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Sell Like The Avengers: Learning From Nic Read

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The Avengers of Marvel fame have a wide range of abilities and personality styles. To be successful they need to blend their skills in a way that leads to success and not merely open conflict.

In much the same way modern B2B sales teams need to find a way to blend all of the team’s skills and abilities into a single sales process.

Nic Read, the founder of SalesLabs, co-founder of RGI and EdX, researcher, author, consultant, and teacher, shows us how in this podcast interview with Cascade Insights’ CEO Sean Campbell.

They discuss old sales habits that need to change and new approaches that need to be taken.

All based in large part on the extensive amount of research Nic has done over the years.  Including a recent series of 1,000 interviews with B2B sales professionals and their managers.

Sales Is Your Mission, Don’t Make It Impossible. Listen To Learn:

  • Tips sales teams should take from superheroes and Mission Impossible.
  • How sales teams can effectively blend multiple individuals into a single sales process.
  • Why selling competency is more about knowing the customer’s industry than being social.
  • Learn why Nic believes that, “There are too many salespeople who seem ill-equipped to talk about a customer’s business as if they were an industry insider.”
  • Why old school selling is dead.  And what modern selling, in a B2B context, looks like.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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 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. 

Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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 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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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 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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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 newsletter, subscribed to the podcast, etc. because they had met or worked with our CEO, Sean.

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 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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

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. Are You Shouting Into The Void? Mrx Lessons For Marketing

This, for our purposes, was perfect. Scrolling past our ad could gently and passively remind enterprise clients that there is an excellent 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. (Stay tuned, we’re working on a study.)

This Is Why You Should Mrx Yourself.

For an informal qualitative study on a few target clients, we reaped a goldmine of insight and several new 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. Want your own market segmentation insights? Get in touch.

 

 

Creating The Category - An Interview With Matt Ipri

Creating The Category – An Interview With Matt Ipri

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Mid-market marketing is no easy task. Especially if your product is the first of its kind.

However, a savvy marketer knows how to effectively market a product in a new category. Matt Ipri is an expert in doing just this.

As the vice president of marketing and business development at Decision Lens, Matt brings a lot of first-hand experience to the table. In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell chats with Matt about strategic mid-market marketing.

Creating The Category - An Interview With Matt Ipri

Become a Master of Mid-Market Marketing.

Listen To Learn How To:

  • Target multiple industries with your website.
  • Maximize the effectiveness of your current content.
  • Build separate strategies for market awareness and product awareness.
  • Work well with the analyst community.
  • Handle competing with your customer.
  • Reap the benefits of creating a new category.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, or Stitcher. Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

 

seen and heard

Seen And Heard: Business Communication Skills

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No matter where you are in the B2B world, good communication is vital.  You can’t sell your new product or service without keeping your audience interested and engaged.  You certainly can’t convince anyone your solution is innovative if you can’t convey its advantages.

Communication is the core of our business. We’ve written about it a lot. Check out some of our top tips for being a good communicator in B2B.

Present Like a Pro.

We compiled a simple checklist for preparing a presentation to ensure success.  While you might not have hours to rehearse a presentation before you walk into a meeting, there are other things you can do to be ready:seen and heard

  • Glance through your deck for just two minutes. Did your main points stick out? Were you tempted to keep reading?
  • Let your slide titles tell the story. The body of the slide can provide the details.
  • Visually emphasize your points. Space them out. You don’t want a slide with a wall of text on it.

Think your deck is ready to present? Check out our full checklist for business presentations here before you send it out.

Engage your audience.

There’s a reason people listen to TED Talks just for fun: the presenters are incredibly skilled speakers. They can captivate the audience and keep people engaged for 20 minutes, which would otherwise be far too long for an online video, according to AdAge’s best practices.

How can B2B tech professionals and researchers keep audiences similarly engaged?

The best presentations have several things in common:

  • Telling a story that relates your presentation to the real world.
  • Highlighting the conflict then making your argument.
  • Using a dramatic narrative structure to highlight powerful quotes.
  • Giving context. Don’t just tell the audience, put them in the scene.

You can also read Akash Karia’s book, TED Talks Storytelling: 23 Storytelling Techniques from the Best TED Talks, for more on how to on give a fantastic presentation.

Talk With, Not At.

Have you ever been invited to an online presentation and immediately dreaded it? Online presentations that suck are all too common in B2B.

