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B2B Breakups: 200+ Interviews With The Ones That Got Away

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Never waste an opportunity to learn from a lost deal.

While each win-loss analysis is unique, over the years, we’ve found many common themes that keep costing B2B tech companies customers and deals. From inflexible pricing, to misguided messaging, to bad sales strategy, we’ll talk you through some of the most common B2B blunders and how to avoid them.

These insights have been distilled from more than 200 recent interviews with B2B buyers, decision makers, influencers, and product/service evaluators.

Rigid Pricing Models 

We found that inflexibility in pricing models was a major deterrent for B2B tech buyers.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all pricing model. Some buyers prefer CAPEX pricing models with large sums paid upfront and depreciation and amortization as favorable accounting practices down the road. However, most customers favor OPEX models born of the cloud and as-a-service offerings. Others want something in between. Even within these two models, there’s room for named user pricing, concurrent user pricing, and add-on module pricing.

Choice is key. One product manager told us, “We started with an investigation of a transactional price, and all the vendors were able to do that. But then we wanted to move away from that and get an all-you-can-eat model. That was a real challenge for some of the vendors.”

While you don’t want your pricing to be super complicated, you want enough flexibility to be able to have a pricing structure that matches customer needs and can win the deal.

Whose problem is this?

  • Pricing teams developing which pricing models to offer.
  • Marketing teams positioning the pricing models.
  • Sales reps when customers ask, “How much does this cost me today and tomorrow?”
  • Enterprise vendors caught between on-prem and cloud business models.
  • Start-ups and SaaS technology pure-plays with inflexible pricing models.

Key Lessons

Strategize how you can be flexible without being complex. Consider how different CAPEX and OPEX pricing models may complement corporate spending cycles. For instance, we found that offering quarterly pricing in addition to annual and monthly has tipped the scales on some deals.

Customers often switch vendors when a big contract is up for renewal. Take away that trigger by offering OPEX pricing options or an early renewal incentive. This is becoming commonplace even for on-prem offerings.

Research Remedies

Research buyer personas, customer satisfaction with your pricing models, and competitor pricing models to determine the options that would be most appealing to target customers.

All-Or-Nothing Attitude


Company leadership usually wants sales teams to pitch the suite or even the entire platform to customers. This is often much more than B2B buyers want.

In our research, we heard many complaints about upselling or being forced to buy more than was needed. “I feel like you’re always in a sales environment where they’re trying to sell you their next solution even though you haven’t figured out how to use what you have,” one B2B buyer told us.

All-in-one is an appealing concept, but many customers are cautious whether such a pitch is too good to be true. Concerns are raised about integration, customization needs, lock-in, and lower adoption due to the replacement of favored tools.

A platform that does too many things at once can scare buyers away if they aren’t ready for the seismic shift of ripping and replacing critical systems.

Buyers also get annoyed when they sense that sales reps are more concerned with making another sale than they are with making sure the customer gets the solution they need. This ruins all possibility of strengthening the relationship with the buyer.

“As soon as you get on the phone with these guys, they’re ready to upsell you,” another customer complained to us. “They’re ready to [say], ‘Well if you get this tier, you can get this. If you get this tier, you can get this’…[But], I really wanted something specifically tailored to do what I want to do.”

Vendors should make sure they have offerings that match buyers’ requirements, not just expensively exceed them. Don’t let short-term goals cloud long-term strategy. Being pushy about closing this deal, now can cost you lasting relationships with buyers.

Whose problem is this?

  • Sales leadership when setting sales strategy.
  • Sellers when pushed to “sell the suite” to the detriment of lasting customer relationships.
  • Product leaders needing to build solutions that can be used piecemeal when necessary.
  • Marketers failing or neglecting to show how each piece works independently of the other.
  • Marketing teams determining the minimum SKUs.

Key Lessons

Recognize that some customers simply don’t need everything you have to offer right now. Have offerings that let customers bite off what they can comfortably chew.

Our research indicates that land-and-expand models tend to win more deals than pushing a top-down sale from the get-go.

Technology buyers increasingly want partnerships instead of transactional relationships. Our research indicates that vendors who prioritize land-and-expands sales are getting more wins than those that are driving for all-in-one.

Research Remedies

Researching key buying criteria, buyer personas, and go-to-market strategies can uncover how sales and marketing can best speak to buyers’ specific use cases and how product teams can build solutions that can accomplish customers’ “jobs to be done.”

Sales Not Doing Their Homework

B2B buyers notice when sellers are not up-to-speed on their company and use case. Customers can easily spot a canned demo, especially when requirements have been shared via RFP or similar.

If a sales rep doesn’t do their homework on target buyers, there are many tells. To name a few examples: a noticeable lack of the buyer’s industry context, not knowing customers’ “jobs to be done,” or offers that wildly miss the mark of buyers’ needs.

For instance, a marketing manager told us about sitting through a sales pitch where the seller clearly should have realized that the pricing model they were offering wasn’t feasible. “My total marketing budget is only about $700,000. For everything. That’s all my mailings, all my postage, all my creative, all my digital. So, obviously, a 50 or 80 thousand dollar spend just doesn’t make sense,” the marketer told us.

Another word of caution: sales reps, don’t assume your product or service is superior to the competition. You have to listen to your customers to know how they are evaluating potential solutions. Humility and curiosity about the customer’s needs are sure-fire methods for shedding the superiority complex.

Whose problem is this?

  • The C-suite when setting sales goals. Focus on long-term relationships not just end-of-the-quarter deal-closing.
  • Sales leadership hiring sales talent and setting best practices for engaging with customers.
  • Sellers during client conversations and initial engagements.

Key Lessons:

Sales needs to do their homework on buyers’ particular use cases and specific business contexts. Prepare for the sales pitch and listen to what customers say throughout.

Research Remedies:

Post-pitch follow-up calls and questionnaires gather important feedback from customers who said “yes” and those who said “no.” Win/loss market research studies uncover candid customer perspectives on sales performances.

Ignoring the Customer’s Existing Environment

B2B purchases don’t happen in a vacuum. Except in an unusual extreme overhaul, each new B2B purchase will have to interact with the products and services the buyer is already using. Hence, “How well will this solution play with our existing environment?” is an inevitable question in the B2B buyer’s journey.

In the words of a CIO we interviewed, “We can’t get past that roadblock. In our minds, it was like, ‘We can’t get to how it’s going to integrate with our system because you can’t demonstrate you can do it.’”

Of course, it’s not always obvious how a new product or service will fit in with existing solutions. In these cases, buyers need to know how much customization and configuration is in their future.

Product managers, remember that customers shy away from solutions that require months of coding, specialists, and other customization hoops. Whenever possible, buyers favor integration that can be accomplished with configuration rather than development.

Also, product managers, make sure integrations won’t break every time a vendor rolls out an update.

