demo too early on.

Quite the reverse, actually. We often hear grumbles that sales reps spend way too much time on the slide deck before getting to the good part.

Though some customers may enjoy the PowerPoint view of a product, others consider it as a waste of time. Adjust accordingly.

Always assume that the competition is proving their product’s worth in an attention-grabbing, mind-blowing demo. If that’s the case, how much time do you want your sales team to spend droning on about the product before showing off what it can do?

4. Not knowing the buyer personas. An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

Far too often, we suspect that B2B buyer personas never get shared beyond the marketing team.

Trust us, the rest of the company needs to know those buyer personas too. Especially sales.

So many sales teams go-to-market with one pitch targeted at a single buyer persona.  This automatically eliminates all other potential customers. It’s not wise to have such a limited sales approach.

B2B sales reps need to know whether they’re talking to the CFO or IT admin and tailor their message accordingly. Obviously, these two personas care about different things. Don’t get into the weeds with an executive but dismiss the IT admin’s questions around configuration by flashing screenshots of dashboard reports at them. Instead, a successful pitch would carefully address both persona’s concerns.

Speak to all the buyer personas in the meeting.

5. Forgetting to talk about ease-of-use. 

It’s fair to assume that all potential customers care about how easy the product is to use.

Usability concerns are often responsible for lost deals. Two especially common culprits are:

  • Fear that the product is too complex to implement.
  • Worry that user adoption will be low without significant training.

Ease-of-use should receive a lot of attention in your sales team’s pitch decks and demos.

6. Lack of transparency on total-cost-of-ownership.

It may be tempting to “estimate” a lower price for your customers than is realistic by neglecting to factor in related costs.

Don’t do it, though. It will destroy any chance of brand loyalty. Omitting related costs from the estimate may win today’s sale, but it will kill tomorrow’s.

B2B sales reps should:

  • Be upfront about professional service fees.
  • Give a realistic estimate of the implementation timeline.
  • Explain any additional infrastructure customers will have to purchase.

Failing to mention these costs may just create a new customer for the competitor.

Be honest and direct to keep the customer coming back.

7. Not sending enough sales reps.

Say a customer arranges a half-day demo with an account rep. They ask three of their colleagues to clear their schedules to attend. Then a single sales rep shows up and is unable to answer anything beyond the most basic questions. From the client’s perspective, this is a huge waste of time.

To sell to important stakeholders such as senior IT managers and business leaders, sales reps need to be capable of thoroughly answering each of their questions.

However, it’s unusual for a single sales rep to have enough knowledge and context to do this well all on their own. That’s why it’s smart to bring a team.

The sales entourage should include:

  • A strong account rep who understands the buyers’ needs and how the product can address them.
  • An expert in industry context and jargon.
  • A solutions architect who can demonstrate how the product will be used in a real-world environment.

8. Being slow to respond. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

Obviously, being responsive to leads is extremely important.

Unfortunately, sales teams don’t always know about the lead right away. Large companies especially struggle with this problem.

In many cases, it’s far too difficult for potential customers to interact with B2B tech sales teams.

Sure, the website probably has a “contact us” form but potential customers have no way of knowing who is on the receiving end of that form.

Same issue with the phone. There’s no telling who will pick up that general number listed on the website.

With no clear and easy route to a sales rep, potential customers may leave in search of a more accessible vendor.

Further, even if customers make the effort to leave their email or phone number, large companies often take way too long to get back to them.

This state of affairs puts upstarts at an advantage.

Big tech companies may have larger sales forces than startups, but startups sales reps are often way closer to their companies’ contact us forms, emails, and phone numbers.

In our win-loss studies, we’ve found that upstarts typically get back to potential customers within a day. Whereas large companies may take a week or more to respond.

It’s not hard to guess who will win the deal: the company that responds within hours or the company that responds in a week.

How To Do Better

These B2B sales mistakes may be upsettingly common, but they are also easily avoided.

Market research can help you figure whether one of these common pitfalls is tripping up your sales team and how to adjust to win more deals.


This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Special thanks to Senior Research Analyst Colleen Clancy for contributing to this piece.

 

 

 

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

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The tech industry is all about market segmentation. Unfortunately, this tendency often leads tech companies to miss a key measurement of success: whether the solution is actually accomplishing the tasks it is being used for.

Do you know what jobs customers are using your product or service for? One would hope. Surprisingly, many companies don’t.

This article is based off a B2B Revealed episode.

You can listen to the episode or read the article below.

B2B Revealed – ON: iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play

The tech industry spends a lot of effort figuring out the types of customers it has. Tech leaders obsess over how many customers are in the education sector, how many are in large or small businesses, how many have a hundred or more licenses, etc. Still, many companies have a gaping hole in their knowledge.  They don’t know the specific jobs customers are using the product or service for.

