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Win-Loss Analysis: Is Your Team Set Up To Succeed?

Win-Loss Analysis: Is Your Sales Team Set Up To Succeed?

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Improving win rates is within your control. After many B2B win-loss analysis research projects, we have found that simple adjustments can make a huge difference to the effectiveness of your sales team.

Largely, it comes down to ensuring your sales team has the time, tools, and training to do their jobs. Sadly, this is all too rare in the world of B2B tech.

We recently hosted four B2B sales experts on the B2B Revealed Podcast to learn what B2B sales teams really need to do their jobs well. Check out the episodes and summaries below.
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B2B Brand Research: Don't Skip the Qual

B2B Brand Research: Don’t Skip the Qual

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Applying a B2C approach to B2B brand research just doesn’t work.

With B2C, it’s of utmost importance to make sure that general awareness of the brand is really high. (Think product placement for Coca-Cola on movies and TV, billboards, etc.)

But with B2B, it’s much more important to make sure the right people are aware of the brand. Often, it doesn’t matter whether the general population is aware of a B2B product or service. Only a handful of very specific professionals would ever use the solution anyway.
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Interview with Dr. Joel Kvedar on the Future of Connected Health

The Future of Connected Health

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Today’s subject is the future of Connected Health, based on a conversation with author and TEDx speaker, Dr. Joe Kvedar.

Dr. Kvedar takes us through the current state of Connected Health in this episode. We cover some of the fascinating technology integrations out there today, an array of unique startups, and some of the regulation and compliance issues that are hindering Connected Health solutions.

In This Episode

  • Why the Healthspan is so much shorter than the Lifespan
  • How a variety of Connected Health startups are helping to lengthen the Healthspan
  • Policy and Regulations that challenge the growth of Connected Health solutions and startups.
  • How technology is being used in the world of Connected Health from Voice Analytics to Biomarkers.
  • The Future of Connected Health solutions and their impact on the Healthspan

To listen to this interview on your phone, visit the B2B Revealed show in Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast player.

As always, we’d love for you to take a minute to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And, if you have any feedback (or would like to work with us on a podcast of your own), you can reach us at hello@cascadeinsights.com.

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

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.
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B2B Marketing Strategy

Are You Shouting Into The Void? Market Research Lessons For Marketing

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Enthusiastic praise, frequent boosts in industry publications, social engagement and shares… By these measures, our marketing was, well, awesome. Especially seeing as we have a pretty niche focus: market research for B2B software companies.

But, as we’ve said before, popular and profitable aren’t necessarily the same thing. We knew we had to gauge our marketing success in other ways.

Was our content reaching our target customers? Did our content help scoot buyers down the sales funnel?

We needed answers! Luckily, we know how to get them. We are a market research firm after all.

The Problem

We were getting a lot of positive feedback from our podcast listeners, blog readers, and social media followers. That, along with the steady increase in cold inbound marketing leads told us that the quality of our content was not our top concern.

People liked what they saw when they saw it. So how could we get more people to see it? Especially our target customers?

We went right to the source and asked them.

We Market Researched Ourselves

Who We Asked

We reached out to a few of our clients in companies we would like to do more projects with in the future. Our interview subjects were executives in the marketing or market research departments of enterprise and mid-market B2B software companies.

What We Asked

In this case, we decided a survey would not suffice.

Instead, we wanted to have conversations with our clients that would allow for answers we may not have thought to ask questions about. So, we crafted a discussion guide for in-depth interviews to get the conversation started.

We designed the discussion guide to tease out when and how target customers find and consume content marketing. Here are few examples of our questions:

  • When you have a business problem, where do you first look for more information? Google search? Internal company publications? Social feeds? Online communities?
  • What keywords do you search? Do you type in a phrase or a question?
  • When looking for a market research vendor, do you vet their content marketing (blogs, newsletters, podcasts, etc.)? Or do you focus on the root pages of their website (home page, about us, etc.)?

Other questions were designed to reveal how target customers evaluate the merit of the content marketing pieces they come across. Some questions in this category included:

  • Do you ever forward content to your colleagues? What would prompt you to do so?
  • What types of content do you read all the way through?
  • Do you subscribe to newsletters? Do you read them?