Marketers, avoid messaging that says the product can do anything for everyone. Instead, demonstrate how the solution can be used within the context of what particular customers are trying to accomplish. Targeted marketing and customer referrals are helpful here.

Sales, promising there will be no integration headaches is usually disingenuous. Just because you sell it doesn’t mean the customer won’t bail when implementation turns into an unexpected disaster.

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Product managers when prioritizing the goals and attributes for a new product or service.
  • Marketers when crafting messaging about use cases.
  • Sellers when explaining to the buyer what customizations and integrations they should anticipate.

Key Lessons:

Don’t overpromise seamless integration for everybody. Set accurate expectations for customization and integration in the buyer’s specific context.

Strive to make customization a process of configuration. Avoid code-heavy methods of customization. (Unless your target persona is a developer, in which case, go nuts!)

Research Remedies:

Key buying criteria and buyer’s journey research can determine how heavily customers are weighing configuration capabilities in their buying decisions.

Messaging Is Speaking The Wrong Language

Messaging that focuses on the technical aspects of a product when targeting business users is a common B2B misstep. This leads to poor awareness of the product’s business capabilities and may influence the buyer to believe the product is too complex for their case.

A business process improvement specialist shared their frustrations about sellers assuming that business users are also IT experts. “The business user pops in there and says, “Wait a minute, this feels like that IT mumbo jumbo that IT typically speaks at us. That makes no sense to us and we just shut down,” they said.

The same problem can appear when marketing overemphasizes the business angle when they should be targeting IT buyers.

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Sellers during sales pitches.
  • All facets of marketing.
  • Marketers tasked with lead gen especially.
  • Vendors entering a new market (vertical or solution-specific).

Key Lessons:

Talk to buyers in a language they’ll understand.

Research Remedies:

Messaging and positioning testing, buyer’s journey mapping, buyer persona, and go-to-market studies are specifically designed to inform customer targeting efforts. These research efforts explore all facets of the B2B buyer’s purchasing experience.

Star-Crossed Use Cases

Sometimes it’s just not a great fit.

Ideally, your sales team spends their time pitching to buyers whose needs match the solution’s key features and core competency. But that isn’t always the case.

Yes, it can be hard to retreat after investing time and effort in a target buyer. However, it’s much smarter to leave a doomed deal and refocus your energies where they will be more successful.

As one IT manager told us, “The partner was really wanting to get into customizations and how we can make this work for our business. We were taking the approach of, ‘Well, we want this product to work for us in a way that it’s designed for [rather than] trying to make this product work for us by forcing [it] to use our processes.’”

It’s essential for sales to recognize a doomed deal early in the relationship with a potential customer. That way, sales can refocus on buyers that would benefit from the solution’s core competency and features. You know, deals they might actually win.

At the same time, don’t make the buyer feel ditched. Be honest that you’re not a fit, leave them in a good place, and re-engage with other products down the road that are more in the sweet spot.

Success comes from fitting the product to the customer, not the customer to the product or service.  

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Product teams during the design process. It’s best to design for specific “jobs to be done” rather than just shooting for the moon.
  • Sales when deciding which customers to prioritize. Devote the most time and effort to buyers that benefit from the product’s core competency.

Key Lessons

If you’re building a product for a particular buyer persona, make sure you have a firm grasp of their “jobs to be done” that need to be accomplished via your solution.

Target buyers that have a need that can be met by the core competencies of your product or service.

Research Remedies

Customer journey mapping, key buying criteria and market opportunity assessments uncover why buyers are looking for a product or service in the first place. This research determines the functionalities needed to accomplish buyers’ “jobs to be done” along with the features that customers prioritize the most.

Turn Loss Into A Strategic Gain

Each lost deal, when properly analyzed, yields useful information to hone your product, sales, and marketing strategies.

It all boils down to understanding buyers’ wants and, more importantly, their needs. This insight gives you the ability to:

  • Determine which customers to target.
  • Strategize ways to expand existing customer accounts and form lasting relationships with new customers.
  • Build products that satisfy buyers’ “jobs to be done.”
  • Create solutions that don’t give and charge buyers way more than they need or want.
  • Use messaging that speaks to buyers in terms they understand.
  • Offer pricing model options that will appeal to target customers.
  • Recognize use cases that aren’t a good fit and devote sales efforts elsewhere.

Want to turn your lost deal into an insight gain? Get in touch.

Research for this analysis was conducted by Jacob Dittmer, Tyler Honsinger, and Scott Swigart. Learn more about our research for B2B technology companies.

Your Favorite B2B Posts of 2017

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It was a good year for B2B content. As we reflect on 2017, we bring you a countdown of our most read articles of the year.

10. What To Read In B2B

Our “B2B Book Reviews: One-Sentence Recaps” page offers an efficient path to seeking wisdom from experts and staying on top of new trends.

We provide you with some of the best classic and recent books on B2B – and a few we don’t think are worth your time.

For example, here’s what we had to say about these books:

This list will provide you the opportunity to improve your B2B skills, and is continuously updated with new books to rush order or avoid like the plague.

Have a book that you want us to review? Let us know.

9. #Mrx Pro-Tip: Interview Your Competitors’ Ex-Sellers

“Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps” reveals the wealth of insight you can access by interviewing former members of rival sales teams.

This piece includes key questions to help you get the right data. For example:

  • What were the key selling points of the competitor’s product or service?
  • Which product features were clients most interested?
  • What buying criteria did clients have?
  • Which features left customers uninterested or unimpressed?
  • Which of the competitor’s product or service features were the most lacking?

Check out the full article for more key questions and best practices for interviewing ex-sellers to better understand your rivals.

8. “You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual.”

B2B tech is a niche field. As such, it can sometimes be extremely challenging or downright impossible to get an appropriate sample for a quantitative study. Luckily, qualitative research can get the answers without relying on a mathematically irresponsible sample.

Learn how to design the right kind of study to match your needs with “You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual.”

7. If You Have a Point, Make It & Other Grumpy Writing Tips

If you’re in B2B tech, chances are, your job requires you to communicate through writing at some point. Read “Write Right: Convincing Content” for the best ways to get your point across.

Marketing Manager Isabel Gautschi encourages you to mean what you say, make smooth transitions, procrastinate strategically, and say it in fewer words. She didn’t earn her editing nickname “Half-As-Long” for nothing. Check out the piece for more curmudgeonly advice for writing compelling arguments.

6. There Are No Stupid Questions, But There Sure Are Some Smart Ones

In “101 Market Research Questions,” we share some of the sharpest questions we have based studies off of for B2B tech clients. Check out the smartest questions our clients have asked us to answer over the years.

5. “This Methodology Opens Numerous Possibilities.”

“Gender Gap: A Look at 50 Tech Giants” shows us that LinkedIn ad targeting opens the door for a number of studies of the tech industry.

