• Twitter
  • Linkedin
(503) 898-0004 | hello@cascadeinsights.com
Cascade InsightsMenu
  • Market Research Services
    • Close
      • Expand-Your-MarketUnderstand Your Customers
        • Key Buying Criteria Research
        • Win/Loss Analysis
        • Buyer’s Journey Mapping
        • Market Segmentation Research
        • Buyer Persona Research
      • Define-Your-BrandDefine Your Brand
        • Brand Studies
        • Market Opportunity Research
        • New Product Launch Research
      • Understand-Your-BuyersExpand Your Market
        • Channel Market Research
        • Go-To-Market Research
        • Competitive Landscape Analysis
        • Usability Testing
  • Marketing Services
    • Close
      • MediaMedia
        • Podcast Production
      • Marketing-StrategyContent Marketing
        • Content Creation
        • Messaging Upgrades
      • Content-MarketingMarketing Strategy
        • Persona Development
        • Content Strategy
  • Podcast
  • Resources
    • Close
    • Studies & Resources
    • B2B Marketing Blog
    • B2B Market Research Blog
  • About Us
    • Close
    • Our Story
    • Our Clients
    • Client Testimonials
    • Ethics Policy
    • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us
  • Menu

Heat Up Your Cold Email

February 14, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Marketers, Blog Posts, Interviews - Thought Leaders, Podcasts, Product Managers, Rethinking B2B Sales Podcast Series /by Sean Campbell

How can sellers use cold email to engage rather than irritate?

Apple PodcastsSubscribe to B2B Revealed on Google PlaySubscribe to B2B Revealed on StitcherSubscribe to B2B Revealed on Soundcloud

Ryan O'DonnellIn this episode of B2B Revealed, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell chats with Replyify Co-Founder Ryan O’Donnell on how to use cold email to increase audiences and avoid the spam filter.

Obviously, cold email is more likely to be welcomed when it is relevant to the recipient. But Campbell mentions how common it is for him to open a cold email that has nothing to do with his work. “…It wasn’t targeted, it wasn’t relevant, there wasn’t appropriate research done, [and] it wasn’t packaged correctly,” he said. Clearly, the seller hadn’t bothered to make sure their outreach was of value the recipient. This is a big no-no.

Instead, start with those who already have demonstrated an interest in your product or service. “The easiest place to look, if you already have clients, is your existing client base,” O’Donnell explained. These folks are much more likely to find your outreach applicable to their work than someone contacted out of the blue.

O’Donnell provides some helpful guidelines to prevent sellers from flooding customers’ inboxes and trying their patience. “We like to see 3-5 sentences per email. We like 5-10 emails delivered over the course of 30-45 days, with a mix of give-and-take. You’re giving the [audience] something of value,” O’Donnell said. Make sure buyers can quickly grasp the point of your communication and how it relates to their work. While an occasional follow-up is OK, don’t just keep bugging people who haven’t replied. Instead, focus your energy on those who have chosen to engage in a conversation.

Streamlining your cold email processes is possible through automation platforms such as Replyify. “Replyify helps you manage replies and to-do items, automatically send emails, manage unsubscribes, update contact information, and move folks around,” O’Donnell said. “Once you actually create these different sequences, and you put a strategy around reaching out to these different segments, or personas. It becomes really easy to keep that going because once the automation takes over on the email side, you’re just feeding the beast.” This platform allows sellers to monitor all of their cold emails for legal compliance as well as assess and hone targeting efforts.

In essence, cold email shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It should be a clear, targeted message with direct relevance to the recipient. Aim to start a conversation, not bury the buyer in a deluge of unwanted email. Add value, not spam.

Defrost Your Cold Email Writing Skills

Want to improve your cold email writing skills, but don’t know where to begin? Listen to the full episode for more on this topic and check out our guide to sending legal cold emails along with tips for effective written communication.

Do you need more B2B brilliance? Check out the many ways you can follow us.