What We Found Out

Over the course of the interviews, we discovered something major: there is a huge difference between the way folks in mid-market software companies consume content marketing vs. those in enterprise software companies.

Basically, we realized our market segmentation needed more nuance.

Our B2B marketing strategy was working great for mid-market companies.

To our relief, we got mostly positive feedback from our clients working in mid-market companies. Some remembered finding us through a Google search or being impressed by a topic covered on the Cascade Insights Blog or the B2B Revealed Podcast.

In other words, our mid-market clients had easily sought out or come across our content, and liked what they saw. This was just the sort of feedback any marketer wants to hear.

Enterprise software companies required a whole new marketing strategy.

The story with enterprise software companies was quite different though.

Sorry service firms, enterprise customers probably aren’t reading your content marketing, even though it’s good.

Our enterprise buyers said they didn’t scour the Internet in search of new service firms to work with. Instead, they preferred to focus on vendors that had already been approved by their companies’ procurement teams.

Same deal with content. Most of our enterprise clients said they first checked internal sources of information for their own company. Next stop was old standbys like Gartner, Forrester, or other syndicated firms that target their industry niche.

Our enterprise buyers said they were not looking at any service firm’s B2B content marketing. They just don’t have the time for it.

Your website better be amazing though.

Okay, so the enterprise buyer is not really the audience for our podcast or blog. But, our enterprise interviewees made clear that they do pay close attention to vendors’ websites.

The root pages, that is.

They’ll spend a few minutes perusing the website to get a sense of the sort of projects the firm specializes in and what kind of companies they have worked with.  Our enterprise interviewees emphasized that they spend only a few minutes on service firms’ websites though. (We didn’t ask about how much time they spend looking at product websites.)

Clear, efficient B2B messaging is key.

If a service firm is lucky enough to make it onto a preferred vendor list, they still only have a couple minutes to impress potential enterprise buyers with their website.

How Market Researching Ourselves Convinced Us To Change Our Ways

These interviews gave us a lot of ideas for honing our B2B marketing strategy.

Create Separate Approaches for Mid-Market & Enterprise Target Customers.

Since our mid-market and enterprise clients are likely to find, view, and vet us in totally different ways, we realized we needed to have separate marketing strategies to reach and woo both.

For our blog, podcast, and newsletter, we needed to assume the audience was mostly from mid-market companies. If we kept on doing what we were doing, we’d probably reach these folks just fine. So. Keep producing quality, useful content and give potential clients a variety of ways to subscribe, depending on their preference. Check.

For enterprise buyers, we needed to focus on our website.

Make The Website Smooth as Butter.

Our enterprise interviewees revealed that our website is the first- and likely only- marketing that a potential enterprise client will see from our firm. And they’ll be focusing on our home page and services, not so much on our podcast or blog.

We immediately took steps to make our website even more concise, streamlined, and compelling. We:

  • Sped up the site by switching to a dedicated CDN (Cloudfare).
  • Identified our most important messaging and where it was located on our website.
  • Removed unnecessary pages to more easily funnel customers where we wanted them to go.
  • Redesigned several root pages to visually highlight our projects.

Shine a spotlight on the team.

The interviews with our mid-market clients really showed us that a personal connection to a content creator was a big motivation for engagement with our content.

Several mid-market interviewees said that they listened to the podcast, subscribed to the newsletter, etc. because they had met or worked with our CEO, Sean Campbell.

True, they may not have had time to read or listen to everything we sent them, but that wasn’t really the point. They liked the periodic reminders of Cascade Insights’ innovative market research.

Even though this was positive and useful information, it prompted us to start considering how we could leverage other personal connections to our talented team of analysts to drive more of our content marketing efforts.

It makes sense. Market research projects are an investment. Clients want to know that the whole team has expertise, not just the leadership of the firm.

Bam. New marketing initiative. Amplify the brilliance of our whole team of analysts.

Always Answer The Phone.

Our mid-market clients weren’t shy about revealing their email addresses in their interactions with service firms. These buyers said they sent messages, filled out contact forms, or subscribed to newsletters when interested in a service firm.

Enterprise clients, on the other hand, were much more likely to call.

Before we market researched ourselves, our company phone had simply forwarded to the boss’s mobile number. He’s a busy guy though, and couldn’t always pick up. Being a small firm, we didn’t think that was much of a problem. But, from the interviews with our enterprise clients, we learned these folks wanted to get in touch right away, not leave a message.