Roger Courville, known as the “Michael Jordan” of webinars, told our CEO what he likes and dislikes in his online presentations. Some of the main takeaways from our interview:

  • Learn to avoid talking at people. Start talking with people.
  • Interaction should be the very first thing you do – offline and online.
  • Presentation decks make crappy documents. Documentation decks make crappy presentations.
  • If you wouldn’t do it in an in-person seminar, why would you do it online?

Want more of Roger’s insights? Check out the full podcast episode on our blog or on iTunes or Stitcher. You don’t want to miss these online presentation tips.

Tell a Story.

You probably won’t be researching things like historical controversies and tight-rope walkers. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from keeping your audience interested.

In our blog post, Riveting Research, we discuss some top tips about crafting a story from your research findings.seen and heard

  • Learn from the top documentaries on Netflix. Even if they don’t have the most interesting subject, they still keep their audiences enthralled.
  • Title your piece about the tension in the story behind your research.
  • People read research to learn. Make sure you don’t just rehash what everyone already knows.
  • Entertain your audience or they won’t care what you have to say.
  • People love a controversy. Learn from people you disagree with.

The easy part of research is creating it. You need to package your insights in a way that makes people care about what you’ve learned. The best way to do this is to create a story and give your audience a reason to care.

Turn Conflict Into a Catalyst.

Researchers aren’t the only people who have to give bad news.  Whether you’re talking to a client or your boss, not everything you say will be butterflies and puppies, but you can always have a positive spin.  Instead of putting your head down and hoping the audience doesn’t notice, acknowledge the issue and provide a solution.

Here are some tips on telling people what they don’t want to hear.

  • Be straightforward with your audience.
  • Don’t let them blame you if it isn’t your fault. People will be defensive, but you are just telling them the facts.
  • Use data to prove your point.
  • Stay focused on communicating necessary information. You can be sympathetic later.
  • Tell them the disaster you’ve helped them avert by alerting them to the problem now.
  • Find the positive. If you can offer a solution to the problem at hand, things will go much smoother.

When you conceal bad news, you allow other people to create the story. Instead, you should be controlling the narrative. Avoid audience panic and blame by coming prepared with directness, data, and possible solutions.

We wrote an entire post on researchers giving bad news, check it out the next time you have to deliver a difficult message.

Be a Master Writer.

Choose your words carefully.

Writing is incredibly powerful, and you need to know how to do it right.  While creating clickbait-fueled headlines to drive people to look at your site, the message itself is what causes people to go further with you and become clients or valuable partners.

  • Show your passion in your writing and your audience will be passionate too.
  • Keep it short and leave the academic speech at home.
  • Though you’re writing to a professional audience, remember that they are human. Don’t be boring for the sake of showing off.

Brush up on your writing know-how with our blog post about convincing content.

Keep your eye on the prize.

When the goal is sharing information, your goal may not necessarily be to get as many social shares as possible.  For content marketing, you need to look at metrics beyond how many shares you got on Facebook.seen and heard

Is the goal to go viral or to get quality leads? These are two separate things. Sure, it’s great to create a viral post, but it doesn’t matter if no one fills out the “Contact Us” form or makes a purchase.

Ask yourself, does it sell? Use our comprehensive guide to content marketing and assess yourself. Make sure your content is on track to fulfill goals, not just your ego.

 

This post is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Want more genius B2B revelations? There are lots of ways to follow us. Have a business problem you need market research to slay? Give us a call at 503-898-0004.

 

Is Cold Email a Legal Evil?

Is Cold Email a Legal Evil?

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Cold email is one of the most hotly contested outreach methods in B2B. But is it even legal in the first place?

Professionals’ inboxes are flooded with emails from senders they have no relationship to. Recipients often gripe about this and quickly relegate the emails to the spam folder. There are a zillion think pieces ranting about how irritating cold email is. And then there is the flood of comments defending cold email as a sales tactic.

Regardless, cold email keeps pouring in. Without the express consent of the recipient, are companies legally allowed to send it? Is cold email legal?

The answer is: it’s complicated.

Listen to the B2B Revealed Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Overcast, and SoundCloud

***Before we dive in, please note that we are not lawyers and this article should not be considered formal legal advice. We have brought our professional research experience to examine the issue from many different angles. Read on to better understand the factors contributing to the murkiness surrounding the legality of cold email.

CAN-SPAM Says You Can Cold Email. 

Is Cold Email A Legal Evil?

