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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

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Never waste an opportunity to learn from a lost deal.

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

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

Rigid Pricing Models 

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

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

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

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

Whose problem is this?

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

Key Lessons

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

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

Research Remedies

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

All-Or-Nothing Attitude


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose problem is this?

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

Key Lessons

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

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

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

Research Remedies

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

Sales Not Doing Their Homework

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

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

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

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

Whose problem is this?

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

Key Lessons:

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

Research Remedies:

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

Ignoring the Customer’s Existing Environment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Problem Is This?

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

Key Lessons:

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

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

Research Remedies:

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

Messaging Is Speaking The Wrong Language

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

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

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

Whose Problem Is This?

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

Key Lessons:

Talk to buyers in a language they’ll understand.

Research Remedies:

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

Star-Crossed Use Cases

Sometimes it’s just not a great fit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Problem Is This?

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

Key Lessons

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

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

Research Remedies

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

Turn Loss Into A Strategic Gain

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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 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

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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.


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. 

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

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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.

Key Buying Criteria: The Path to ‘Yes’

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Key Buying Criteria: The Path to ‘Yes’

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

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

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

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

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

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 B2B marketing and sales messaging.

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. With B2B focused market research and marketing services, Cascade Insights helps companies seize opportunities in the B2B technology sector.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In-Depth Interviews for B2B Market Research: The Basics

Length

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

In-Person Vs. Remote

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

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

Respondents

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

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

Incentives

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

Recruit

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

The Interview

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

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

Why In-Depth Interviews?

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

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

The Upstart Competitor

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

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

Our client needed to know two key things:

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

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

Each one was able to provide a unique perspective.

What We Learned From B2B IDIs

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

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

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

Key Buying Criteria and In-Depth Interviews

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

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

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

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

Uncensored Customer Feedback

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

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

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

Meeting Stakeholder Needs with In-Depth Interviews

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

B2B Sales

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

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

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

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

B2B Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product Development

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

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

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

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

Challenges with In-Depth Interviews

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

Mistaken Stakeholders

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

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

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

Needlessly Infinite In-Depth Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recalcitrant Respondents

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

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

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

Interviewers That Don’t Get the Business or Tech Jargon

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

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

The Drive-Thru Interview

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

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

Why Do In-Depth Interviews For B2B Research?

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

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

 

Pump Up Your Partnership: 9 Questions for Your Channel

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For many B2B companies, partners are their lifeblood. Partners drive sales and generate new opportunities, yet their needs are often overlooked. Companies’ B2B channel strategy suffers as a result.

With that in mind, Cascade Insights presents a series of questions designed to help partner-led organizations better understand the partners they have today.

1. How should you keep your B2B partners appropriately informed?

Episode 124: Pump up your Partnership: 9 Questions for your Channel

This article is based on a “B2B Market Research” podcast episode. If you would rather listen to the podcast episode. You can do so below.

Partners often want to know everything. Unfortunately, you can’t tell them everything because sensitive information might leak. You don’t want to give them a glimpse of your road map only to have them show it to their customer a week later to help close a deal.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t chat with your partners about your plans.

Ask your partners how they want to be informed. Find out if they would prefer a portal or a push, pull, or just-in-time model, etc.

Also, what type of content do they want to see when they’re being informed about your product roadmap?

2. How can you best educate partners on rapidly changing features?

Beyond informing your partners, you sometimes need to train them. For our clients, this is becoming an increasing pain point.

Ten years ago, you had a product launch for a piece of software once every 2-3 years (or once a year if you were Apple). With that cadence, you could build up assets in advance and launch training initiatives, run road shows, and the like. This approach helped to ensure that your partners were ready to talk up and implement your solutions with their customers from Day 1.

Now things are very different. Whether it’s software as a service (SaaS) or it’s more of an infrastructure play, services are constantly evolving. New features are always being added. So, how can you best educate partners if you’re offering a service? That’s a key question you should be asking today.

3. Which B2B partners are driving the largest amount of revenue for you?

Not all of your partners are equal. Sales will vary across customer segments (SMB, Enterprise, Vertical specific, etc.) and/or regions (US, EMEA, APAC, etc.). If you do your homework, you’re likely to find certain partners who are driving the bulk of your sales and others who are just waiting for leads and handouts.

Once you identify the partners who are driving the most revenue for you, show them the most love. Keep in mind that your best partners may not necessarily be the companies with the broadest brand recognition. In fact, they’re more likely to be second tier players who are well-known in their niche.

4. How many of your partners are running with the enemy?

It’s just a fact that your partners are probably working with your competitors. It’s to be expected. No matter how big your software or hardware platform is, you can’t possibly provide everything a partner’s target customer might need. However, you want to minimize the number of times a partner has to look outside the bubble of your products and services. In addition, when they do look outside, you want to know why that is. Don’t be shy about asking your partners what other partner relationships they have.

Also, ask them whether you generate the bulk of their revenue. If not, who does?

5. Which partners are good co-creation partners?

Some of your partners create unique offerings that you might be able to co-sell. Perhaps they have an add-on to an existing solution. Maybe they have a product that extends your solution into a new market or an industry. These folks can expand your reach. Find them. (It may even be strategic for you to buy them. Then you can directly offer what they’ve created.)

6. What should you beg, borrow, or steal from competing partner programs?

This is a tricky one to go after. You might hear that someone else’s partners really like a certain program benefit that a competitor offers. Understandably, you may then be tempted to provide that same benefit to your own partner community. However, your partner community could be very different in temperament, organization size, and capabilities. Your partner community may not receive the program benefit in the same way.

Benchmarking best of breed is fine, but make sure it’s wise and worth it before you start drastically changing your partner program.

7. What do your partners really think about your products?

As your partner, they are already a fan of your offerings (at least to some degree). On the other hand, they may have implemented your offering across an array of different customers. Or, if they are a boutique firm, they may be experts on a single type of client and really understand deployments in the public sector, oil and gas, healthcare, etc.

You can learn a lot from their observations of their clients’ experiences with your product.

Perhaps your product is really good for 90 percent of the customers that your company interacts with. As for that other 10 percent, a partner who sells to healthcare would be able to tell you if it does a poor job working in that particular sector.

8. When do your partners need support and how do they want to access it?

There are limits to what you can provide, of course, but you do want to enable your partners to be successful with their deployments. Probe not just on what they want for support, but how they want it delivered, and how quickly they expect to receive that support.

9. How do vendors want to hear about new opportunities?

This is one of the most obvious questions, but we saved it for last because it needs to be asked in just the right way. You’re never going to be able to give partners as many leads as they want, but you do want to ask whether the leads you are giving them are valuable.

Perhaps there is a certain type of lead that you could be providing more of. Maybe your partners feel disappointed when they work with you on large deals, but are pleased when you work with them on smaller deals.

Again, you’ll have to balance out the leads they want with what you can reasonably provide.

These questions are designed to open the door to a better partner program. With a greater understanding of your partners, you may discover new opportunities for visibility for your products and services. In turn, your partners may be more willing to facilitate that visibility and drive more sales for both of you.

This blog post and podcast episode are brought to you by Cascade Insights. We offer channel market research services to the B2B tech sector.