So, we quickly hired a high-end answering service, Ruby. There was an immediate uptick in quality, inbound leads. It was a huge payoff for such a simple adjustment.

Pay For Impressions, Not Just Clicks.

Our mid-market clients said that they subscribe to our content to remind themselves that we exist.

Of course, we’d also like to remind our enterprise clients that we exist. But, as we covered earlier, they probably won’t read vendor blogs. For enterprise folks, pay-per-click ads for our content would likely miss the mark.

We realized that impressions ads are a better approach for our enterprise buyers. Twitter and Facebook, for example, let users pay to have ads that target a specifically chosen audience. For instance, all Facebook users in your CRM system.

This, for our purposes, was perfect. Scrolling past our ad could gently and passively remind enterprise clients that there is an excellent B2B market research firm out there called Cascade Insights.

Consider The Case Study.

We heard from both mid-market and enterprise buyers that they’d really like to see a case study from us.

The enterprise folks emphasized that when vetting service firms, they want to see that the firm has handled problems like theirs for companies like theirs.

Sigh. Case studies are a bit of a thorn in our side. A zillion non-disclosure agreements are signed for any given project. Who wants to read a case study that is mostly redacted?

However, we can solve the problem in another way. We can look back through our thousands of projects and do a quantitative study on those. That way, we won’t give away any one client’s findings, but reveal larger trends. We can reap meta insights without compromising any of our clients’ anonymity. For example, here’s what we learned from a plethora of win-loss analysis projects.

This Is Why You Should Market Research Yourself.

For an informal qualitative study on a few target clients, we reaped a goldmine of insight and several new B2B marketing strategies to boot.

To all the other marketing managers out there, imagine what a formal market research project could do for your business problem.

This blog post is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We offer market research and marketing services to the B2B tech sector.

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. There are no distinguishing features.

Successful products have something that sets them apart.

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

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

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

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

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

3. The product is hard to use.

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?To be blunt, B2B software companies are infamous for releasing unusable products. It’s sad, but true.

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

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

4. First-time-users are intimidated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The partners aren’t helping.

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?Sometimes, the partners matter just as much as the product.

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

Don’t underestimate the importance of partners.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. The product is superfluous.

Don’t exceed the needs of the market.

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

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

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

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

8. You’re targeting an extinct buyer persona.

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?Buyer personas need updating. This is very important. If your buyer personas haven’t been refreshed in years, you may be building a go-to-market strategy or designing a product launch to target a persona that no longer exists.

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

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

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

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

The Cure

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


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

You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual

You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual

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In an ideal world, all B2B research would result in a tidy heap of quantitative statistics, graphs, and charts all pointing to a clear course of action. Company leaders would glimpse the dramatic numbers and approve strategy adjustments right away.

But, as we know, fantasy is rarely reality.

This holds true with B2B market research. Many B2B tech companies would love to commission sweeping surveys that yield conclusive insights about the market.

Unfortunately, given that B2B tech is a rather niche field, it is often extremely difficult to get an appropriate sample for mathematically responsible conclusions.


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

Let’s walk through some of the unique challenges of conducting quantitative research for B2B tech.

B2B ≠ B2C

The B2B Buyer’s Journey Is More Complex than B2C

Market research for B2B companies is very different from B2C.

B2B deals are more complex. A CEB study found that an average of 5.4 buyers had to formally approve each B2B purchase. Whereas with B2C, there are usually far fewer buyers involved.

Conventional wisdom says that about five people are necessary to make a wise B2B purchase, as it’s usually a significant spend for the business. Hence, there is much more wooing involved to push through a B2B sale than a B2C one. Often, months or even years are spent cultivating relationships before that big B2B buy.

Small B2B Target Markets Make for Poor Survey Samples.

Be careful with sample sizes for quantitative B2B research.In many cases, B2B companies target much narrower markets than B2C companies do. A bottle of ketchup can be marketed and sold all over the world. Whereas B2B solutions, from our experience, may have a total addressable market of 100,000 companies or far less. This is a huge difference from a B2C product that could legitimately be sold to any US consumer who might walk into a grocery store.

Smaller target markets are one of the main reasons why quantitative research isn’t always the best method for understanding B2B business problems.