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

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

January 24, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Competitive Landscape Analysis, B2B Customer Journey Mapping, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Research Blog, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Marketers, B2B New Product Launch Research, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured B2B Marketing Teams, Featured B2B Product Managers, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Key Buying Criteria, Product Managers, Studies, Win/Loss Analysis /by Isabel Gautschi

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 Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsWe 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

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade Insights
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

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsB2B 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

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsB2B 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

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsMessaging 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

 Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsSometimes 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

 Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsEach 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

December 20, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B Brand Studies, B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Channel Market Research, B2B Competitive Landscape Analysis, B2B Customer Journey Mapping, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Opportunity Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Market Segmentation Research, Blog Posts, Featured Podcasts, Key Buying Criteria /by Sean Campbell

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:

  • Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today’s Ever-Changing Sales World
    Author Jill Konrath has a been a B2B sales rockstar for years, and she proves it yet again with this book.
  • Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
    This book earns its status as a classic, though it could have lost 100 pages and still been great.
  • Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
    You have to understand “jobs to be done” before you can adequately measure your success and prepare against disruption. See our in-depth review.

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.

What is Competitive Intelligence

The Spy Who Wasn’t – Clarifying Competitive Intelligence

November 1, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Competitive Landscape Analysis, B2B Customer Journey Mapping, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Opportunity Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Marketers, B2B Usability Testing, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Featured Podcasts, Interviews - Thought Leaders, Podcasts, Rethinking B2B Sales Podcast Series, Win/Loss Analysis /by Sean Campbell

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:

  • Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals
  • Ernst & Young

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

Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

Creating The Category - An Interview With Matt Ipri

Creating The Category – An Interview With Matt Ipri

September 6, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B Brand Studies, B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Channel Market Research, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Market Segmentation Research, B2B Marketers, B2B New Product Launch Research, Blog Posts, Featured Podcasts, Interviews - Thought Leaders, Measuring Marketing Success Podcast Series, Podcasts, Product Managers /by Sean Campbell

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.

 

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

July 21, 2017/0 Comments/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Research Blog, B2B Market Researchers, B2B New Product Launch Research, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured B2B Product Managers, Featured Podcasts, Podcasts, Product Managers, Win/Loss Analysis /by Sean Campbell

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.

How Partners Are Adapting to the Cloud

How Partners Are Adapting to the Cloud

May 3, 2017/2 Comments/in B2B Channel Market Research, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Marketers, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Featured Podcasts, Podcasts, Product Managers /by Sean Campbell

How Partners Are Adapting to the Cloud

This article is based off a B2B Revealed episode. You can listen to the episode or read the article below.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/competitiveintel/Episode146-HowPartnersAreAdaptingToTheCloud.mp3

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

Your partner channel sees the world differently now. The cloud has changed everything. For partners today, it’s adapt or die.

On-premise software and hardware are giving way to cloud-based solutions. This is forcing a swift evolution in go-to-market strategies for independent software vendors, systems integrators, and more.

B2B tech companies often have hundreds or even thousands of partners. That’s a huge and rapidly changing ecosystem.

As a market research firm working exclusively with B2B tech companies, we’ve witnessed scores of partner evolutions first hand. Here are eight trends that partner channel leaders should be aware of.

  1. Partners Curry Favor With Business Leaders. How Partners Are Adapting To The Cloud

B2B tech partners, as a rule, are moving away from targeting IT. Instead, they’re focusing on business leaders.

Many of our projects have revealed that partners are making significant moves to identify talent who can target business-decision-makers in client accounts. It’s a company-wide effort across delivery, sales, marketing, and more.

In truth, partners are struggling with this change. In the past, technology expertise alone could make a partner successful. For example, “we can set up SAP” used to be enough. Now, partners also need to be business experts. Something like, “we know how to transform your accounting” is a better strategy these days. Demands have evolved and become more complex.

  1. Vendor-Offered Business Training Gains Importance.

Since B2B tech partners are increasingly selling to business leaders, partners want a vendor who can help them speak to the business side of the deal.

In fact, many software vendors are expanding the amount of business training that partners can access so it matches or even exceeds that offered for technical training.

  1. Partner/Vendor Monogamy Is On The Way Out.

We’ve seen in our research that partners are less likely to work exclusively with a single vendor.