That’s a huge problem. Thankfully, Clayton Christensen‘s latest book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” gives hope. It spells out how understanding “jobs to be done” will keep products and services relevant. The theory also explains how to spot an area ripe for disruption.

It’s extremely important for corporate researchers to understand “jobs to be done” in order to conduct effective studies.

Insufficient Innovation Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Early in the book, Christensen establishes that innovation today is troubled.  He writes,

“In a recent McKinsey poll, 84 percent of global executives acknowledged that innovation is extremely important to their growth strategies, yet a staggering 94 percent were unsatisfied with their own innovation performance.”

Christensen connects his latest book with his famous work on  Disruptive Innovation Theory. (For more info, check out “The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business.”)

He states,

“Despite the success and enduring utility of disruption as a model of competitive response, it does not tell you where to look for new opportunities.”

Disruptive innovation theory helps to illuminate companies ripe for disruption within an industry. However, Christensen admits that it doesn’t show how to find opportunities. “Competing Against Luck” does.

Does It Get The Job Done?Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Jobs theory drives at the reasons for purchasing and using a product or service. It can be used to figure out why customers chose to:

  • Purchase a solution.
  • Go with a different solution.
  • Stay with the status quo and purchase no new solutions.
  • Continue to use a solution.
  • Stop using a solution.
  • Switch to another solution.

Christensen explains,

“We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.”

It’s important to figure out what job your product or service is being used to accomplish. You also need to know whether your solution:

  • Makes the job easier.
  • Is the best solution for the job.
  • Justifies a purchase rather than doing nothing.

Got Data? The Right Data?

The core fallacies that prevent companies from understanding what is going on around them is a must-read section of “Competing Against Luck.”

“The Fallacy of Active Data Versus Passive Data” is a big one. Christensen writes,

“Instead of staying cognizant of and focused on the type of data that characterizes the rich complexity of the job (passive data), growing companies start to generate operations-related data (active data), which can seduce managers with its apparent objectivity and rigor but which tends to organize itself around products and customer characteristics, rather than Jobs to Be Done.”

I’ve seen this many times with our own client base. As a company grows, it becomes blinded by its data. Company leadership thinks current metrics of success are more important than continually revisiting the original assumptions that launched the company in the first place. The success of current endeavors is measured and over-measured while the validity of the company’s purpose remains assumed and unchecked.

Collecting market segmentation data on your customer base is great. You can’t stop there, though. It’s not enough. Gathering data on “jobs to be done” is just as important.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation DataChange Is Expensive

When analyzing jobs, it’s critical to take switching costs into account.

You’ll have to look further than the mere cost of the new solution. Think of it like the cost of moving to a new house. What you end up paying isn’t just the price of your new home, but also the cost of the moving company, the technicians to install various appliances, painters, etc.

This is a frequent area of study for us. We often must ask, “What did you remove to make room for the new product or service? What will have to be integrated with the new solution?”

Typically, new products and services have to be integrated with the company’s existing systems via APIs or other means.

Integration can take months or even years to finalize. Since a long time span must be factored into integration, many potential customers may have only an estimate of what it would cost to switch to a new solution.

Post-Purchase Questions Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Christensen also has a great section about what he calls the “Big Hire” and the “Little Hire.” The big hire is when the money is laid down and the purchase is made. The little hire happens again and again as the individual or business puts the product to use over time.

In our studies, we ask, “Which features were considered a key reason for purchase? Are you still using them?”

This line of inquiry is designed to surface the “little hires” of the product. After the customer has been using the product for a while, did the justification for the big hire diminish? Perhaps features that sold the customer on the purchase did not live up to expectations.

Another great question to ask is, “What features are you using more than expected?” This is another “little hire” question. The answer may surprise you. Perhaps a lesser known feature is driving strong customer loyalty.

The Jobs That Aren’t Getting Done

Christensen’s discussion of non-consumption is vital.

He says,

“You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead.”

One of the best market research questions is, “Are all current solutions in the marketplace lacking certain capabilities?”  If the answer is “yes,” the stage is set for a disruption. Someone is going to realize that there is a job that is not being satisfied.

Disruption Red Flags Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

There are many ways to complete a job. Many companies make the mistake of assuming that solutions capable of completing the task will be similar. They’re not always.

Tech companies are often challenged by this. They invent the class of products and then struggle to imagine any other class of products that could meet the same need.

The battle between Yahoo and Google is a perfect example. Yahoo basically invented internet portals, but they took a card-catalog style approach to indexing the internet. Google built a powerful search engine based on the actual structure of the internet. It was much more efficient than Yahoo’s approach. This was one of the key drivers of Google’s triumph over Yahoo. Eventually, Google will be bested by someone who looks at the problem of surfacing information on the internet and finds a completely different way to do it. It’ll probably come from “a different class,” of solutions as Christensen would say.

