Concept testing a new idea with your target market could ultimately save your business from the kiss of death. While startups and small businesses are at a much greater risk for collapse if a product fails, enterprises risk seriously damaging their reputations and losing substantial sales.
Concept testing your solution can help you make better decisions about designing, developing, and investing in your new idea for the best possible success.
“If you build it, they will come” is a great saying, but it’s not the wisest strategy for B2B tech. The only way you’ll have a successful product/service launch is if the market finds value in the concept and trusts your solution more than rival options. B2B Concept Testing lets you know whether or not this is the case.
Here are five indications you should invest in B2B Concept Testing before you finalize your launch strategy.
B2B Thought Leadership Research is a tried and tested go-to for marketers who want to increase their brand’s reputation and authority in the B2B technology sector. But, in all honesty, B2B Thought Leadership is very hard to get right. Too often, thought leadership initiatives either fail to capture interest, trust, or both.
While we agree that leveraging research to create powerful marketing assets is a smart move, we often see the marketing angle overpowering the quality of the research. Or, good research presented poorly.
With unfortunate frequency, data is leveraged sloppily or unethically to make an obviously biased claim or thinly-veiled sales pitch. This undermines credibility and the thought leadership initiative.
Even the more ethically-minded can struggle with effective thought leadership when they fail to synthesize a compelling storyline out of a pile of data.
From a firm that specializes in market research and messaging for B2B tech marketers, here are some guidelines to make sure your next B2B thought leadership initiative is successful.
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If you’re a B2B marketer, you probably have one or both of the following problems with marketing and customer data:
As a result, your data-driven marketing strategy fails to win you new buyers. Consequently, you might be seduced by the idea that more powerful software will make your marketing problems disappear. Or, that you are just one software integration away from truly understanding your customer. But more software won’t fix your problem.
In our research, we’ve seen purely software-centered B2B marketing strategies fail because B2B sales are too long and complex. A B2B sale might take months or years, and involve an average of 6.8 stakeholders. Thus, a single database can’t comprehensively represent what’s going on, and B2B marketers see large holes in their data they can’t always explain.
Conversely, in a B2C sale, the entire purchase might take a single buyer half an hour on Amazon. So, while B2C marketers can find everything they need to know about their buyers from analyzing social media, click streams, web analytics, and content marketing statistics, B2B marketers need a different approach.
Specifically, good B2B marketers rely on a blend of great software, data, and organic market insights – based on independent research.
So before you pull out your credit card, try this sanity check: when you look at your existing dataset, do you have a clear idea of how to fill in those dark spots in your data? If you answered “no,” put the credit card away. More software won’t solve your problem.
Let’s face it: you’re probably uncomfortable with the idea of churn analysis.
You’re busy trying to grow revenue. There are a million fires to put out, and you have to keep your team focused on maintaining a healthy pipeline and winning more customers.
Ordinarily, this is the normal thing to do. However, focusing on customer acquisition when your churn rate is high is like trying to drive a car with a flat tire. Your journey isn’t going to be smooth, and you may not even get to your destination.
There’s no hard and fast rule for what constitutes an acceptable B2B churn rate. However, analysts generally agree that anything over 10 percent is cause for concern. If that applies to you, it’s time to hit pause and figure out why you’re losing so many customers.
B2B sellers often think of their role in the customer buying journey as a numbers game. And organizations reinforce this notion. Promotions and pay bumps often hinge on how well the rep measures up to their KPIs. From the number of SQLs they convert to how much revenue they generate, these metrics are necessary for tracking and analyzing your sales team’s performance. However, these metrics don’t tell the full story but are chronically overemphasized.
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B2B leads don’t become customers overnight. B2B marketers need to master the art of lead nurturing to guide prospects in their buying journey. At this phase, your content has piqued their interest enough to fill out a contact form or download a whitepaper. Now your job is to keep their interest. You have to convince them that your solution is the best fit.
Knowing how and when to make contact with your marketing qualified lead (MQL) is the key to winning them over. But, there are a few things you need to consider before you make your move.
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B2B sales strategy is centered on holding a strategic viewpoint- not just a tactical one. Great B2B sellers develop and revise plans for their accounts, rather than simply taking tasks as they come.
We get it, it’s hard to remember to be strategic when a lot of opportunities are knocking at your door. In this scenario, it’s easy to just keep writing proposals, scheduling meetings, and working on statements of work. But if you aren’t regularly checking back in on the big picture, your B2B sales strategy is likely to lag far behind organizational changes and opportunities in your accounts.
Customer churn is a normal part of SaaS business models. Some analysts think an annual B2B churn rate of 15 percent is considered acceptable. But, you might be aiming for 10 or even 5 percent. In any case, a lot needs to go right for a customer to be happy with a new product or service, and it is impossible to please everyone. But if the churn rate gets too high, you need to quickly determine where the problem lies.
Your customer analytics can usually provide clues as to where users are struggling with your product. However, these datasets won’t tell you the whole story, such as the internal dynamics behind why a customer dropped you, or ways your solution fails to adequately address jobs-to-be-done. Worse still, your data may even be misleading you! Qualitative insights from customer conversations are the only way to understand the churn your customer analytics can’t explain.
Here are four reasons for a high B2B churn rate you may not have considered, based on conversations we’ve had with B2B buyers over the course of scores of 14+ years of market research projects.
First impressions matter, especially in the B2B buyer’s journey. Buyers identify the problem or need their company is experiencing and begin exploring their vendor options. They swipe left or right on potential matches based on nothing more than what they see on vendors’ websites.
The amount of time a prospect spends on all of that content you’ve produced is minuscule compared to the time you spent developing it. For example, Google Analytics data suggests that a reasonable target for average session duration on a B2B website is two minutes.
So much like a social media or dating profile, your site needs to be engaging right from the start.
Finally, buyers spend nearly half of their B2B buyer’s journey flying solo. A 2019 study from Gartner shows that buyers spend nearly half (45 percent) of their time in the journey doing independent research. Many potential leads are lost in this phase—without sales or marketing even realizing it. Why? Because something makes that prospect swipe left before they ever fill out a contact form, send an email or pick up the phone.