Rather, partners are increasingly offering a mix of services that cross various cloud platforms and apps. A partner may offer AWS, Azure, and Salesforce to its customer base, for example.

This represents a significant shift in partners’ business models. Ten years ago, it would have been rare to find a partner who offered competing technology stacks from the same shop.

  1. Partners Are Climbing Verticals.

Thanks to the cloud, partners can also be more vertical-focused than they were in the past.

Partners used to take vendors’ neutral solutions and make them more industry-specific.

Today, partners can simply point customers to a range of cloud-based solutions that are designed to meet the needs of a certain vertical market.

Partners of the past were technology implementers. The role is shifting to more of a business liaison.

  1. Vendors’ Partner Programs Are Lagging Behind The Times. How Partners Are Adapting To The Cloud

Many vendors are failing to capitalize on the changes in their partners’ world views.

Some vendors maintain a product-centric focus and foolishly try to force their partners to fit in with it. This doesn’t work so well now that partners are increasingly concentrating on business and industry.

As a result, partners and vendors often have conflicting strategies.

  1. Partners Are Less Restricted By Geography.

In the past, partners focused on regional dominance, perhaps by city or even country.

With the cloud, partners are less limited by regional boundaries.

Now that the buyer’s journey is primarily digital and many solutions are delivered via the cloud, the need to pick a local partner is greatly diminished.

Unfortunately, many vendors still assume regional selling and delivery constraints exist in how they award and classify partners.

This needs to change.

  1. Big Data Is Driving More Sales. How Partners Are Adapting To The Cloud

Vendors can now better support software as a service, infrastructure as a service, or platform as a service solution partners by providing them with usage data.

With this information, partners can learn whether customers are using a certain cloud service more than others, which features customers rely on the most, and which features are rarely used.

Equipped with this knowledge, partners have a better chance of finding and prioritizing smart sales opportunities.

  1. Big Deals Have Given Way To Recurring Revenue.

Lucrative development and service contracts for on-premise software installations were once the norm. Often, these contracts entailed years of service with custom extensions built by the partner.

With the rise of cloud-based solutions, many companies have switched their technology spending from CAPEX to OPEX.

The large cash outlays and contracts required for on-premise rollouts no longer exist.

Instead, smaller drips of recurring revenue have taken their place. Hello, subscriptions.

Know Your Partners.

In sum, any partner program leader who understands these trends has the knowledge to retain and grow partnerships.

If you don’t understand how these trends are impacting your partner channel, perhaps it’s time to start asking the tough questions that only a market research project can answer.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

February 7, 2017/4 Comments/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Customer Journey Mapping, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Opportunity Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Market Segmentation Research, B2B Marketers, B2B New Product Launch Research, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured B2B Marketing Teams, Featured B2B Product Managers, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Featured Podcasts, Key Buying Criteria, Podcasts, Product Managers, Win/Loss Analysis /by Sean Campbell

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.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/competitiveintel/Episode140-CompetingAgainstLuck.mp3

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.

 

 

Stall Points and Market Assumptions

Are Your Market Assumptions Still True?

November 19, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B Channel Market Research, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Opportunity Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Market Segmentation Research, B2B Marketers, B2B New Product Launch Research, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured B2B Marketing Teams, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Featured Podcasts, Interviews - Thought Leaders, Measuring Marketing Success Podcast Series, Podcasts, Product Managers /by Sean Campbell

You could be on a collision course for a stall point. Many companies don’t even recognize their market assumptions are wrong until it’s too late!

Stall points and incorrect market assumptions can almost be looked at as a Shakespearian tragedy. At some point, the market assumptions that allowed for the rise of a successful enterprise will no longer be true. Many companies are ill-equipped to recognize when their market assumptions are no longer true.

To explore this subject, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviewed Derek van Bever, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School and coauthor of “Stall Points.”

Are Your Market Assumptions Still True?

Many companies are ill-equipped to recognize when their market assumptions are no longer true.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/competitiveintel/Episode135-AreYourMarketAssumptionsStillTrue.mp3

You can listen to the interview or read the modified transcript below. In print form, this interview has been edited for clarity and readability.  B2B Revealed – ON: iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play

Sean: 

Today we’re going to be talking with Derek van Bever, coauthor of Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing Yours Doesn’t Have To.