I’ll give another tech example of this form of disruption. Going as far back as IT departments have existed, there has been a job called “create a server.” For the longest time, the fastest way to create a server was to buy one. Then you had to install an operating system on it, get a management agent, and work with the physical server over a number of years because changing and learning a new one would be an expensive hassle. Then, bam! Along comes VMware. With their virtualization stack, VMware had a whole new way of creating a server quickly. Then VMware got disrupted by players like Amazon Web Services, which had another way of creating a server quickly.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation DataYour Solution Was Hired To Do a Job. Is It Doing It Well?

A purchase doesn’t guarantee that the customer is satisfied. Understanding whether your product or service is helping customers to accomplish specific jobs is critical to gauging success.

Market segmentation data is not enough. Post-purchase qualitative research is just as important.

Christensen explains,

“What job did you hire that product to do? The good news is that if you build your foundation on the pursuit of understanding your customers’ jobs, your strategy will no longer need to rely on luck. In fact, you’ll be competing against luck when others are still counting on it.”

“Jobs to be done” theory breaks us free from an almost obsessive focus on market segmentation across the corporate research industry. Instead of getting caught in the cycle of gathering endless data on “who,” we can also approach the more interesting question of “why.”

Christenson takes us back to a fundamental truth: all products and services are hired to do a job. Figure out what that job is. Do it better than anyone else. Watch your success reach new heights. You won’t need to rely on luck.

I highly recommend that market research professionals and company leaders of all kinds read “Competing Against Luck.”

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.

 

 

Key Buying Criteria: The Path to ‘Yes’

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Key Buying Criteria: The Path to ‘Yes’

This article is based on an episode of B2B Revealed. The audio version is available here.

Understanding customers’ key buying criteria is vital to having a competitive edge. To give the people what they want, you have to know what they want.

As much as we’d like people and companies to know exactly what they want and how to articulate it clearly, that just isn’t often the case.

When figuring out what motivates B2B companies to purchase a product or solution, you’re going to have to do some digging. In-depth interviews (IDIs) with competitor customers and the customers you wish you had can uncover a treasure trove of information.

Here are a few questions to ask competitor customers and aspirational customers to help you uncover B2B companies’ key buying criteria. You can then exploit that knowledge in your sales and marketing efforts.

Why is the company searching for a replacement solution?

It’s good to start with the organizational or business need that caused the search for a replacement solution in the first place.

The solution isn’t needed to solve a problem that appeared out of thin air. If companies are looking for a new solution, they have realized that there may be an opportunity to do an old job more efficiently.

Look at the way the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaking up industries. Say you own a fleet of vehicles. With the IoT in play, you’re probably thinking very differently about how to instrument, track performance and price those vehicles than you would have 10 years ago.

Did the company consider DIY? Why are they looking to buy?

It’s also important to consider whether the company could perform the job themselves. Why did the company decide it was better to purchase an outside solution?

No outside solution can truly fit the needs of a company better than the company could itself. However, many companies don’t have the resources for such a DIY approach.  Before investing a lot in chasing after a potential customer, make sure they don’t have the internal capabilities or organizational structure to develop their own solution.

If they don’t have the internal capabilities or organizational structure, make sure to highlight how your solution solves problems without requiring them to meet those needs.

What functionality is lacking in the company’s current solution?

Nothing is perfect. With any business solution, the company has to compromise. Maybe the features were great but the price is a little steep. Maybe one important integration is awesome and another only so-so.

You should find out what compromises the customer made to go with their current solution.

If your solution is of similar quality but wouldn’t force the same compromise, you have yourself a market opportunity. You may need to make some adjustments to meet that opportunity, either in product development or in what is being amplified in your sales and marketing efforts.

Which features tipped the scales?

Next, ask which features were considered the main reasons for making the purchase.

Do you have these features? If not, they should be on your roadmap.

Is the company still using the features that drove the sale?

Maybe a competitor’s sales team got the company excited about features that weren’t actually that great when put to real world use.

This is particularly true in the software industry, where the term vaporware was invented.

In-depth interviews with competitor customers can bring a wealth of information. Targeting these folks can reveal the features that remain beloved and in use.

Which features are companies using more than expected?

Competitors tend to talk up the features they think are the most important in their marketing efforts.

However, their customers may value some of the features that get far less airtime.

Again, in-depth interviews with employees of companies that have been using the solution for months or years can reveal important features that aren’t as visible when examining the companies’ marketing materials.

Is this solution one of many bought from the same vendor?

Another area to probe is whether this product was actually the second, third, fourth, fifth product that was bought from a given vendor.

When a customer opts for the competitor, you want to know whether you’ve lost to a product or a platform. Does this customer prefer to buy individual products that are best-of-breed? Or would they prefer a platform from a single vendor?

Microsoft, Oracle, and a lot of long-standing tech companies have leveraged the platform model for quite some time. Now newer companies like Amazon and Google are essentially doing the same thing with their various cloud offerings.