To prove this out, let’s just consider the math. Say your client gives you a list of 5,000 people they’d like to hear from. According to one sample calculator, you’d need 537 responses for a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 4 percent.

Response rates being what they are, you’re not likely to achieve that number.

B2B experts know to anticipate low responses. For instance, Kapost wrote of a survey effort,

“First, we were ashamed of our response rate. I’m talking a tail-between-the-legs, oh-goodness-that’s-bad kind of reaction. But after speaking with others in our industry, we now know that 1.1%-2.6% is actually quite good.”

Sure, your response rate could be higher than that, but it would have to be MUCH higher to get an appropriate sample.

So, back to our example. Let’s say you get a 2.7 percent response rate. That means you only get to talk to 135 of the target 537 people from the initial 5,000 person list.

It gets worse. Even if you got a 10 percent response rate, you’d still only get to talk to 500 people. Unfortunately, that’s still shy of a reasonable sample for the study.

Always evaluate whether you can get a mathematically responsible sample when considering survey methods and research design.

Surveys Are Limited Tools For Understanding the B2B Buyers’ Journey.

Typically, B2B stakeholders have a lot of questions about the buyers that filled out their surveys. However, they may not realize that surveys aren’t always the best way to understand the B2B buyer’s journey.

Remember, the average B2B sale involves about five buyers. To understand how they reached the decision to purchase, you’d have to hear from each of those five buyers and learn their role in that choice.

Back to our example. Let’s say you get a 2.7 percent response rate on your 5,000 person sample. That means you have 135 responses. Then, say that responses are somehow magically divided equally into five uniform roles in the purchase decision. That means you have roughly 27 responses from each persona. That’s just too small a number for solid analysis.

How To Get It Right For B2B

There are some ways to use quantitative surveys effectively in B2B. They’re not without compromise though.

Up The Sample Size.

First, you could get a larger sample and then generate a larger number of responses.

Frankly, this isn’t always possible. Perhaps the individuals the study targets are in an extremely niche market. Or, the research focuses on a certain country where the solution in question isn’t well known.

There are a million reasons why it could be difficult to get an appropriately sized sample for decent quantitative B2B research.

Ask The Client To Give You a List of People To Survey.

While this option could take some of the leg work off market research firms, there is an inherent challenge.

Any list a client provides is likely to be biased, especially if it’s based on a mix of marketing and sales leads. These leads are already predisposed to consider or buy a solution from the client. These folks alone won’t give an accurate portrayal of the client’s position in the marketplace. For that, you’d have to also hear from competitor customers and customers that decided not to buy at all.

Concentrate On Getting More Responses.

You could also put a ton of effort into initial and follow-up outreach to survey respondents to increase the response rate.

While these efforts may get you more responses from a small list of targets, it doesn’t change the fact that the list was small to begin with.

Improve The Quality Of Your Sample.

Take a page from qualitative B2B research.

Accept the fact that you’re not going to get more responses, and get to know more about who responded to the survey.

This doesn’t allow you to project your findings across a broad population in every way you might like to. However, you can have more confidence in your findings.

Stop Hitting Divide.

Finally, you might have to limit your quantitative goals.

For example, for those 5,000 targets in our example, if you adjust the acceptable margin of error to 5 percent, you only need 357 responses.

You also might have to stop hitting divide on your calculator. Say a stakeholder wants to project the research findings onto the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and the US. If you don’t have enough responses to meaningfully do that, don’t try. Seriously, don’t try to take 357 responses from 10 different countries and make projections for each individual country. That’s just bad math.

Also, you may have to limit the level of analysis you do on a persona, title, or industry basis. For example, if you’re doing research on key buying criteria, you might be able to figure out how an organization buys and who’s part of a typical buying committee. But, you won’t be able to drill down into how each individual buyer buys or is influenced.

Don’t Ship an Illusion.

Make every effort to avoid presenting faulty data as a firm conclusion.

If the sample for your survey can’t provide an accurate representation of the populations you’re trying to study, you may have to make the tough choice to ditch quant altogether. Otherwise, you’ll be making a bunch of bad decisions on flawed statistics.

Ditching quant can be challenging to propose because senior stakeholders often want information that they know can’t be argued with. They want insights that come with lots of numbers, graphs, and charts.