Derek is a senior lecturer in a general management unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches building and sustaining a successful enterprise in the second year elective curriculum. He’s also the director of the Forum for Growth and Innovation, a research project sponsored by Professor Clay Christensen the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma. The project is focused on discovering, developing, and disseminating predictive theory on management and innovation.

Derek, welcome to the podcast.

Derek:

Thank you very much, Sean.

Understanding Growth In Fortune 100s

Sean: 

One of the reasons I think “Stall Points” is so great is because it’s based on really fantastic research. Tell me about the research that backs up the book’s findings.

Derek:

The book comes out of an assignment we were given by our corporate strategy members at the firm that I helped to found called the Corporate Executive Board (CEB). These members were really focused on what is probably the central question facing the strategist: How do we extend a top line growth run and how do we avoid a growth stall?

These members were really focused on what is probably the central question facing the strategist: How do we extend a top line growth run and how do we avoid a growth stall?

This is a gang that is very quantitatively oriented. They insist on rigor in research. We did what is, to our understanding, the most comprehensive analysis that has ever been done on the growth experience of the Fortune 100. Our study period extended from the invention of the index in 1950 to 2006.

For the 600 companies that had been in the index in that time, we looked at patterns of growth. We wanted to better understand:

  • The growth experience of very large firms.
  • How common it is for large firms to stall in their growth.
  • The market cap or talent defection consequences of stalls in growth.
  • The causes of stalls.

We produced some pretty interesting findings that had a big impact on the understanding and actions of a lot of our members.

What’s A Stall Point?

Sean: 

Could you define a stall point for us?

Derek:

This was a concept we had to invent. A stall point represents the point in a company’s history where there is a multi-year, and significant downturns in corporate revenue growth.  The stall point itself represents the greatest difference in the growth rate.

A stall point represents the point in a company’s history where there is a multi-year, and significant downturns in corporate revenue growth.

In our study of 600 firms, we examined each year they were in the Fortune 100 during 1950-2006. For each company, we examined a 10 year rolling average of each company’s revenue growth for the 10 years prior. We also looked at the 10 year rolling average looking forward.

For each year in their growth history, we were trying to understand the growth rate across the decade preceding and following the year where we saw the most significant inflection, or stall delta.

The stall point wouldn’t have been a point in time that the managers of the firm would have experienced some shudder of dread. Importantly, though, only 11 percent of the companies we studied could achieve a significant level of growth after the stall (defined as a 6 percent real growth rate in the period following the stall to the present day).

Hurry Up To Slow Down

Sean: 

In the book, you mention companies tended to accelerate into to the stall. Can you explain that?

Derek:

We’d like to believe that management has some foreknowledge that they are stalling. We’d like to think they’d have some sense when they’re in trouble.

Most want to imagine that if a management team notices that their company is slowing its growth, that they can bring it down for a landing the way that you might a glider. Unfortunately, firms behave a lot more like rocks than gliders when they approach a stall.

Unfortunately, firms behave a lot more like rocks than gliders when they approach a stall.

For example, we did an analysis of the average growth rate of stalling companies in the years before and after their stall point. You see a very common pattern where in the five years or so prior to a stall, companies are growing in the 8-10 percent range. In the year just prior to the stall, that jumps up to about 14 percent on average. Then they fall. For the next several years, they have negative growth. On average, for the next decade, they level out to like 1-2 percent. Very uninteresting real growth.

We hypothesize that growth before the stall may reflect the last gasp acquisition. This is when a company tries to use the acquisition to keep up a growth rate.

We hypothesize that growth before the stall may reflect the last gasp acquisition. This is when a company tries to use the acquisition to keep up a growth rate.

Stalls are often a surprise to management. What’s fascinating is that at times they’re carrying out their own growth strategy and something changes that they hadn’t been aware of and the bottom drops out. That’s extremely common.

Why Do Companies Stall?

Stall Points and Market Assumptions

Stall points happen when the market assumptions you’ve based your business on are no longer true. Photo Credit: © icholakov / Fotolia.