Under CAN-SPAM legislation, you can send an email to someone you don’t know.

However, there are several requirements that must be met for commercial email to qualify as legal. You can read the requirements at this link, but here is a quick summary:

  1. Include no false or misleading header information. For example, you can’t fake the origination domain for the email or email address.
  2. Avoid the use of deceptive subject lines. There seems to be some ambiguity here. When does a creative headline become deceptive? It’s a pretty subjective judgment call.
  3. Clearly explain that the email is an ad. Simply put if it’s an ad (as defined by CAN-SPAM) you need to be clear and explicit about that fact.
  4. Tell people where you’re located. Yep, you have to tell them where you are.
  5. Explain how folks can opt out of receiving email from you. This does not require a formal unsubscribe. It can be something as simple as, “Tell us if you don’t want to receive email from us.”
  6. Honor opt-out requests within 10 business days. You also can’t charge a fee for recipients to be taken off the list. Also, you can’t sell or transfer their email to a third party.
  7. If someone else is sending cold emails on your behalf, you need to monitor what they’re doing. If the emails sent on your behalf don’t meet requirements, you can still be held legally responsible.

Is Cold Email Legal In Other Countries? 

Internationally, the legality of cold outreach gets even more complicated because each country is different.

Is Cold Email A Legal Evil?Take regulations around opt-in requirements, for example. Do recipients have to sign up to receive the email? In the UK, opt-in is not required if the email is sent to a commercial entity and the email is relevant to the job the recipient engages in. However, opt-in is required in countries like Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, and others. In other countries, no opt-in is required at all if the email is relevant to the recipient’s job title. Countries in this bucket include France and Sweden. In another variation, the Netherlands doesn’t require opt-in if the recipient’s address is publicly available. Obviously, that’s a wide range of different types of conditions and concerns. And that’s just for Europe.

Canada, for instance, has some of the strictest laws in the world when it comes to spam regulation.

If you’re going to send commercial emails to folks outside the U.S., make sure to research each country’s laws before you do.

What About Cold Outreach For Market Research Studies? Is That Legal?

As a market research firm, we send out a fair amount of cold emails to recruit survey and interview respondents for our studies. You may be curious where market research recruiting emails fall on the cold email spectrum.

In the U.S., market research recruiting outreach is completely legal.  Market research outreach is actually considered exempt from the CAN-SPAM legislation. (There are some caveats to this, read all about it here.)

But if you’re doing market research cold outreach internationally, make sure to research each country to see whether market research related emails are exempt from spam laws.

Why Are We All Getting So Much Cold Email?

Cold outreach automation platforms are used by many recognizable tech giants and unicorns. For example, Yesware is used by Groupon, Square, and ZenDesk. And Outreach.IO is used by Century Link, Cloudera, Microsoft, and Adobe.

You may be wondering how these platforms get away with sending so much cold email. Well, technically, they’re allowed to, under the current version of CAN-SPAM.

But, many savvy industry viewers wonder how long that will last. These platforms take advantage of sellers’ personal email accounts. Since the volume of email is then limited only by the email service provider’s sender limits, it’s no wonder B2B cold emails have increased dramatically. For example, depending on the Gmail account type, sender limits vary from 500-2000 emails a day. Hence, an automation platform could conceivably send 60,000 emails a month from a single Gmail account.

Why All The Hate Over Cold Email?

We’ve established that as long as cold email meets the necessary requirements, it’s legal.

And yet, blog posts on how much cold email sucks keep getting exponential shares. What merits this reaction?

Well, an annoying B2B cold email probably slips up on one or more of the following:Is Cold Email A Legal Evil?

  1. The message has no connection to the recipient’s work. For cold email to be valuable to the recipient, it must be relevant to their day.
  2. The email does not provide value. A good rule of thumb is to try to give as much as you take. Want to start a conversation with a new lead? At least include a link to something they can use, like a relevant industry resource, podcast, or blog post.
  3. It’s unclear what the point of the message is. It’s important to have a simple and reasonable ask. This could be as easy as requesting a short email response. Simple is key. Make sure the request can be replied to in ten words or less.

Cold emails that are relevant to the recipient, provide value, and have a clear, easy ask are much more likely to get a response.

For The Most Part, It’s A Legal Evil. Is Cold Email A Legal Evil?

Cold email may be annoying and you may prefer unsolicited survey requests to steer clear of your inbox. But, that irritating influx of unrequested email is probably legal, as long as the sender follows the appropriate regulations, such as CAN-SPAM in the U.S.