However, you’re not helping that senior stakeholder if you design a survey that can’t possibly get a sufficient number of responses for good analysis. That’s worse than not giving them quant in the first place.

Luckily, ditching quantitative doesn’t mean you can’t study the problem. Perhaps you just need to use a qualitative method instead.

Qualitative Research To The Rescue!

Qualitative B2B research can often answer B2B questions much more effectively than a survey.Qualitative research can often answer B2B questions much more effectively than a survey. It’s a good compromise. While you won’t have the ability to project the findings from a qualitative effort to a broader population, you will be able to answer many questions and have confidence in the results.

You’ll be able to deeply investigate key themes, drivers, and motivations.

In addition, you won’t need nearly as large a target list as you would for a quantitative study. For many of our B2B qualitative research studies, 12-20 research participants adequately cover a homogenous population.

Also, recruiting success rates are typically higher for qualitative studies. In our experience, as high as 30 percent of the population under review responds. This means that not only do you need fewer respondents in the study, but you can recruit more people from the same list than if you were doing a quant study. Further, your initial list of targets gets to be much smaller as well.

For example, you could tackle five different buyer personas in a study that only involves 50 interviews with a target list of about 500 people. That’s 10 interviews per persona.

It is important to keep in mind, though, that these qualitative approaches are not going to allow you to project your results onto a broader population.

They will give you a great deal more discovery, insight, and investigation than you already have on-hand.

Better yet, it keeps you from using quant in ways that are not only inappropriate but dangerous. You don’t want bad math informing business decisions.

In sum, the next time a stakeholder tries to take quant study beyond its design limits, just say “no.” Chances are, qualitative will get you results both you and your stakeholders can use to inform smart decisions.

This blog post and podcast episode are brought to you by Cascade Insights.

How Good Researchers Give Bad News

How Good Researchers Give Bad News

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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

B2B market researchers don’t always get to give good news. Researchers often find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain that the product isn’t great, sales efforts are failing, or marketing is kind of “meh”.

To avoid a shoot-the-messenger scenario, B2B market researchers need excellent business communication skills. Here’s our approach to delivering bad news in a constructive way.

People pay for B2B market research when something goes wrong.

Our research is often commissioned to identify a problem and to provide a solution. Basically, something has gone wrong and our clients want to know how to fix it.

Breaking bad news to clients is just part of the job. We sometimes joke that our unofficial motto is, “We deliver bad news.”

For example, we’ve had to explain to a client that their field sales in the UK were so bad, customers were fleeing in droves. Another client had to be told that the upstart that they didn’t think was a threat very much was one. Convinced they had the superior product, one client was shocked to learn that the buyers they wanted were truly satisfied with a rival’s less flashy product. In another instance, our client thought they were losing deals to a competitor only because they had a cheaper solution. It turned out that not only was it cheaper, but customers also preferred the competing solution’s features and capabilities.

Needless to say, we’ve had a lot of practice giving tough feedback to clients. More importantly, we’ve learned how to deliver bad news in a way that motivates clients to absorb and act on our B2B market research findings.

Here are 10 ways we turn bad news into constructive criticism.

1. Be Direct.

Spit it out. Being straightforward is important.

Indirectness often leads to confusion as this excellent Harvard Business Review article explains in a discussion of “the dangers of easing in.”

Justify that research spend. Let your clients know what you found out.

2. Put On The Kevlar.

B2B market researchers need excellent communication skills.
Bad news tends to elicit strong reactions. No one likes to hear that they messed up or don’t measure up to the competition. Defensiveness is only human.

But don’t try to duck and cover. Answer from the knowledge base you have and shoot back when necessary.

3. Use Data To Defeat Fear.

People often look for a way out first and a solution second. Many prefer evasive maneuvers rather than facing up, especially if they are at fault.

If you have to give bad news, expect your clients to question your data and insights.

Any bad news you present needs to be firmly supported with data. That data needs to be backed up by a strong methodology.

Further, make sure your conclusions are backed up by more than one data set.

For example, qualitative B2B research is great for adding depth to quantitative studies, as it gets at the “why” behind the numbers.

Incorporate as many relevant research approaches into your findings as time and budget allow. This will make it less easy for your client to challenge your analysis.

Don’t give the client any room to question your market research findings. Instead, direct their focus toward what to do with those findings.