Sean: 

What drives a company into a stall?

Derek:

There is one common driver that we see.

I finally figured out why companies stall!

Seth Verry, the researcher who was in charge of managing the team on this project, came to me and my coauthor, Matt Olson, one day. Seth came running out of the office as we were taking the elevator down. He said, “I finally figured out why companies stall!” We’re like, “Okay Seth. What is it?” He said that it’s because the things they believed the longest or the things that they believe the most deeply are no longer valid. Basically, what they know is no longer true.

For example, in a lot of the stall companies that we’ve studied, there was someone, some voice in the wilderness, who was calling attention to the problems that were discovered. For stall companies, the voice in the wilderness wasn’t able to get traction. They weren’t able to get an audience inside the firm.

With companies who experienced a stall, the gap between what was believed to be true and the emerging external reality widened. That was the chasm into which the company’s fortunes fell.

The market assumptions that underpin our strategy begin as direct observations of reality. As managers, we’re interacting with customers and competitors and we get what’s going on. We build a strategy that is firmly rooted in reality. Those observations then become the foundation of our strategic plan. They become the pillars of the operational guidance that we give our management teams and frontline staff. Eventually, they become “unspoken orthodoxy,” if you will.

We run into trouble when these market assumptions become outdated.

For example, premium-position captivity can be in some ways be thought of as very, very similar to being disrupted. In this category, there is something companies try to convince their premium customers to accept that they are unwilling or no longer willing to accept from them. Here, the market position is eroded from below. These companies are captive to, in Clayton Christensen’s terms, the “sustaining trajectory.” In other words, companies try to improve their product to make more money from their best customers and become blind to the reality that’s emerging underneath them.

This clearly happened with Caterpillar, with the entry of Komatsu. This is from memory, but when confronted by Komatsu, Lee Morgan, the chairman of Caterpillar, said, “Komatsu prices their product 10-15 percent below ours. That tells you all you need to know about their quality.”

How could he have missed it so completely?

How could he have missed it so completely? Disdain and denial of the emerging competitor is in some ways a very human reaction.

Here is an analogy to understand premium-position captivity: we’re stuck at the top of the market and the momentum shifts to the bottom.

Innovation breakdown is a failure to sufficiently invest in new ventures. When the core of the business runs its course, there’s nothing to sufficiently replace it with.

With premature core abandonment, companies give up on the core of their business.

Take the example of Kmart overtaking Sears and then Walmart overtaking Kmart. Both Sears and Kmart had assumed that, logistics cost being what they were, this was a 1 percent gross margin business that you couldn’t do much about. Walmart realized that this probably wasn’t true. Instead, Walmart saw an opportunity to double the margin of the business.

Giving up on the core of the business for greener pastures is a sign of trouble.

Giving up on the core of the business for greener pastures is a sign of trouble.

There is also talent bench shortfall. People tend to hire people who look just like they do. If you have great chemistry during an employment interview, you may be thinking, “Oh boy, I really like the cut of that person’s jib. They’re just like me when I was younger.” That’s fine. That creates a nice interaction.

However, sometimes business needs people with very different experiences. Suddenly, you may need very different capabilities from those that were required in the past. In these instances, you may find yourself completely flatfooted when you’re hiring people and training them up to replace you. The challenges that we face in the future are very different from the challenges we faced in the past.

When we become unhinged from understanding what’s happening at the frontier of our market, that is what causes all of these different manifestations to stall.

Sean: 

Working with Fortune 500 accounts, sometimes I feel I have to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist.  When I interact with these large companies over time, it’s pretty clear each one aims for hiring people who focus on a certain way of processing problems and deriving solutions.  All of which affects their ability to understand their market assumptions in a non-biased way.

For example, one large Fortune 500 might focus on creative problem solving, another might focus on individuals who think about solutions from more of a quantitative perspective.

That focus on “like hires like” exhibits in all kinds of funny ways. One of our clients, a very well-known big tech company, they never show up on time for a meeting. Never. It’s the complete opposite for one of our accounts that is engineering driven. All fourteen of their research stakeholders on our project will show up precisely on time. It’s almost like a single tone when they join the conference bridge.