Many customers prefer a platform instead of a collection of point solutions. This preference needs to be factored in when considering key buying criteria.

How much did price drive the sale?

You want to figure out if the customer was willing to pay a premium and if it was a factor in their key buying criteria. Was low cost the primary concern? Or was money no object?

You also want to identify which features they were willing to pay a premium for and which features were merely table stakes.

Does the company prefer a subscription or perpetual pricing model?

In the technology sector, many products are turning into services. Customers are getting increasingly used to the idea of a subscription or rental model as opposed to some kind of perpetual license or upfront costs.

In-depth interviews with competitor customers may tell you that even though you have comparable features and greater capabilities, customers would rather rent a solution than buy it outright.

In other words, your pricing model (and not your price) could be losing you deals.

Key Buying Criteria over Features

Many organizations focus on producing all the features customers might need.  Others focus on matching every competitor in the market, feature by feature.

Neither approach is the right one.

The focus needs to be on buying criteria.  That way you know what features to build today, which ones to never build, and which ones you can plan to build at some point in the future. That’s the way to win in B2B.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.

Image used courtesy of Maxsim/Fotolia.

Find Your Competitor’s Achilles’ Heel: Post-Sale Questions for Customers

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Competitors’ customers are treasure troves of insight. Not only can they tell you how satisfied they are with the competitor’s product or service, they can also clue you in as to why they picked the competitor in the first place.

In other words, you may learn why you missed out and how you can have the winning solution the next time around. Here are a few good questions to ask customers who have been using the competitor’s products for a period of time.

Episode 122: Post-Sale Questions for Competitor CustomersThis article is based on a “B2B Market Research” podcast episode. If you would rather listen to the podcast episode. You can do so below.

How often was the user or organization engaged with after initial sign-up?

The answer to this question shows you whether or not the competing company was high-touch. It can also show you whether the customer felt they were engaged with as much as they would have expected.

Was the transition from sales to implementation smooth?

Some of your competitors are going to be very good at selling and not so good at implementing. This is a potential win-back opportunity for your firm.

Did the implementation go well?

What were the pain points? What went smoother than expected? Again, this can highlight whether your competition is good at selling but not so good at implementing.

Now that the product has been in use for some time, which features are being used more than expected and which are being used less than expected?

The features the customer is enamored with may not be the ones that you expect.

qa

Dig into this question to figure out which features drove customer engagement and which features have grabbed and held the customer’s attention after deployment.

Did third parties influence the customer’s decision to go with the competitor?

Were there partners involved while the application or the service was being deployed and integrations between the new product or service and existing solutions were being established?

How fundamental were those partners to the success of the deployment of your competitor’s product?

How was education handled for the product or service?

Buying is one thing, but having a product or service that you can learn well enough to actually use in a real-world setting is another.

How much support did the competitor offer?

What type of support did the competitor provide? Was it predominantly focused on community support or were paid support vehicles available? This can help you decide what types of support assets you need to invest in.

Which type of support did the customer utilize the most?

Which type of support did the customer find the most useful? You may realize you should consider webinars, “how-to” style content, reference architecture guides, or something completely different.

Was the customer satisfied with the mechanism of payment?

Did the customer feel that they were paying for the product in the way they wanted to? Were they forced to sign a yearly agreement when they would have preferred a monthly agreement? Were there certain tiers of pricing that they didn’t necessarily agree with? Were there areas in which they wished there were more options available?

Did the actual cost of the solution measure up with expectations?

Ask whether the solution began to cost the organization more and more over time. This could happen due to increasing support costs, challenges with integrating the new purchase with existing systems, or even the cost of educating users on how to use the new product or service effectively.

Does the customer foresee a time where they will outgrow the solution now that they’ve had it in production?

What could cause the company to outgrow the solution? The answer to this question could help you predict a win-back opportunity. Even if you have lost that company as a potential customer for the time being, you might have the opportunity to win them back months or years down the road. Factors such as vertical, company size, number of users, etc. could be indicators that it’s time to get your customer back.

Find The Competitor’s Achilles’ Heel

All of these questions are designed to bring insight to:

  • How the customer came to the competitor.
  • How satisfied they are with the competitor’s solution.
  • Whether and when they may be looking elsewhere.

Obviously, having that sort of knowledge of your competitor will give you an edge.

Any one of these questions are guaranteed to generate insight in your next research study. Go out and ask them.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Check out our podcast for more episodes and articles on B2B Market Research method.

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How To Make Praiseworthy B2B Buyer Persona

How to Make Praiseworthy B2B Buyer Personas

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Episode 120: How to Make Praiseworthy B2B Buyer Personas

What are the questions that B2B buyer personas need to answer?

How do you make a B2B Buyer Persona that’s going to generate real praise from colleagues and stakeholders?

What makes B2B buyer personas different than their B2C counterparts?

That’s the focus of this article and the related B2B Market Research podcast episode.  If you prefer to listen to that episode you can do so above.