However, just because you can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Don’t send that cold email unless it meets the legal requirements, is relevant to the recipient, provides value, and has a reasonable ask.

Wondering why your company’s cold emails are scoring leads or sending them hurtling toward the “unsubscribe” link? We’re happy to help.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Want more genius B2B revelations? There are lots of ways to follow us.  Have a business problem you need market research to slay? Give us a call at 503-898-0004.

Roger Courville: Why You Suck at Virtual Presentations

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­B2B Revealed Podcast

Interview – Roger Courville

In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell and Roger Courville discuss how to generate more engagement with webinars.

Roger is called the “Michael Jordan of online presentations and virtual classes” and was named rising international star by the National Speakers Association. He also leads a company called Roger Courville Webinars SuckEvent Builders, where for the last 18 years, he has helped companies with webinars, webcasts, and virtual classes.

In this episode, Roger tells us why online presentations are crucial for communication, development, and learning.  He also explains how to properly conduct a webinar.

Not only will we hear some of Roger’s best practices, but we can learn about his pet peeves, personal weaknesses, and favorite presentations to watch and learn from.

In This Episode:

  • What makes webinars so bad?
  • Generating engaging presentations as communication tools.
  • Creating effective attention getters to draw in your audience.
  • Designing a motivational presentation for information cognition and retention.
  • Producing presentations with a genuine approach.
  • What webinars lack to engage audiences.
  • How to improve presentations to involve your audience.
  • Why introductions and biographies motivate audiences to continue to listen.
  • Talking at people versus talking with people.
  • How to coach your boss when you know the more effective approach.
  • Watching top talks and seminars to understand best practices.
  • Things you need to stop doing right now before your next webinar.

The Takeaways:

  • Guide the audience on how to participate in a presentation.
  • Learn to avoid talking at people. Start talking with people.
  • You’re better off saying your point then facilitating dialogue.
  • Just talking from a powerpoint doesn’t make for an interesting webinar.
  • Presentation decks make horrible documents. Documentation decks make horrible presentations.
  • Interaction should be the very first thing you do – offline and online.
  • Make it a conversation by calling on people individually and keeping them engaged.
  • If you wouldn’t do it in an in-person seminar, why would you do it online?
  • A long-winded opening is just a waste of breath.
  • Stop using part of your webinar to explain the platform. They either know it already or come in too late to hear your explanation.
  • Only say the parts of your bio that are relevant to your audience.  No more.

Links:

We recommend following Roger on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay up-to-date on best practices in virtual presentations. You can also check out the recommended TEDTalks Roger cited for some ideas on how to captivate your audience.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with our posts on virtual presentations, market research, and other B2B tips. You can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.

B2B Products

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.

 

an open letter to b2b sales leaders

An Open Letter To B2B Sales Leaders

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Are you losing deals because of your sales team’s actions?

After more than a thousand market research interviews in the B2B tech field, we’ve collected some of the most common mistakes that sales reps make. These insights have been gathered from hundreds of interviews with B2B tech decision-makers, product evaluators, customers, and partners.

Here’s how to recognize and avoid these common sales blunders.

Listen to the B2B Revealed Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, Overcast, and SoundCloud

1. Not getting up to speed. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

No prep, no win.

At least half of the lost deals we investigate are due to sales teams demonstrating a lack of knowledge of the buyer.

B2B customers need to know that the company they’re buying from understands their industry. Sales reps need to show either first-hand experience or extensive book knowledge of the customer’s industry.

Actually, B2B sales reps should be so knowledgeable that they could easily skip the first few days of training if the customer were to hire them tomorrow.

Sales reps should also be able to speak their customers’ industry jargon fluently. Sure, it’s okay to ask what an acronym means but no more than once or twice in a sales meeting. More than that and customers will be seeing red flags.

2. Oblivious to why the customer is looking to buy. 

Importantly, B2B sales reps need to know what jobs buyers need a solution to solve.

We often see sales reps who can sing the virtues of their product but have no idea what job customers will use it for. Not good.

B2B sales reps need to be able to explain how their product can satisfy customers’ “jobs to be done.”

3. Over-reliance on the pitch deck.

Real-world sales conversations don’t fit neatly into a PowerPoint or script. B2B salespeople should be confident enough in their knowledge not to panic if the dialogue deviates from the pitch deck.