We took a look at the workforces of 50 large tech companies to uncover insights on the gender gap and to reveal the demographic information accessible to researchers through ad targeting.

Yep, the gender gap is still pretty gapingly wide. The good news is that researchers are not forced to wait for intermittent diversity reports to study it.

4. Disruption Red Flag: Competitors Know Your Customers’ “Jobs To Be Done” Better Than You Do

Are you missing a critical measurement of success? Find out with “Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data.”

It’s essential for companies to understand “jobs to be done” in order to build solutions that truly meet their customers’ needs.

Using Clayton Christensen‘s latest book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice,” we examine essential questions for product teams:

  • What are target customers’ “jobs to be done”?
  • Does your solution get the job done?
  • Do you have the right data to measure whether or not it does?
  • Do customers have a “job to be done” that no current marketplace solutions meet? If so, this is an opportunity for innovation.

3. “Don’t Just Drop the Bomb and Leave.”

It’s difficult to be the bearer of bad news, but we share our constructive approach in “How Good Researchers Give Bad News.”

Check it out to learn how we turn bad news into constructive criticism. Advice includes:

  • Be direct.
  • Use data to defeat fear.
  • Acknowledge sample bias.
  • Describe the disaster you’ve averted.
  • Offer a cure.
  • Remember: There was a fire before you arrived.

Good researchers know not just share devastating findings and leave. Instead, they deliver the bad news, endure the pushback, and point the client in a direction that can improve their business.

2. Keep Your Presentation From Crashing & Burning

“The Pre-Flight Checklist for Research Presentations” provides a handy way to make sure your presentation is ready to soar to success. Relevant to anyone giving a business presentation, our advice shares practical tips for keeping your audience engaged.

1. Our Ageism In Tech Data Got Your Attention

Your favorite article of this year was, “Ageism in Tech: The Silent Career Killer.”

We examined government data, a Payscale study and LinkedIn ad targeting data to research ageism in the tech industry. Spoiler alert: the tech industry is not kind to those over age 35.

Thanks For Reading!

This year has provided us the ability to continue growing as a business, expanding our client base, and provide you with quality content that is important to you. We continue to appreciate our listeners and readers and encourage them to share their terrific feedback. We look forward to sharing more research, book reviews, and exciting interviews with you in the coming year. Thank you for your support, and we wish you the happiest of New Years!

This post is brought to you by Cascade Insights.

The Spy Who Wasn’t – Clarifying Competitive Intelligence

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What is competitive intelligence (CI)?

A nuanced understanding of the marketplace in which you and your competitors are situated? Yes.

Corporate espionage? No.

Jackson was first introduced to the field at MCI, where he led a nascent CI effort. Jackson has since had CI roles with British Telecom, Verizon, and now Ernst & Young. He is a firm believer in following a systematic approach to gathering competitive intelligence.

Get Competitive Context. Listen To Learn:

  • What is competitive intelligence?
  • How this research can help you anticipate your rival’s next move.
  • The difference between competitor intelligence and competitive intelligence.
  • How to build an ethical competitive intelligence practice.
  • Personality traits that make for a great CI analyst.
  • How to conduct an effective pricing analysis.

Notable Quotes:

“With a good strategic pricing analysis program, you can get something that’s even better than if you had the competitor’s price book.” – August Jackson

“A good pricing intelligence program will give you a very clear sense of what your competitors are likely to do in these situations. So, you can adapt and develop strategies that allow you to get out ahead of that.” – August Jackson

“Everyone will be surprised to learn just how willing people are to talk to someone, and I’ve never found the need, even remotely, to pretend to be anyone else other than who I am.” – August Jackson

Mentioned in this Episode:

Subscribe to B2B Revealed on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher.

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This Is Your Brain On Notifications: An Interview With Jill Konrath

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Thinking about taking a break to check your email? Think again. These few minutes are costlier to your productivity than you think.

“70 percent of emails received are attended to within 6 seconds within arriving in our inbox. The recovery time for that interruption is 10 to 20 times the length of the interruption.” – Jill Konrath, Time Savior.

Well-known author and a thought leader in the sales field, Jill Konrath, speaks with Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell. They discuss key points in her latest book, “More Sales, Less Time” and the importance of taking control of your time.

Everything asks for a notification these days: email, slack, calendar, text, etc. Jill explains how to turn off these notifications, save for texting alerts from family, along with important apps that will help you prioritize. “Our time is our greatest asset, and blocking off times when we can really focus on what really matters enables us to get it done certainly more quickly, but at a higher caliber,” Jill says.

Today’s distractions are killing our creative and strategic potential. “The more time we spend in an environment that gives us quick hits of seemingly vital, but likely irrelevant information, the harder it is for our brains to do the kind of creative and strategic thinking that is so necessary.” She says.

Jill explains how to control your time and live by design instead of by default, along with making a habit of saving time and completing priority projects.  Jill also shares a number of productivity apps you can use to stay more focused during the day.

Unlock Productivity Wisdom. Listen To Learn:

  • Why you’re addicted to checking notifications and what you need to do about it.
  • The true costs of distractions when it comes to personal productivity.
  • How you can stop responding to every notification, at the moment it arrives, with one or more of these productivity apps: RescueTime, SaneBox. Unroll.Me. Freedom.
  • About her first book which focuses on how you can be more effective in “Selling to BIG Companies.”
  • Why she wrote her second book, “SNAP Selling,” and her third, “Agile Selling.”

Subscribe to B2B Revealed on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher.

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Mastering The Mid-Market: Lessons In Leadership With Charlie Nooney

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If you’re going to transition from one market segment to the other, you sometimes just have to “rip off the Band-Aid hard,” according to MobiTV CEO Charlie Nooney.

CEO of MobiTV, Charlie Nooney, explains how to lead through a market transition and the evolution of IPTV services in this podcast interview with Cascade Insights’ CEO Sean Campbell.

They also discuss the future of IPTV and the significant role MobiTV has to play in creating that future.

The conversation wraps with a great discussion on some of the leadership lessons Charlie learned from his time at Walt Disney company and what it takes to build a great company culture.

In short, you’re going to love hearing what Charlie has to say.

Change Your Company Culture For The Better. Listen To Learn:

  • All about the US IPTV market and how they’re changing.
  • How cable operators (large and small) will have to evolve to survive.
  • How to re-structure sales and marketing efforts you so you focus on mastering the mid-market.
  • Why you should, as Charlie says, “never let a failure go to waste.”
  • Learn why Charlie believes that, “The culture is in many ways in direct relation to the product… it’s hard to overcome not being excited about what you’re doing.”

Subscribe to B2B Revealed on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher.

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Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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When it comes to B2B studies, having the right people is just as important as asking the right questions.