Are you Keeping your Personas in a Drawer?

Recently I came across an article from the Content Marketing Institute that talked about why B2B marketers sometimes keep their buyer personas locked in a closet. The reason for that, they said, is that the personas tend to focus so much on a consumer oriented view of the buyer that they’re not particularly relevant in a B2B context.

B2B Buyer Personas Are Different

By its very definition, a B2B buyer persona is going to be pretty different from a B2C one. It doesn’t matter what kind of ice cream they like or what car they drive. What matters more in B2B is that you’ve really cracked the code on how they buy.

You also have to realize that in B2B, it’s probably not a buying committee of 1. More likely, you have to understand the 8, 10 or more people that have a role in the buying process.

That’s why we think building buyer personas requires two crucial steps: you have to ask the right questions and you have to ask them of the right people.

This is one of the reasons that we built our own in-house recruiting capability for the buyer persona work we do.

Why in house?

Because the person doing the recruiting has to have the expertise to know whether or not they’re talking to someone who can give meaningful answers about the buyer’s journey.

How To Make Praiseworthy B2B Buyer Persona

So, with that background, what are some of the areas you need to focus on when developing B2B Buyer Personas?

Business Challenges and “Jobs to be Done”

First, it’s important to learn which business challenges the buyers believe are the most unique to their industry. These challenges are a goldmine. They will help you tailor your product. They will help you tailor your marketing. They will help you tailor your sales efforts.

You also want to find out which business challenges they think are the most daunting.  This is different from what business problems they think are the most unique and it’s really key to separate the two.

Many business professionals can wax poetic for an extended period of time about how unique their industry is, particularly if they’re passionate about it. But what you really want to get at are the business problems that they find the hardest to solve.

One way to identify these problems is to ask what jobs need to be done. It’s good to ask this question whether you’re talking to C-levels or more junior employees. You should follow up by asking which of these jobs could be solved by existing products or services.

Obviously, it’s better to be in the category of solutions where the customer doesn’t have a lot of potential options for getting the job done. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t be successful where there’s already a plethora of solutions. Your road is just going to be a little harder.

Vertical Alignment and Success Factors

Next, you should find out whether the product or service you’re offering would be used differently in the particular industry you’re targeting for your buyer interviews. For example, your product might be used slightly differently in healthcare than it would in education, even though it has a similar use case overall. This may lead you to realize that you’re going to have to tailor your product to individual industries and their needs.

What metrics would they use to prove to the other stakeholders that this was a good purchase?

Then ask how would these buyers measure a successful product deployment or launch inside their organization. What metrics would they use to prove to the other stakeholders that this was a good purchase?

Self-Education and Influencers

Another key area to probe is how these buyers self-educate.

For example, if they were to search for your product or solution on the Internet, what would they search for? You might find them stating certain questions or problems they have and this will lead you to long tail keywords that you can focus on in your SEO work and marketing efforts.

Then you want to ask, who outside the organization influences them in terms of the products or solutions they want?

You want to steer clear of more general business influencers here. Instead, you want to focus on the individual or groups of individuals that influence them when it comes time to purchase a solution for a particular type of product or service. You might look for niche bloggers, social media influencers, or even conference speakers who deliver sessions at industry specific conferences.

Who Gets on the Short List?

…you want to dig into how folks generate an initial list of potential vendors.

Then you want to dig into how folks generate an initial list of potential vendors. How do they go about the process of generating that short list? That might be a mixture of referral and outside resources, but you want to make sure you fully understand how vendors arrive on that short list.

Then you want to dig a little deeper into the kinds of online assets they use to educate themselves on potential vendors that might make it to the short list. Are there specific blogs, specific types of social media, specific publications? In other words, what channels do they like to hang out in? You want to look at this in terms of both online and offline activities. What communities do they belong to, what associations are they in, what conferences do they attend, what groups are they engaged with?

Climb the Decision Tree

For most B2B purchases, there’s a pretty extensive decision tree. Depending on which study you read, you might hear that there are eight stakeholders in a purchase, or 12, or 10, or six. The point is: there’s certainly more than one. In short, impulse buys don’t tend to happen for complex B2B purchases.

With so much money and so many people involved, you’re going to need to understand the decision tree. You want to know all the stakeholders who are going to get involved.

With so much money and so many people involved, you’re going to need to understand the decision tree. You want to know all the stakeholders who are going to get involved.

You also want to figure out who is the most influential.  You don’t want to get the entire laundry list of potential influencers. You just want the most influential ones because you’re only going to be able to focus your sales and marketing efforts on a limited set of individual titles and personas.

For technical products you also want to ask, how does the IT or the technical side of the house, interact with the line-of-business side? It’s important to figure this out so that you don’t fall afoul of one team or the other when you’re trying to sell your product.