As a research firm, it’s our job to discover findings to meaningfully impact decisions.

As a research firm, it’s our job to discover findings to meaningfully impact decisions. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to package our findings so that they get through to our stakeholders within the context of their company climate. We have to figure out how they think and their base market assumptions in order to communicate effectively with them.

That said, I’d like to get your comments on how the leaders of companies impact stall points.

How Does Leadership Loss or Change Affect Market Assumptions and Stalls?

Derek:

Usually, in the firms we looked at, which made over a billion dollars in revenue, heavy dependence on an individual leader was the exception, not the rule. It is the exception to have a larger than life individual removed from the equation leaving a vacuum so drastic, you can see it externally. One example is Disney. Disney was caught (completely understandably) flatfooted when Walt Disney died.

For most of the enterprises we looked at, it would be a real board malfeasance if they were unprepared to fill the gap of a departed leader.

Homogenous Leadership Is a Problem

Sean, you mentioned in an earlier conversation that you asked your students to look at the composition of management teams and boards in companies to see how narrow the paths were to the very top of the house. You asked them to look at how often a single dominant business unit would be the staircase to the management committee or for inside members of the board.

I would encourage your listeners to do that same analysis for themselves. Celebrating a great core of business that is able to generate significant talent is great. However, I’d caution that the narrow sourcing of top leadership is very highly correlated with the “group think that misses things” phenomenon.

A real diversity in top leadership is important.

A real diversity in top leadership is important.

A bias toward promoting internal talent can be a real liability, as 3M discovered back in the day when they were trying to get into the consumer business and discovered that they really had no internal consumer competency. I suppose most companies wouldn’t do that any longer, but 3M is the great cautionary tale if you’re committed to only promoting from within.

Sean: 

Thanks for mentioning that exercise we talked about before. It was always really illuminating for the students and for me. I would have my students use it across different companies in the Fortune 500. I had my students look up the bios on the company web page for the 15-20 senior leaders. I had them read up on these leaders to see what business unit they worked in, and what business units they worked in over time. Often, we found a business unit that the bulk of those leaders came from. That business unit was the hotbed that gave the company its start or direction.

If the leadership of the company all comes from the same place, they probably have a pretty focused view of the world. Also, they’ll be ill-suited to deal with things like disruptive competitors, or an upstart who prices way below market value while still delivering a good quality product or service. Uniform leadership is also unlikely to develop cutting edge acquisition strategies and is even less likely to start any sort of disruptive business unit themselves.

Derek:

I’m sure most of your listeners are trying to figure out how to take advantage of the new opportunities that digital channel and products offer. Or they’re defending themselves against having their models picked apart by competitors who don’t have their asset base. That divide currently creates enormously different responses to threats and opportunities.

Sean: 

We see this kind of problem a lot these days within a typical B2B sales team. The selling model is so radically different now from a few years ago. Major changes have happened. Many large tech companies just can’t even conceptualize how these upstarts are selling, much less the changes to the marketing funnel, and the buyer’s journey that these same upstarts are leveraging. All of which means that it’s harder now for big tech companies to figure out how the other guys are being successful and how they can mirror that success.

What would be your advice for either minimizing the likelihood of a stall or surviving one in an effective way?

Red Flags and Market Assumptions

Your sales team may pick up on red flags that the C-Suite hasn’t noticed. Photo Credit: © Oleksandr Rozhkov / Fotolia.

Do You Know How To Spot a Red Flag?

Derek:

Of the 600 Fortune 100 companies we studied, 87 percent stalled in their growth at some point during the 50 years we looked at. Half of that group were able to restart again to some level of growth at about 1- 2 percent above GDP. Everybody who restarted, restarted fast. They were growing, they stalled, and they got right back up on the horse.

Our hypothesis for this was that the companies that were able to restart their growth after a stall were able to quickly and accurately diagnose how their market assumptions had fallen short of the current situation. They reevaluated faulty market assumptions that led to poor strategies toward customers, markets, competitors, technology, etc.

One of the most effective ways for stimulating action is actually covered in our book. At the end of our research, we sat down with the whole team and asked, “Knowing what you know now and looking back across all the case studies we’ve done, what could or should management have seen in the moment that would have been a red flag?”