The efficacy of a B2B market research study hangs on the knowledge of its survey respondents, interview subjects, and focus group participants. Clearly, research teams should invest in recruiting study respondents that are qualified to bring insight to the business problems in question. It’s only logical. Otherwise, why bother with a research project at all?

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

Sloppy B2B market research recruiting is a recipe for disaster. Rushed recruiting is the industry standard, unfortunately. Especially for panel firms.

B2B tech companies typically have a vague sense of who they’d like their market research teams to talk to. They usually have an idea of who should be in a focus group, receive a survey, or have an interview. But, this does not go far enough. Vague guidelines are not sufficient for an effective respondent recruitment process. Speed should not be the top priority here.

Finesse and focus are required.

In order to find first-rate respondents for a B2B market research study, you need specialized knowledge of the industry. Much more so than you would for a B2C consumer study. Context is crucial. To use a skiing analogy, B2B market research is not a bunny hill. It’s a black diamond.

As a firm that does most of our market research recruiting in-house, we know that the process can be challenging. However, our high-quality respondents bring extraordinarily powerful new perspectives to our clients. Those strategy-shifting results make our elite market research recruiting well worth the effort.

Here’s how we do it.

Market Research Recruiting: Don’t Just Take Anyone.

Narrow it down.

Not everyone is qualified to be a good study respondent. At Cascade Insights, we spend a great deal of time figuring out exactly who we need to hear from to illuminate gaps in our clients’ knowledge.

Many teams we work with aren’t as meticulous. Like the skier afraid of anything with a steep slope, these teams have fallen into the habit of asking for only a limited number of requirements for market research recruiting.

Panel Firms Get It Wrong.

Sadly, panel firms are a frequent go-to for tech companies when they want to shove off their recruiting efforts. This is not a good practice. For niche audiences like the ones B2B tech needs to hear from, panel firms typically lack industry knowledge and expertise. Panel firms simply don’t have enough context to identify and recruit respondents who can provide valuable insight.

Often, our new clients are startled at the emphasis we place on typical market research recruiting efforts. We recently had a client from a Fortune 500 say, “I want to talk to developers.”

“And?” we asked.

“What do you mean?” they said, sounding surprised.

“Do you want to talk to them about DevOps or the Internet of Things? Do you want to talk to development managers, architects, corporate developers, developers working for startups, developers building SaaS apps, developers who work with AWS or Azure?” We could have gone on and on.

You need to drill down like this right at the start of a B2B market research study. Without this kind of specificity, you won’t get the right people.

Get reallllllllyyyyyy specific.

Qualified respondents are essential to B2B market research studies. Say we want to talk to competitor customers for a qualitative research project. We would never stop at simply “competitor customers” as a parameter for market research recruiting. Instead, we would narrow our focus to customers that:

  • Bought from a specific competitor company.
  • Purchased a certain product or service from that competitor.
  • Belonged to a vertical or company size range that was of interest to our client.
  • Fit the buyer personas most relevant to our client.

Having the answers to these questions makes for a much more exciting and useful study. It’s also great for the client to have this type of strategic clarity and focus.

Get beyond broad phrases like “competitor customers.” You can do better.

Think more along the lines of, “Slack users who work for enterprise organizations in the manufacturing sector where the Slack deployment is sizable and has been in use for less than 12 months.” Now that’s a good respondent profile. You’re ready to start recruiting!

Catch a Quality Candidate.

Look for them in their social media habitats.

The best place to start looking for excellent study respondents is LinkedIn.

A few years back, people would get very wary when we told them that we trust certain types of data from LinkedIn. They would say, “You can’t do that. My sister’s cousin’s best friend doesn’t believe in LinkedIn and he never updates his profile. That’s proof that it’s a faulty data source.” That’s what we call reasoning from a specific. Not a quality you want in a research firm.

LinkedIn is a goldmine.

Take a step back. Microsoft recently invested $26.2 billion in buying LinkedIn. That’s a huge investment to make in a platform with crummy data. It’s safe to assume Microsoft found some value (billions of dollars worth!) in LinkedIn’s data. Don’t let your sister’s cousin’s best friend arbitrarily discredit a great resource for your study.

When we approach B2B market research recruiting via LinkedIn, we hone in on study candidates’ titles, companies, and locations. Just those three pieces of information are quite valuable for identifying qualified respondents. Also, a subscription to LinkedIn Premium is much cheaper than hiring a panel firm or buying a third-party list to get the same information.

One caveat: take the job description section (not the title) with a grain of salt. LinkedIn users supply this information themselves and may play up or omit certain things. Other times, they may have neglected to refresh a dated description.

In our recruitment process, we take the job description section into consideration but we don’t value it as highly as the title, the company, and location. Before you start fretting about dated, obsolete profiles, remember that you’re not conducting a census, you’re drawing a sample. Every profile you look at doesn’t need to be perfect.

Company, title, and location = powerful data.

For example, let’s say you need 30 knowledgeable people to interview for a qualitative study about your competitor’s sales process. Search filters for company, title and location may give you a pool of, say, 2,000 profiles to consider. That means that it’s perfectly acceptable- even necessary- to rule out a majority of the candidates. You’ll still end up with more than enough stellar potential respondents. You don’t have to worry that some of those initial 2,000 people may have since changed jobs and not updated their profiles. That’s what screening is for.

From our experience, the title, company, and location data for potential B2B tech study respondents is rarely wrong. It happens maybe 5 percent or less of the time in our recruiting efforts.

There is an obvious reason for this. Lying on your LinkedIn profile is like lying on your resume. Someone is going to find out. When they do, that lie damages your professional standing and employment viability. Most people implicitly understand this. Sure, just like on resumes, many people inflate the truth a bit. But no data set is perfect. This is why we take the job description with a grain of salt. It would be much odder to lie about who you work for, where you are, and your specific job title. All of that information is rather easy to prove or disprove.

Basically, don’t worry about the occasional rotten apple amid the millions of LinkedIn profiles, there is the whole rest of the orchard! For B2B market research study recruitment, LinkedIn’s data is very high quality. The network has 467 million members, and two or more new members join each second.

A little social savvy goes a long way.

Though LinkedIn is our favorite respondent hunting ground, we also sometimes leverage Twitter to great advantage.

For a recent project, we had to reach individuals who were quite familiar with the product Tableau. To find them, we searched for folks who claimed to be Tableau Zen Masters, a designation given to active members of the Tableau community. Searching for “Tableau Zen Master” on Twitter surfaced nearly a hundred viable candidates for our study.

Another time, we had to identify companies working out of the startup incubators funded by AWS and Google. These incubators provided startups with computing power, cloud services, and office space. The challenge with finding these startups was that the founders and development team members were unlikely to mention anything about their relationship with AWS or Google on their LinkedIn profiles. Further, unlike other providers, Google and Amazon don’t publish a list of the companies currently working out of their incubators.