4. Acknowledge Sample Bias. (No Sample Is Free From It.)

Some groups will have inherent biases.

For example, in win-loss studies, it’s important to talk with customers who have actively and happily opted for the competitor. Obviously, you can expect that these customers will have some negative views of the client. It doesn’t hurt to warn the client before you dive into their criticisms.

Remind your stakeholders that the research demanded that you specifically seek out buyers with negative views of them. Point out that understanding customer critiques will allow the client to strategize more effectively.

5. Stay Focused On The Findings.

As you present your research, stay on target. Share the insights fully before expressing your feelings about it.

This isn’t the time to sound sympathetic. Save such feelings for after the readout.

Remember, you want this to be a conversation about what the findings mean and what to do with them. Don’t get sidetracked by wallowing in the problem and why it isn’t someone’s fault.

6. Tell Them Why The Status Quo Must Die.

Clients have often invested years in the status quo of their company.

When you deliver bad news, you’re essentially saying that business-as-usual isn’t working. An individual or a team has messed up or missed something, or a strategy has fallen obsolete.

Expect this to elicit strong reactions from an individual or two.

Rather than getting sidetracked by these strong feelings from an individual, focus on the research stakeholders as a group. Look for signals from the rest of those present to see if they agree or disagree with your approach.

7. Describe The Disaster You’ve Averted.

Explain how your findings are not just identifying a current problem, but preventing future ones.

Don’t just punish your clients with bad news, show them how putting out the fire now will save them trouble down the road. Everybody loves Smokey The Bear.

8. Offer A Cure.

Something is wrong, yes, but it can be fixed. Provide options for addressing the situation, if only to start a dialogue in a positive direction. Good B2B market research is designed to illuminate areas that could use some work. And to offer solutions.

It’s not your job to know the client’s business as well as they do. It is your job to take what you have learned and try to extrapolate what solutions might make sense and at least start a conversation in that direction.

Offering potential solutions will also set you apart as a researcher. So many others just provide data.

Too many researchers don’t bother with offering potential fixes. They think, “I’m here to give you the data. It’s your job to figure out what it means.”

But. Consider how this makes you sound.

Think about it, would you just want a doctor to diagnose you with some strange scary illness and leave? Wouldn’t you rather know that there is a potential cure? Hope matters.

9. Remember: There Was a Fire Before You Arrived.

Tech companies usually purchase B2B market research when something has gone wrong. It’s just the nature of the game. They’re losing sales, they’re watching a rival triumph, the market has changed in some way, etc. When these things happen, companies want researchers to identify the problem and point them toward correcting it. They wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth if you told them they were doing everything perfectly and still losing out. That’s not helpful.

Delivering bad news is a necessary evil for solving problems. No pain no gain.

10. Find The Flipside.

Keep in mind, the news isn’t all bad.

Many clients simply need to adjust their strategies to emphasize their strengths. We’ve seen clients tripping over new product development efforts but excelling in sales, for example. Or marketing that has emphasized features when it was the ease of integration that was convincing most customers.

You get to illuminate this more pleasant and hopeful side of the equation when you suggest a path forward from the research findings.

Good researchers know not just to drop a bomb and leave. Instead, they deliver the bad news, weather the pushback, and point the client in a direction that can improve their business.

Bad news can be a good catalyst.

This podcast and article are brought to you by Cascade Insights. We provide B2B market research and marketing services to the B2B technology sector.

Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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.

B2B Market Segmentation Research

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

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

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

This article is based off a B2B Revealed episode.

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

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

Tech companies focus heavily on figuring out the types of customers they have. 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

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?

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 solution 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.”

We’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.

Change 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 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

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 B2B market research questions is, “Are all current solutions in the marketplace lacking certain capabilities?”  If the answer is “yes,” the stage is set for disruption. Someone is going to realize that there is a job that is not being satisfied.

Disruption Red Flags

There are many ways to complete a job. Many companies make the mistake of assuming that all 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.

Here’s another B2B tech sector example. 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.

Your 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 measuring 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.

We highly recommend that B2B market research professionals and company leaders of all kinds read “Competing Against Luck.”

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights, a hybrid B2B market research and marketing firm. We research the who, what, when, where, how, and why of B2B tech sector buyers and how best to message to them.