We then created a red flag diagnostic made up of 50 questions about finance, sales, marketing innovation, R&D strategy and business planning. We recommend these things be investigated inside the firm. It’s a test, essentially, for:

  • The CEO.
  • The executive committee.
  • The next generation of leaders.

It’s interesting to give these folks the test and then compare their answers.  Where does the CEO see a problem that the rest of the firm doesn’t? Does the rest of the firm see a problem that the CEO doesn’t? Where do the younger managers see things that the more experienced managers don’t? All of these gaps in perception are really interesting to investigate.

You’re likely to find some premium captivity. The sales force knows whether customers are no longer willing to accept a price increase. The sales force is going to see this in a way that top management will be insulated from.

Top management may grumble, “We’ve added more products to the solution we sell. We’ve added more features to this product. We’ve increased the pricing. It’s not taking in the marketplace. It must be sales.”

While management may be patting each other on the back and saying, “How happy are we?” The next generation may be saying, “Oh God, they don’t see it, do they?”

While management may be patting each other on the back and saying, “How happy are we?” The next generation may be saying, “Oh God, they don’t see it, do they?”

The difference in responses to the red flag test is where you can really begin to spot and isolate the things you should focus on.

Anybody can go get the book or go online and download the appendix that these questions are in and do as I’m suggesting. If nothing else, it’s a great conversation for the management. It could really spot some very isolated things that you need to focus on.

Don’t Ignore Your Dead Deals, Study Them

Sean: 

From a competitive intelligence standpoint, your sales force might be your first indicator that a competitor is probing your customer base and trying to win them to their side.

We also tell our clients that it’s important to examine the companies that made no decision at all, or at least it appears that they didn’t.  These are the entries in your CRM that aren’t marked as a loss but are marked with comments like – “stopped responding,” “didn’t have budget,” or “didn’t request a proposal.”

What’s interesting is that a lot of times, we’ve found that dead no decisions were wins for a new and disruptive competitor.

For example, when we probe dead deals, as opposed to probing losses, we find that 50-60 percent of them are a loss to a disruptive competitor. Your sales leadership is probably thinking, “We’ll just get them next time, they weren’t ready to buy.”  But they were ready to buy.  Just not from you.

Finally, these disruptive competitors usually start eating at your customer base from the bottom, meaning they are focused on smaller deals. This makes it even harder to realize when what appeared to be dead deals were actually losses.

Derek:

You remind me of something that Clay and I wrote in an article a couple of years ago on disruption and consulting. In the course of our research, Clay said something quite memorable. He said, “Disruption always enters via the basement door.”

Just as you’re saying, we get so focused on how well we are serving our Fortune 50 customers, how well we are growing those relationships etc., that the threats bubble up unnoticed from below. In classic disruptive response or non-response asymmetric motivation, when our small customers are getting eaten away we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, right, that’s too bad but how are we doing in our key accounts?”

That’s completely understandable from a human perspective and completely understandable from today’s economics perspective but somebody should be paying very much attention to those dead, no decision outcomes and saying, “What are we missing? How is the market evolving away from us in a way that we should wake up to today?” That’s a really good point.

Sean: 

Before we wrap, why don’t you tell me a little about the work that you’re doing today.

Derek:

Clay and I got to know each other back when we were first working on the research that ultimately led to Stall Points. Clay had just published Innovator’s Dilemma. (One of us has sold millions of copies. The other one hasn’t. I tell my students that they can join an incredibly select club if they buy “Stall Points.” Take it out from your local library or buy it if you want to boost our sales figures!) I now teach in Clay’s course and I think you mentioned the name. It’s called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise.

I guess the summary of my points so far is that if you’re lucky enough and skilled enough to build a successful enterprise, the reward for you as the leader is that someday you’re going to have to change.

The better your business is, the more clearly you lead your segment, the harder it’s going to be to pull off that change.

The better your business is, the more clearly you lead your segment, the harder it’s going to be to pull off that change.