However, both AWS and Google have Twitter accounts that market their incubators to new startups. With that knowledge, we started looking for Twitter users who were startup founders and were actively following one of the Twitter accounts aligned with an AWS or Google incubator account.  We then checked on LinkedIn to make sure these individuals were still with the startup listed on their Twitter profile. After confirming that the startups were residents of AWS or Google incubators, we just had to reach out to enough of these folks to get a good study sample. Of course, not everyone we reached out to was working out of one of the incubators, but a surprisingly large number were.

You can find them if you know where to look.

We aren’t shy about getting creative to recruit the perfect study respondents. In addition to leveraging social media, we might look at speaker lists for conferences that align with our market research study question. If we’re looking for competitor customers, we may take a gander at the competitor’s case studies. We might even look at websites like SlideShare or individual forums and communities online to mine participants from these locations.

However, that creativity requires extensive industry knowledge of the B2B tech sector. You won’t find that in a panel firm.

Form Letters Have No Game.

Make ‘em feel special.

Let’s talk about outreach. After you identify your dream respondent profile and find a sufficient sample of them, you’ve got to convince them to actually participate in the study.

Here’s another area where panel firms are likely to make a mess of things. Often, third-party firms specialize in mass recruiting. Their outreach efforts tend to be very templated and rely heavily on form letters. This is no way to woo a busy specialist working in a unique niche of B2B tech. These respondents need to be interested and intrigued before they are willing to take the time to engage. A form letter isn’t going to entice them. Outreach for these prized respondents needs to be more individualized and specific.

In one recent study, we were focused on looking for individuals who could meaningfully comment on app stores. To do this, we looked for professionals who had spoken at major conferences where app stores were the topic of conversation. We also searched for influencers who were regularly sharing content on the subject via blogs and social media.

Once we had identified a pool of qualified respondents, we crafted highly personalized outreach.  We demonstrated that we were specifically interested in speaking to each candidate based on the public information we found about them online.

We say why we want them.

In our outreach, we include context for why we’re interested in each potential study participant. We’ll include relevant details from their public LinkedIn or Twitter profiles or information that is readily available via web search. This automatically makes our outreach personalized. It gives the impression that the person we are contacting is not just a fill-in-the-blank on a form letter but an individual specifically desired for their expertise.

Let’s say we’re looking for companies that have deployed a certain type of product. We might start by looking for individuals who mentioned that they have experience with that product on their LinkedIn profile. We’ll scan their job descriptions to see if they’ve claimed to have led a business initiative that leveraged that product.

In the outreach, instead of saying something generic like, “Do you have experience with GIS solutions?” we’d say, “Given you’re responsible for running the GIS department for the city of Denver and you’ve got a team of 12 all focused on GIS concerns, we would love to talk to you about the products you use today to meet business needs.”

Understandably, this kind of outreach is going to get a much better response rate than a generic form letter. So, don’t go the form letter route.

Don’t Rush The Recruit.

The wrong people can’t give the right answers.

In sum, the next time you start a research project, ask yourself whether you know:

  • Who can best provide insight into the business problem.
  • How to find a sufficient sample of qualified respondents.
  • What information to include in the outreach to entice participation in the study.

If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, don’t worry. Send us an email or give us a call.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. With B2B focused market research and marketing services, Cascade Insights helps companies seize opportunities in the B2B technology sector.

Sales Needs A Say In Strategy

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Your sales team is conducting qualitative research all the time. Talking to them is perhaps the lowest cost qualitative research project you could possibly do. It’s also your best chance to achieve a strong sales strategy in sync with the goals of your organization.

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

Unfortunately, many companies undervalue their sales professionals. This results in scores of missed opportunities and the alienation of the sales team.

Companies often make two big mistakes:

  1. Companies’ market research teams typically don’t have a great perception of their own sales team.
  2. Sales teams aren’t often invited to participate as major stakeholders in market research studies.

Having worked with many Fortune 1000 clients, I’ve seen this happen a lot. I know who gets invited to the table. Usually, representatives from marketing and product development are invited right away. If the project is important enough, a vice president or C-level executive gets an invite too. Sales leadership is skipped over far too often. That is a huge mistake.

Sellers and market researchers typically have very different personalities.

Sales and market research demand very different approaches to be effective at each job. 

Think about how each role would behave in a meeting to discuss a research project. You’re probably picturing the following:

  • The salesperson will talk a lot and the market researcher will ask a lot of questions.
  • The salesperson will push the group to make a decision and the market researcher will counsel patience.
  • The market researcher will rely on data and the salesperson will rely on instinct.

Frankly, there may be an element of truth to these stereotypes. No problem.

Different perspectives are not a bad thing. The whole room will be pushed to consider possibilities they wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’ll give an example of the sales-as-an-afterthought syndrome. On a recent project for a Fortune 200 company, we received a list of stakeholders as the project kicked off. Since this project was large, the stakeholder list was understandably large as well. There were 15 names from all over the business. Product development, the executive team, marketing and, of course, market research team leads, were all represented. Oddly, not a single salesperson, sales manager, director of sales or even a sales VP were on the list.

To make matters worse, this was a project to figure out which opportunities the client should pursue in a market crowded with competitors. It’s hard to imagine that sales leadership wouldn’t have something worthwhile to contribute to the subject of sales strategy. They may have already had the answers to some of the questions that the researchers were after. At the very least, sales leaders undoubtedly had highly relevant questions on the topic and should have been given the opportunity to ask. Further, the outcome of the study was directly pertinent to crafting an effective sales strategy. It made zero sense to have no one to represent sales on the stakeholder list.

There is a false perception that products sell themselves.

This is another big reason why I think invites to sales leaders get “lost in the mail.”

You see this bias crop up in many Silicon Valley companies. They might say, “We don’t worry about what the competition is doing. We just build great products.” They may proudly boast of their focus on “doing” over selling.

I’ve even seen companies advertise that they don’t have salespeople. They do, but they make up a title like “customer success representative” to call them instead. I don’t buy it.

I guarantee you that every company has someone (or several someones) in sales even if they don’t title them like they are.

I’m sorry, products don’t just sell themselves. Someone has to tell the narrative that connects the product to a set of business problems or opportunities.  Someone has to develop and execute on a sales strategy.

Regrettably, judging from the overwhelming majority of stakeholder lists for studies, it looks as though many-a-market research project completely overlooks this fundamental truth.

The experience of sales leaders is unduly discounted as a valuable source of qualitative data.

The biggest reason why sales teams are not invited to the stakeholder team is that people tend to think that the data salespeople can provide is inherently biased. 

ALL data is inherently biased.

Download numbers, SaaS service trial counts, website page visits, feature usage, NPS scores… All that data has an agenda too. It’s collected for a specific purpose and intended to measure a specific thing. It doesn’t necessarily bring context along with it. (That’s what market researchers are for.)