Purchase Flow

You also need to dig into the mechanics of the purchasing process. That alone can torpedo your offering before you’ve even got it to the right people.

How are solutions purchased by the decision makers, influencers, end-users inside the target organizations that you want to go after? Also, is there a standardized decision making process that must be followed for purchases or are they done on a case-by-case basis?

What typically prevents your target customer from engaging with vendors, even if they like what the vendor is offering? The answer to this question can lead to meaningful insights. You may learn, for example, that you need to spend more time with the purchasing committee in the organizations that you target and develop a buyer persona for the committee just as you would for your target customer.

Then, who actually pays for the application? This, in tech, can be difficult to answer because customers often move from freemium usage to paid usage to increased levels of usage. Hence, in the beginning, end-users, influencers or mid-level managers might have bought a product. However, the application or usage pattern may eventually grow to the point that senior decision makers have to get involved to negotiate a larger contract. In other words, who is actually paying can change over time.

How do they Want to Buy?

Finally, you want to look at how the buyers actually want to buy.

Walk them through their overall journey as a buyer from the very, very beginning. You’ll see pretty clearly where they spent the bulk of their time and where they spent less time.

…don’t forget to ask them what vendor personas they want to work with.

Also, don’t forget to ask them what vendor personas they want to work with. It isn’t just a buyer persona game in B2B, it’s a vendor persona game as well, because teams of sellers engage with teams of buyers.

And with that I want to wrap up this podcast episode.  Don’t forget to visit us at www.cascadeinsights.com

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. 

Check out our podcast for more B2B Market Research episodes and articles.

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Make Your B2B Buyer Personas Rock: Tips from Adele Revella

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Make Your B2B Buyer Personas Rock: Tips from Adele Revella

Listen below:

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Top-notch B2B Market Researchers know that Buyer Personas are the centerpiece of modern B2B marketing and sales efforts.

“Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business”by Adele Revella is an excellent resource for understanding buyer personas and the impact they have on market research studies.

For this episode of the B2B Market Research Podcast, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell spoke with Adele about her book and her approach to analyzing buyer personas.

[Sean:]

On the podcast today I have with me Adele Revella, who has written a very interesting book called “Buyer Personas, How to Gain Insight Into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies and Win More Business.” She’s also got a great website at buyerpersona.com. Adele is the CEO and founder of the Buyer Persona Institute.

First off, Adele, why don’t you give us a formal definition of Buyer Personas?

[Adele:]

Buyer Personas symbolize the real people out there that you need to target with your marketing decisions.

The idea is to understand who makes the buying decisions that you want to influence in an aggregate.

That’s a general idea, it’s when we get into the specifics that it gets more interesting.

Our approach to buyer personas focuses on first understanding the buying decisions that our clients want to influence and then to focus on the people that make those decisions.

Most buyer personas are what we would call a buyer profile. They profile the people, but they don’t get deep enough into the buying decision.

That’s where the B2B buyer persona departs from and differs from a consumer buyer persona, and that’s really the emphasis of our work.

[Sean:]

You mentioned the difference between B2B and B2C. One of the things that really jumps out in your book is that companies sometimes use marketing, sales, and market research methods that are better aligned with low consideration versus high consideration purchases.

You write that sometimes people say their buyer persona is simply CIOs and the Fortune 500, and you respond, “No, no, no, no, that’s not enough.”

You also do a great job of explaining that if you borrow too much from the B2C way of looking at things you actually do yourself a pretty big disservice when you’re putting buyer personas together.

Can you unpack some of your thoughts in this area?

[Adele:]

When we look at the B2C approach to buyer personas, what we see is a generic description of a mom with two kids and a dog and maybe her income level and so forth. We want to sell her on our brand of cereal for her kids.

There isn’t any insight in that description.

If all we had to use were existing B2C research methodologies, it would be hard to go much deeper without some very specific kinds of conjoint studies and so forth.

But with B2B, if we use some different methods, we’ve got a chance to really unpack the buying process and get some great insight.

That’s because B2B buyers tend to put so much consideration into their decision.

(Some consumers do too, but that’s much rarer.)

We use the term “high and low consideration” to acknowledge the difference.

Some B2B buyers spend days, weeks, months or even years investigating their options around a major technology investment, a major capital improvement, or a major new service partner.

Some B2B buyers spend days, weeks, months or even years investigating their options around a major technology investment, a major capital improvement, or a major new service partner.

Hence, if interviewed correctly, that buyer can tell you so much about that buying decision that you can do far more than simply profile them as a CIO in ABC industry with an X sized company.

We can actually get to insights by interviewing them about exactly how, when and why that buying decision went down.

If we do that across enough buyers, we can start to get to some really interesting findings that effect everything from how we’re going to take a product to market to how we can effectively persuade those CIOs or buyers to choose us rather than our competitors.

[Sean:]

Those are all really good points.

One of the things I’m sure folks are curious about is how many people you have to interview if you want to build a killer buyer persona.