Great B2B sales reps are always ready to dive right into the demo. We’ve literally never heard a complaint that a vendor gave a proof-of-concept or demo too early on.

Quite the reverse, actually. We often hear grumbles that sales reps spend way too much time on the slide deck before getting to the good part.

Though some customers may enjoy the PowerPoint view of a product, others consider it as a waste of time. Adjust accordingly.

Always assume that the competition is proving their product’s worth in an attention-grabbing, mind-blowing demo. If that’s the case, how much time do you want your sales team to spend droning on about the product before showing off what it can do?

4. Not knowing the buyer personas. An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

Far too often, we suspect that B2B buyer personas never get shared beyond the marketing team.

Trust us, the rest of the company needs to know those buyer personas too. Especially sales.

So many sales teams go-to-market with one pitch targeted at a single buyer persona.  This automatically eliminates all other potential customers. It’s not wise to have such a limited sales approach.

B2B sales reps need to know whether they’re talking to the CFO or IT admin and tailor their message accordingly. Obviously, these two personas care about different things. Don’t get into the weeds with an executive but dismiss the IT admin’s questions around configuration by flashing screenshots of dashboard reports at them. Instead, a successful pitch would carefully address both persona’s concerns.

Speak to all the buyer personas in the meeting.

5. Forgetting to talk about ease-of-use. 

It’s fair to assume that all potential customers care about how easy the product is to use.

Usability concerns are often responsible for lost deals. Two especially common culprits are:

  • Fear that the product is too complex to implement.
  • Worry that user adoption will be low without significant training.

Ease-of-use should receive a lot of attention in your sales team’s pitch decks and demos.

6. Lack of transparency on total-cost-of-ownership.

It may be tempting to “estimate” a lower price for your customers than is realistic by neglecting to factor in related costs.

Don’t do it, though. It will destroy any chance of brand loyalty. Omitting related costs from the estimate may win today’s sale, but it will kill tomorrow’s.

B2B sales reps should:

  • Be upfront about professional service fees.
  • Give a realistic estimate of the implementation timeline.
  • Explain any additional infrastructure customers will have to purchase.

Failing to mention these costs may just create a new customer for the competitor.

Be honest and direct to keep the customer coming back.

7. Not sending enough sales reps.

Say a customer arranges a half-day demo with an account rep. They ask three of their colleagues to clear their schedules to attend. Then a single sales rep shows up and is unable to answer anything beyond the most basic questions. From the client’s perspective, this is a huge waste of time.

To sell to important stakeholders such as senior IT managers and business leaders, sales reps need to be capable of thoroughly answering each of their questions.

However, it’s unusual for a single sales rep to have enough knowledge and context to do this well all on their own. That’s why it’s smart to bring a team.

The sales entourage should include:

  • A strong account rep who understands the buyers’ needs and how the product can address them.
  • An expert in industry context and jargon.
  • A solutions architect who can demonstrate how the product will be used in a real-world environment.

8. Being slow to respond. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

Obviously, being responsive to leads is extremely important.

Unfortunately, sales teams don’t always know about the lead right away. Large companies especially struggle with this problem.

In many cases, it’s far too difficult for potential customers to interact with B2B tech sales teams.

Sure, the website probably has a “contact us” form but potential customers have no way of knowing who is on the receiving end of that form.

Same issue with the phone. There’s no telling who will pick up that general number listed on the website.

With no clear and easy route to a sales rep, potential customers may leave in search of a more accessible vendor.

Further, even if customers make the effort to leave their email or phone number, large companies often take way too long to get back to them.

This state of affairs puts upstarts at an advantage.

Big tech companies may have larger sales forces than startups, but startups sales reps are often way closer to their companies’ contact us forms, emails, and phone numbers.

In our win-loss studies, we’ve found that upstarts typically get back to potential customers within a day. Whereas large companies may take a week or more to respond.

It’s not hard to guess who will win the deal: the company that responds within hours or the company that responds in a week.

How To Do Better

These B2B sales mistakes may be upsettingly common, but they are also easily avoided.

Market research can help you figure whether one of these common pitfalls is tripping up your sales team and how to adjust to win more deals.


This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Special thanks to Senior Research Analyst Colleen Clancy for contributing to this piece.

 

 

 

Welcome to the B2B Revealed Podcast

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Having what amounts to a collective PhD in B2B comes with the responsibility to share some of our knowledge with the world.  We’ve done that for years through The B2B Market Research podcast.