In many ways, B2B salespeople are conducting qualitative research every single day that they work for your company.

Your first reaction to this statement may be, “No way. They don’t record the conversations they have. They don’t transcribe them. They certainly don’t code the responses, and they don’t build findings decks.” You’re right. They don’t.

They do have conversations with real and potential customers every single day. With each interaction, salespeople use their personal experience to influence the behavior of buyers. That makes their personal experience an incredibly important factor for sales strategy.

Conversations between salespeople and buyers drive:

  • Customer engagement.
  • Future conversations with potential customers.
  • The actual sales of your company’s product.

B2B sales cycles last months or even years. Sellers engage with a buying team of roughly 5-10 people through what might amount to tens or even hundreds of online, phone, and in-person interactions.

Basically, your sales team has a ton of untapped data on your customers and potential customers.

Each B2B sale is a mini qualitative research project.

What are some ways you can engage with sales to mine this kind of intelligence? How can you infuse your next research effort with sales insights? How can you learn more about your company’s sales strategy? Ask your sales team these three questions.

Can I see a demo?

You haven’t properly researched the product unless you’ve seen it demonstrated.

With B2C software solutions and products, this is usually an easy process. You can go down to the mall and see or buy the product, or read public reviews.

With B2B solutions, it’s different. These products cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you can’t just buy them yourself.

For some solutions, like technology products in B2B, you can’t be expected to fully understand the product unless you’re trained on it. Just like the people who are going to use this solution, you can’t be expected to just pick it up and run with it. A demo is the easiest way to get up to speed on a complex product. Simply ask for one.

Salespeople demo the product for real customers every single day. Asking for an hour of their time is a small price to pay to conduct effective research on the product or solution and its competitors.

Who do you sell to and who do you avoid?

So often, market research targets personas that have been in play for so long that they are no longer questioned.

The sales team knows what’s really working. They know the personas who bite and the personas who don’t.

Ask them who they go for first at the start of a sales cycle by:

  • Role.
  • Title.
  • Type of company.

This will tell you at least one of the buyer personas you need to target in your research efforts.

Then ask them the same questions about the big sales. The ones that take longer and require more effort but would provide more long-term benefits. You’ll surface additional buyer personas or even whole market segments that need to be considered.

Make sure to also ask the crucial question of who they never try to sell to by role, title and type of organization. You’ll get a sense of which customers are actively buying competing solutions or aren’t buying any solutions.

Pitch Me

The third thing you want to do is ask your sales team to share their pitch.

In complex B2B sales, there’s no script that a seller reads. It’s not a standardized process.

Your best salespeople hone their pitch using the positive and negative feedback they receive from talking to prospective and current customers. If they highlight certain features, you can guarantee there’s a data-driven reason for that. If they talk up pricing in a certain way, there’s a data-driven reason for that too. If they specifically comment on competitors, there is a reason why.

Inviting sales to the stakeholder team should be common practice.  It’s in your company’s best interest to make it mandatory. You’re guaranteed to get insights that will help shape your study in positive ways. You’re also likely to make all the other stakeholders in marketing, product development, and executive teams happier with the results. Not mention sharpen your sales strategy.

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.

In-Depth Interviews: The Answer To ‘None of The Above’

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When it comes to B2B market research, there is no better tool than In-Depth Interviews (IDIs) for gathering insight.

In-Depth Interviews: The Answer To ‘None of The Above’

This article is based on an episode of the B2B Market Research Podcast. The audio version is available here.

Surveys have long been a popular tool for corporate research, but they have a significant limitation: they can only reinforce or dispel assumptions you already have.

In-depth interviews can uncover context you weren’t even aware of. As such, IDIs are key to qualitative B2B research. They are even essential for building effective surveys, as they illuminate the best questions to ask.

In-Depth Interviews are great for understanding how B2B buying works. For example, IDIs can reveal:

  • The decision-making process for selecting a product or service.
  • The stakeholders involved in the B2B buying decision.
  • The factors considered before making the purchase.
  • What could have changed the decision.
  • Whether the customer or company is happy with the product or service they chose.

In-Depth Interviews for B2B Market Research: The Basics

Length

IDIs are typically 30-60 minute conversations with a business stakeholder.

In-Person Vs. Remote

Historically, IDIs, especially in B2C studies, were usually conducted face-to-face. These days, telephone IDIs are very common.

At Cascade Insights, we prefer telephone interviews because they tend to allow for more time with the respondent. It’s much easier to grab time on someone’s calendar if you’re just asking for a phone call rather than something that requires the logistics of a face-to-face meeting.

Respondents

To uncover powerful insight, you can’t just talk to anyone. Effective studies require talking to very specific people.

Interview respondents need to be able to provide insight into complex B2B business decisions. Often, studies will require respondents with a certain job title or highly specialized knowledge.

Incentives

To ensure a response from the right people, it’s common practice to offer an incentive. Our incentives usually range from $100-200 in value.

Recruit

Finding good interview subjects can be done in a variety of ways. We frequently turn to LinkedIn, industry forums, and social media networks to identify knowledgeable respondents to reach out to.

The Interview

Discussions guides form the foundation of the interviews. These guides are not just a list of questions that are recited verbatim. A typical guide includes key focus areas and specific drill-down questions. However, it’s important to leave room for discovery and investigation during each conversation.

Clients may even influence the course of each discussion by communicating via a back channel with the researcher who is conducting the interview. As the researcher conducts the interview, the client may be in contact with the researcher through an instant messaging platform like Slack, Skype, or Google Talk.

Why In-Depth Interviews?

IDIs are useful because they are uniquely able to get at the heart of customers’ decision-making process. For B2B technology companies, business decisions tend to be complex and involve many different stakeholders.

To illustrate how useful IDIs are for market research, here are some examples from our work at Cascade Insights.

The Upstart Competitor

Our client was focused on selling directly to the enterprise. They had enjoyed being relatively unchallenged in that market for a period of time.

However, a competitor was moving away from selling to small and medium businesses (SMBs) and started targeting enterprise-sized companies. Back when the competitor had focused on SMBs, they had posed no threat to our client even though their technology was somewhat superior. As the competitor started moving upmarket, they became a much greater threat.

Our client needed to know two key things:

  1. Was this competitor truly in a position to sell to the enterprise?
  2. If so, could the competitor be stopped?

To complete this project, we conducted in-depth interviews with:

Each one was able to provide a unique perspective.

What We Learned From B2B IDIs

Customers were able to tell us how the product was being tailored to meet enterprise needs. They could also shed light on how well the competitor’s sales team was able to engage with enterprise-sized organizations.

The competitor’s former sales reps were able to tell us how much of a push there was to target enterprise accounts. They could also clarify which tactics were most often used when targeting enterprise accounts. Importantly, they could also tell us how often they were competing with our client for enterprise deals.