One of the things I’m sure folks are curious about is how many people you have to interview if you want to build a killer buyer persona.

[Adele:]

Listeners at this point are probably assuming you have to interview a whole bunch of people.

Having done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, probably in the thousands by now of these interviews with B2B buyers, I have some happy news I can share with you today.

We have discovered that we learn everything we’re going to learn after about ten interviews around a particular buying decision with a relatively well-focused target market segment.

We test this theory all the time because we tell our clients, “Look, we’re going to charge you per interview, so if you’ve got a budget for more than 10 interviews we’ll happily do more than 10, but the reality is, we think you’ll be wasting your money.”

Occasionally, a client will jump in and say, “No, we really want to buy 20 interviews.” We’ll go and do them and test ourselves afterwards each time. We ask, “Did we learn anything new on the 11th interview?”

The answer is always no.

Many of our clients are basing huge decisions off of these findings.

Before our research, they had often based their message strategy or similar off of guesswork.

For clients who are making a big decision, we tell them to start with the results of the qualitative phase.

For clients who are making a big decision, we tell them to start with the results of the qualitative phase.

Let’s take the results of the ten interviews (or more if we’re going to segment the study across multiple verticals, geographies, types of buyers, etc.) and then let’s go test them in a follow up quantitative study.

Preferably, we’d test them with a quantitative survey with a statistically valid sample spanning different industries or company sizes or geography to find out if our data holds up.

We don’t do that often, I admit, but every time we have gone out and done quant studies we have never learned that we were off target with our qualitative research.

Sometimes we’ve found some additional segmentation opportunities, but we’ve never seen anything that refuted what we learned from those ten interviews.

[Sean:]

All good points.

In fact, if you do qual for long enough, you’ll typically find that the client’s initial assessment of how many interviews should be performed is usually more than they need.

That said, the key thing about 10 being the magic number of interviews is true only if those ten folks align with an analytical group, right?

That said, the key thing about 10 being the magic number of interviews is true only if those ten folks align with an analytical group, right?

In a given group you’re likely to have a specific set of people that you’re interviewing about a particular type of purchase, aligned with a certain type of role or impact on that decision.

That’s also not to say that you wouldn’t have a study that might have three or four of those analytical groups.

But I agree, it’s pretty common that for each group, once you get past ten interviews you’ve pretty much maxed out what you’re going to learn from them.

[Adele:]

Exactly.

We have studies going on right now, one that’s 45 interviews total, another one that’s 40 but the studies are segmented.

We’re talking to different roles in the buying decision or, in one case, some of the interviews are in the US, some are in the UK, some are in Germany, and some are in India.

What we’re trying to do is find out and ultimately prove to the stakeholders whether there are differences across those segments.

So, 10 is a good rule of thumb given that you’ve got a very fixed objective regarding who you want to interview and what buying decision you want to understand.

[Sean:]

To switch gears a little bit, what’s the first thing that alerts you to the fact that a company might not have thought through their approach to buyer personas?

In the first part of the book, there is the implication that there is a way to hurry this process that leads to bad results. I completely agree, but since you’re the book author, I’d love to get your thoughts on that.

[Adele:]

Well, yes. Thanks so much for giving me a platform to say this Sean; it’s the reason I wrote the book.

Buyer personas have become this bright shiny object for a lot of companies now.

People will go download a template and do some set of internal interviews or talk to a few customers or take some data off their marketing automation solution and call that a buyer persona.

The emphasis, for me, is that buyer personas should be about discovery. This isn’t about documentation.

If all we’re doing is documenting what we already know, I’m not sure I get the value of that. Maybe there’s some little tiny value in a big company where somebody in the company knows a lot of stuff and somebody else doesn’t.

But that value is so trivial compared to the potential value from buyer personas.

For example, every single day we go off and ask buyers what affects their decision to choose our client versus someone else.

When we take that information back to the client, they’re blown away.

They hear a lot of things that they knew about already, but there is always a half dozen things that are really shocking.

They hear a lot of things that they knew about already, but there is always a half dozen things that are really shocking.

These surprises, in some cases, fundamentally shift the way our clients think about going to market and presenting their solutions through their sales people and their marketing organization.

That’s the goal for me around buyer personas.

I’m seeing too many people saying “oh yeah we got those, check box” because they’ve got some PowerPoint templates somewhere that somebody filled in- but it didn’t change anything about the organization.

Every time we, as a company, deliver buyer personas, we also give a workshop to help that client walk through the findings and figure out what to change about the way we message our product and market and sell our product as a result of those findings.

We started delivering workshops because we had started to see the same behavior, even though we gave people new insight. They’d say, “Wow, that’s amazing, that’s new,” and then nothing would change.

We want to make sure that the research actually causes real change in the organization.