Somewhat ironically, you, as the CEO of the organization, are going to be the only one who really sees the need for that change. In some ways, you now have to be on two skis. You have to make sure that the existing business competes and runs as well as it can. On the other side, you have to lay the foundation for what’s to come. That is the lonely position of the leader.

We are helping to train what we hope will be tomorrow’s leaders on how to spot these kinds of emerging concerns. Then, personally, Clay and I are in a team working on a larger problem for all of us that he has dubbed “The Capitalist’s Dilemma.” That is, how do we restart economic growth and employment growth and how do we shift from investing in innovations that liberate capital and destroy jobs and redirect that capital and focus into businesses that consume capital and create jobs?

How do we get the economy moving again? It’s a big problem, but stay tuned because we’ve published a little bit on this in HBR. We’re drawing on the alumni network of the school- in our case, the 9,000 students who have taken our course over the last dozen years. We’re using them as partners to understand how this problem presents in the sectors they now work in such as government, finance, and corporations. We’re trying to understand things we could collectively do to restart growth and job growth.

We’re trying to understand things we could collectively do to restart growth and job growth.

I think we are quite committed to focusing on the kinds of innovations that generate the most growth. I welcome your listeners to check out The Capitalist’s Dilemma and get involved in any way they might like if this problem worries them as much as it does us.

Sean: 

That’s an incredibly worthwhile area of work. I want to thank you for being on the podcast. Your kind comments to your colleague aside, I think you’re owed at least a few more thousand sales. “Stall Points” is a really great book.

This transcript was modified for clarity and readability by Isabel Gautschi.

This interview 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’

September 21, 2016/0 Comments/in B2B Brand Studies, B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Go-To-Market Research, B2B Market Opportunity Research, B2B Market Researchers, B2B Market Segmentation Research, B2B Marketers, Blog Posts, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Featured B2B Marketing Teams, Featured B2B Product Managers, Featured CI Teams, Featured Market Research Teams, Featured Podcasts, Key Buying Criteria, Podcasts, Product Managers, Rethinking B2B Sales Podcast Series /by Sean Campbell

Key Buying Criteria: The Path to ‘Yes’

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

http://traffic.libsyn.com/competitiveintel/Key_Buying_Criteria_-_The_Path_to_Yes.mp3

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.

Page 1 of 212

General Inquiries

  • Cascade Insights will never share your information with 3rd parties.View our privacy policy.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Top B2B Blog Award

Top Market Research Blog Award

Categories

  • B2B Brand Studies
  • B2B Buyer Persona Research
  • B2B Channel Market Research
  • B2B Competitive Landscape Analysis
  • B2B Customer Journey Mapping
  • B2B Go-To-Market Research
  • B2B Market Opportunity Research
  • B2B Market Research Blog
  • B2B Market Researchers
  • B2B Market Segmentation Research
  • B2B Marketers
  • B2B Marketing Blog
  • B2B New Product Launch Research
  • B2B Sales
  • B2B Usability Testing
  • Competitive Intelligence Teams
  • Key Buying Criteria
  • Measuring Marketing Success Podcast Series
  • Product Managers
  • Rethinking B2B Sales Podcast Series
  • Studies
  • Win/Loss Analysis
Sean Campbell and Isabel Gautschi

Connect With Us

13908 SE Stark St Suite A Portland, OR 97233

503.898.0004

hello@cascadeinsights.com

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

B2B Market Research

  • — Competitive Landscape Analysis
  • — Product / Service Launches
  • — Market Opportunity Research
  • — Channel / Market Research
  • — Customer Journey Mapping
  • — Market Segmentation Research
  • — Key Buying Criteria Research
  • — Win / Loss Analysis
  • — Brand Studies
  • — Go-to-Market Research
  • — Buyer Persona Research
  • — B2B Usability Testing

B2B Marketing Services

  • — Podcast Production
  • — Content Strategy
  • — Persona Development
  • — Messaging Upgrades
  • — Content Creation

Blogs

  • — B2B Market Research Blog
  • — B2B Marketing Blog

B2B Revealed Podcast


B2B is a complex and challenging field, but most of all, it is fascinating. Join Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, as he shares over 20 years of experience in the B2B market.

Scroll to top