Talking to partners was beneficial because they were able to describe how much of the competitor’s business was pivoting towards the enterprise. Typically, partners have a unique perspective on the markets that their vendor partner is targeting. If your competitor is attempting to move upmarket, that will probably be reflected in requests to their partners to reshape their sales and marketing efforts. An ambitious competitor may even reward partners who have been successful at changing their strategies to attract enterprise deals.

Key Buying Criteria and In-Depth Interviews

IDIs are also incredibly useful for understanding growing industry segments such as the cybersecurity market.

For example, lately, we’ve had a lot of work researching solutions that protect organizations from viruses, malware, and the like. We’ve spent a lot of time interviewing cybersecurity professionals about the features that matter most in endpoint protection programs.

In such a crowded marketplace, knowing exactly which features cybersecurity professionals want, which ones they aren’t interested in paying for, and which features will matter five years from now are all critically important.

In researching these issues for our clients, we conducted IDIs with network security specialists, network security architects, and cybersecurity thought leaders. We reached the people that could personally answer these questions with the authority of having worked with the solutions in question day in and day out.

Uncensored Customer Feedback

Another big advantage of IDIs is that significant client engagement is possible. All throughout the research effort, clients get to listen in on the interviews and hear how the research process is progressing.

There’s nothing like hearing the voice of your competitor’s customers as they tout the virtues of your opponent’s products. Imagine the insight from a B2B buyer laying out 10 reasons why they believe they made a smart decision in choosing your rival.

It’s often the case that companies’ tribal knowledge of their brand’s image is very different from how they are currently perceived. There is nothing like a direct quote from a lost customer when it comes to battling the bias within your own company about the competition.

Meeting Stakeholder Needs with In-Depth Interviews

IDIs don’t just bring hard truths to light. They can also help various stakeholder teams accomplish their goals more effectively.

B2B Sales

Sales leaders often commission win-loss studies. Win-loss studies provide insights on what sales teams are doing most effectively, what they need to stop doing, and what the competitor does better.

Win-loss studies can also help identify the types of buyers that your sales team struggles to engage with and those they excel at selling to.

These studies frequently involve 15-60 minute IDIs with the client’s current customers and with their competitors’ customers.

Sales leaders also appreciate key buying criteria research. This type of research is typically based on IDIs with current customers, competitor customers, and partners.

B2B Marketing

IDIs can also bring insight key to the strategic development of content marketing assets. There are so many “how to do content marketing” resources out there and a plethora of blogs, articles, podcasts, video streams, social campaigns and more from your competitors and partners. With so much out there, it’s hard to know which type of content marketing to invest in.

To create content that has a real impact, you need to conduct real-world research. Certainly, you can look at statistics from your website, blog, and social media efforts, but it’s also important to actually ask current and potential customers what type of content drives them to buy.

For example, one very well-known tech company asked us to study which content drove developers to engage with their cloud service and which content helped educate them on the service’s features. Armed with the knowledge of which content initiatives were resonating the most with customers, our client was able to strategically concentrate their marketing efforts to drive even more engagement with their product.

In-Depth Interviews are also key to building great buyer personas.

One of our clients hired us to give them a greater understanding of the buyers of advanced analytics. The aim of this project was to determine B2B buyer archetypes from business leaders to tech specialists.

For this project, we conducted roughly 10 IDIs with each type of buyer. Through the IDIs, we learned what motivated each archetype to buy, the type of relationship they preferred with suppliers, their key buying criteria, and many other factors in their decision to purchase advanced analytics solutions. Obviously, all of this insight greatly improved our client’s marketing and sales efforts.

Product Development

IDIs with customers, potential customers, competitors’ customers and aspirational customers can reveal information that is critical to product development. You may learn:

  • Which features customers wish you had.
  • Which features drove customers to buy a solution; yours or your competitors’.
  • Why customers use a particular feature.

Today, most companies have a lot of data on what their customers are using but they don’t always understand the context around that use. IDIs can clear that up.

IDIs are also great for digging into how customers rate companies on the “itys” of tech: security, manageability, reliability, scalability, interoperability, etc.

Challenges with In-Depth Interviews

Now that we’ve talked at length about the benefits of IDIs, I’ll acknowledge some of the risks of using this methodology.

Mistaken Stakeholders

Stakeholders sometimes push for quantitative measures when the research demands qualitative data.

Many stakeholders know that they can obtain a quantitative view of their own customer base quite easily. With direct access to their customer base, they often assume it will be easy to get a good-sized sample.

However, things change when you need to hear from competitors’ customers. Finding enough of these folks to have a meaningful quant study of their views is less likely, definitely not easy, and most likely expensive. A better first step is to go with a qualitative research effort that includes IDIs with competitor customers.

Needlessly Infinite In-Depth Interviews

Another related challenge is that stakeholders often want more IDIs than are necessary. You actually don’t need that many IDIs to have an effective study.

If you think about a study that focuses on an average B2B sales process, the sample you need to target is already pretty darn small. Just some basic criteria shrinks the pool down a lot: customers who bought a certain solution from a particular competitive landscape (example: 4-6 vendors) for the purpose of completing a specific job, for instance.

Further, clients typically commission a study to understand a certain type of buyer persona such as a technical or business leader.

Once a study is dialed in this tightly, it’s usually better to conduct a set of 10 -20 IDIs with stellar respondents than to launch an enormous (and expensive!) quantitative B2B survey.

Stakeholders also sometimes fail to recognize the difficulty that exists in targeting the customer base of small startup companies with a quant survey. For example, at least 10 times a year, clients call on us to research a company with a customer base that only numbers in the hundreds. For studies like these, it would be unwise to go with a quant survey. With such a small customer base, and factoring in typical response rates, you won’t be able to get meaningful insights about a startup’s customer base with the number of surveys that would actually get completed.

Luckily, 10-20 IDIs can give you a ton of insight about a customer base that numbers in the 100s.

Recalcitrant Respondents

Interviewees, particularly for B2B studies, often need to be pushed.

For B2B tech market research, we’re not asking people about sensitive medical conditions, their kids, or their failed dreams. We’re just talking to them about business and technical issues. Hence, it’s fine to push for a meaningful answer that has a strong industry context.

For example, if someone tells one of our analysts that they decided to go with a competitor solely based on price, we are not just going to drop it there. We will ask them to justify that response, maybe even a couple of times, because business decisions are rarely that easy. In B2B tech, there are multiple stakeholders that interact as part of a very complex decision tree. It’s important to get at those secondary and additional factors that drove the decision. Perhaps price played into the decision, but it was really a particular integration or support offering that landed the competitor the deal.

Interviewers That Don’t Get the Business or Tech Jargon

For effective IDIs, the interviewer needs to be nearly as knowledgeable as the research participant.