[Sean:]

Yes, that makes sense. It’s somewhat akin to what I’ve told our clients too. We like to measure ourselves on decisions impacted, not on the number of PowerPoint slides we produce.

We gauge ourselves by asking after six months, is your product different, is your sales team different, is your marketing messaging different? Then I really know that we’ve done a good job.

Tell me a little bit about the mock buyer persona interview.

The reason I really like this part of the book was that anyone who has done anything with research for a while has come across a part of an organization or an individual in an organization who says, “I need to know nothing. I simply need to execute. Find me new customers and they shall love me.” And that’s the end of the conversation.

There is a time for that of course, but that time for most organizations is somewhat fleeting. The example I’m using this year is Slack. They are simply killing it. I don’t think Slack needs to do a lot of market research right now. They need to find new customers and spend more to find new customers.

…for multi-product companies you have to make sure that one product that is wildly successful isn’t hiding a problem with another product, etc.

Again, that window of time is somewhat fleeting for most companies.  And for multi-product companies you have to make sure that one product that is wildly successful isn’t hiding a problem with another product, etc.

Or there comes a time when the company’s nose is bloodied, or there is a change in the market dynamic or something else happens and all of a sudden you need somebody who can say it’s not simply about executing, it’s about understanding.

[Adele:]

We have a very open methodology. Of course, we’ve been training marketers to do this kind of research, and I wrote down everything I know about it in the book.

For $9.99 on Kindle, anybody can have access to our method, and people thought I was crazy.

One of the most common things I heard back as companies were learning how to do this was: “My client won’t let me.”

I spoke about that scenario directly in the book, and I said, “Great, if your client thinks they know everything, and you’re an agency or an internal marketer tell them, ‘Perfect. You know it but I don’t.’”

This may be too old an example but, let’s take the Columbo routine: “I’m really dumb and I want to get this information.”

Tell them that you want to schedule a time to interview that internal stakeholder, that person who knows it all and conduct the same kind of interview that you would be conducting with real buyers and tell them to stay in role. Say, “I want you to be the buyer right now, I’m going to take you through this whole interview methodology and don’t get out of role, don’t start talking to me about the product. I want you to talk to me as if you were a real buyer grappling with this decision.”

When that internal stakeholder starts to see the kinds of questions we’re asking and starts speaking in a way that shows they maybe drank in the Kool-Aid, I’ve stopped them and said:

“You know what? If that’s the way your typical customer thinks, you don’t need any marketing. You ought to be pulling in the deals every single day. There’s got to be some objection, some resistance, some issues here or you wouldn’t even need to be thinking about spending money to market and persuade people to buy your product.”

Push back a little bit on them and it really gives them a chance to see the kind of interviews you want to conduct.

[Sean:]

All really good points.

Let me switch gears again to something that was actually mentioned in one of the Amazon reviews of your book.

One reviewer mentioned that a good buyer persona highlights why someone doesn’t buy.

One reviewer mentioned that a good buyer persona highlights why someone doesn’t buy.

That comment really stood out to me is because it’s one of the pieces of feedback I give people about battle cards all the time.

If it doesn’t explain what segment or area accounts that rep should not go after there’s a tendency for people to look at the battle card as an unauthentic piece of content, right?

And as I read through the book, I got the sense that that was also where you were going with buyer personas.

Buyer persona development isn’t just about having a rah-rah session and saying if all these things line up, customers will beat a path to our door. It’s also important to show who will not be a customer and why.

[Adele:]

Exactly.

I think that my method derives a lot from my experience. I spent a year of my life selling big computer systems and four years running sales.

I know that the most valuable thing a company can do to help win more business is to focus their sales people on the deals that they have a chance of winning.

I know that the most valuable thing a company can do to help win more business is to focus their sales people on the deals that they have a chance of winning.

I ran sales in companies where it took us at least six months, maybe a year or 18 months to close a deal.

The worst thing that could happen to me was that I’d spend that six or 12 or 18 months on an account that I had no chance of winning.

We have five insights that we seek to discover about a buyer persona. Perceived barriers is absolutely one of those five insights.

I know some people out there are saying you might build two personas, one for your ideal buyer, one for your negative or “don’t sell” buyer. Again I think that’s a little bit more about profiling than it really is about the persona we build to generate buying insights.

Every buyer has objection, and we certainly want to find out about objections that are so glaring that the client should just cut their losses and get out of the deal sooner rather than later.

We want every buyer persona to include the sincere and profound objections that the reps are going to have to have an argument for.

By forearming ourselves with how a market full of buyers thinks about us, including all the positives and the negatives, we can build the sales tools and programs and so forth to help that sales rep be prepared to win accounts and get out of the ones that are impossible.

[Sean:]

Adele, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. This was a really good concise discussion of buyer personas, and you gave a lot of great tips throughout.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Cascade Insights specializes in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our specialization allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Sign up for our newsletter for brief monthly updates on our Read Like an Analyst series, podcast, and conference list.

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