How often have you been at a party and struggled to explain your day job to someone who isn’t in the same line of work? Instantly, you start dumbing things down so that they can understand what you do day to day. In casual conversation, that’s just fine. However, for B2B market research, the respondent dumbing things down is the last thing you want. Ideally, the respondent should speak to the interviewer as though they were speaking to a colleague. Only then do you know you’re getting in-depth answers that have real industry context.

The Drive-Thru Interview

Another challenge with IDIs is that you can’t control the interviewee’s environment. If the interviewee is ordering a cheeseburger, they aren’t really paying attention. The same is true if they’re focused on their email as much as they are the phone call you’re having with them.

A skilled interviewer versed in the technical and business aspects of the industry tends to solve this problem as well. As soon as interviewees realize that the person interviewing them really gets the challenges in their industry, they tend to quickly focus on the phone conversation. The interviewer just has to be knowledgeable and personable enough to be more interesting than the subject’s email or cheeseburger.

Why Do In-Depth Interviews For B2B Research?

There is just no better way to solve the puzzle of B2B business decisions and find out what customers really, really want.

This article is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and marketing services for the B2B tech sector. 

 

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.

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.

Image Courtesy of Florin Deloiu/Shutterstock.com

Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps

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Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps

Listen below:

Did you enjoy this podcast? Let us know! Review the B2B Market Research podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

The people who used to sell for competitors are valuable competitive intelligence and B2B Market Research assets. And they’re extremely underutilized.

In this podcast episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell shares 26 questions to ask sales reps who recently worked for a rival. The questions are designed to bring insight into:

  • The Key Buying Criteria of Competitor Customers.
  • Strategies & Tactics Used by Rival Sellers.
  • Industry and Market Drivers.

Talking with ex-sellers can bring powerful market, competitive intelligence and customer insights.

A quick caveat: for the best market research data, it’s important to speak with people who recently worked for the competition. Someone who worked there two or three years ago won’t be able to clue you in to the current state of the company.

Here’s what you should ask the competition’s former sales team members:

1. What were the key selling points?

This question cuts through all of the B2B marketing lacquer and gets to the root of what the competitor really thinks will drive the sale.

2. What product features were clients most interested in?

Again, this question lets you peer through the filter of case studies and general marketing messages to see the strongest aspects of competing products.

3. What buying criteria did clients have?

Was it cost, specific features, unique services, etc.? These questions help you to get inside the mind of the buyer. Further, when this information is analyzed along with other direct interviews with competitor customers and partners, you gain a detailed understanding of the competitor’s stakeholders.

4. What features left customers uninterested or unimpressed?

It’s common to assume customers are dazzled by competing products with grand and abundant capabilities — especially if they’re produced by a large and imposing rival. However, this broad pantheon of features may be more than some customers need. Many B2B buyers are looking for very specific features. A former salesperson for a competing company can let you know what those specific features are.

5. Which of the competitor’s product or service features were the most lacking?

A former salesperson would know, as they had to drive around weak spots to make the sale.

6. Were customers more focused on product features or the cost of the product?

Customers’ priorities can clue you in to how the competing company would have to respond strategically. Is it more important for the rival company to keep the product cheap or to maintain a cutting-edge feature set?

7. What were the most common reasons for losses?

The competing sales team didn’t win every deal and they are likely to remember the ones that got away. Chances are, they’ve put some thought into the reasons for those losses.

8. How often were buyers looking for net new solutions?

This is a great question to ask, especially if you are considering a win-loss campaign.

9. What was the market environment?

Did prospects abound with opportunity for all? Or was it a red ocean with competitors on every street corner battling for each deal?

10. Did the B2B marketplace seem saturated with solutions or was there room for upstarts?

This gives you a sense of whether the market landscape is too mature for growth or if there is a lot of untapped opportunity.

11. In the proposal process, what companies did the competitor’s sales team always seem to win against and why?

This question is like panning for information gold. You may find out that you were the one that was always losing to the competitor in the proposal process. Learning why you lost out is invaluable insight.

12. Which companies did the rival sales team lose to?

With this information, your understanding of the competitive environment will grow broader than your own experience and win-loss database. This market research question alone can identify a whole host of new competitors that you might need to worry about.

13. What level of industry affinity did that competing solution have?

For example, was it really good for manufacturing and not so great for construction? From this you can learn which sector of the industry the competitor has staked their strongest claim.

14. Who had the best solution on the market?

The ex-salesperson will either feel that their former company had the best solution or recognize that a competitor did.  Either way, you’re going to get a good read on who stands tallest in the B2B marketplace.

15. Who had a feature set you couldn’t get anywhere else?

This market research question doesn’t drive at the best solution for every customer or the broadest set of customers. It simply teases out the most unique. You may learn about upstarts who may soon become competitors.

16. Were there any features or services that customers were requesting but vendors weren’t offering?

This question helps align your product development efforts with what the market really wants – this year and next year.

17. For go-to-market efforts, who was the best partner to work with? Who brought the most leads?

These questions will help you to understand the web of your competitor’s channel players and partners.

18. Who was the worst partner to work with?

You can avoid them too!

19. Did clients view the salesperson’s former company as a high cost solution?

This lets you know if the competitor is a high-cost solution that provides sufficient value to justify their cost or if the cost isn’t justified by the value.

20. What pricing structures appeared to resonate the best with clients?

This will help you to wisely structure your own pricing model. It also helps when deciding what to lead with when discussing financial terms.

21. Did the sales team have leeway to negotiate the price with clients?

This lets you know whether the competitor starts high and works toward a lower number in sales conversations or if they start low and remain firm on that price.

22. How much would the solution sell for?

In B2B sales, enterprise customers rarely pay the “rack rate” for a solution. It’s often difficult to compare your price to what competitors are actually charging. Therefore, getting a sense of an average selling price or license cost for a given customer type is incredibly useful information.

Try to get the rep to break this down across different B2B segments: small business, medium business, large enterprise, etc. It’s also important to get the “all up” price — as in the cost of the solution itself as well as the price of service and support contracts, required training, travel etc.

23. How long were service contracts and how long was the sales process along the way?

This lets you dig into a part of the pricing model that can be opaque for anyone not already a customer.

24. What was the cost to renew a service contract?

Sometimes it’s not the up front cost that kills you, but the costs over time – such as support and training costs.  Make sure to dig into those as well.

25. Who do you see as the market leader in three to five years?

Your competitor’s former sales rep probably has an interesting market perception. If they didn’t think the company they worked for had a bright future, you may even get their reasons for leaving the company.

26. What market trends do they see on the horizon?

Aside from the companies they were watching, the salesperson probably had their eye on trends as well. Which trends did they think were important and why? Which did they ignore and why?

In closing, ex-sellers can be a treasure trove of market research information about competitors and the market. Don’t miss out on this important competitive research asset.

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. Check out our array of free resources including our blog, ebook, podcast archive and newsletter.