But what if we had more to share?  What if we had more insights about B2B sales, marketing, and product development that were relevant and timely? How could we best share those tips, tactics, and strategies?

Welcome to the B2B Revealed podcast.

Welcome to B2B Revealed

B2B Revealed will:

  • Deal with the real world challenges that B2B sellers face.
  • Help B2B marketers build great marketing strategies and tactics.
  • Bring product leaders to solutions that B2B customers will love.
  • Include more interviews with thought leaders across the B2B landscape
  • Show B2B researchers how to effectively answer key business questions.

Listen to the B2B Revealed podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Soundcloud.

Ageism in Tech: The Silent Career Killer

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Ageism in tech is common knowledge, but, oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of data on it.

Sure, there’s Dan Lyons’ scathing “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” and quite a few think pieces. But where are the surveys, diversity reports with age statistics, and quantitative studies?

For all that’s been written on the subject, we were surprised to learn that many news articles and blog posts seem to cite the same handful of data sources.

We looked at some of the most frequently cited sources on ageism in tech and then went in search of more data. Once again, LinkedIn ad targeting revealed a lot. We found that in the computer games, software, and hardware industries, most employees are under age 35.

Tons of Quotes, Few Statistics

Googling “ageism in tech” turns up a flurry of articles critical of Silicon Valley’s tendency to favor the young. “Silicon Valley’s not-so-secret bias: Ageism,” “Is Ageism In Tech An Under-The-Radar Diversity Issue?”,” “It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley,” blare recent headlines from USA Today, Fast Company, and Bloomberg respectively. “No one in tech will admit that they’re old”, a senior editor at LinkedIn recently wrote.

Reading through the top Google news results for “ageism in tech” reveals that reporting on the subject relies heavily on the same few data sources.

Much of the data is qualitative in nature. Many news organizations leverage interviews with knowledgeable subjects such as current and former tech employees, workers who say they experienced discrimination, or industry commentators such as Dan Lyons. You’re also likely to come across quotes from tech leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, who once famously stated that “young people are just smarter”.

The PayScale Study

PayScale, a salary profile database, released a study about ageism in tech. This is the most frequently cited quantitative study in the top news articles about ageism in tech that we came across.

The oft-cited PayScale study had damning findings.  For this study, PayScale surveyed 33,500 non-retail or sales employees from “large/well-known” tech companies.

Looking at the PayScale data, we had the following observations:

  • PayScale states that “the national median age for all full-time (non-retail) workers is 37.” Only HP had a higher median age at 38, and only Oracle matched at 37. The other 16 companies had a median age that was below the national average.
  • Old guard tech companies have the oldest employee bases. For example, Oracle employees have a median age of 37, IBM’s median age is 36, and Microsoft’s is 33.
  • Newer companies have younger median ages. For example, the median age of Facebook and LinkedIn employees is 29, and 30 for Salesforce, Google, and Amazon.
  • Seven of the 18 companies in the Payscale study have a median employee age of 30 or younger.

The PayScale study has fascinating data on the median age of employees for 18 well-known tech companies.

However, many questions about ageism in tech remain. To name a few, what’s the average age for various tech job titles? What is the average age for the tech industry in general? What’s the average age in tech startups?

Though far less frequently cited in the news, we decided to check out some other quantitative data sources for more information on ageism in tech.

Government Data

EEOC

The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) examines legal charges, resolutions, settlements, and similar actions.

This data is useful when gathering information on how often ageism in tech is legally challenged. However, the EEOC does not tell us about the ages of tech employees by company, industry, title, etc.

BLS

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has conducted the Current Population Survey since the 1940s. Currently, 60,000 individuals are surveyed each month.  The BLS uses the survey responses to report on trends such as unemployment. They also keep track of the average age of workers by industry.

BLS data is good for an aggregate view, but it has a major limitation for those studying ageism in tech: survey respondents get to pick the industry that they work in.

This means that a computer programmer for a trucking company might select “computer systems design and related services” as their industry.

So the BLS may give an average age for a computer programmer, but you would have no idea whether they work for a tech giant, a hospital, a manufacturing company, or the government, etc.

The BLS can also give the average age of workers in an industry. What you can’t figure out from public BLS data, however, is the average age of a computer programmer in a software company, etc

Diversity Reports Are Rare, Age Data is Rarer

With public outcries against sexism and racism in tech, the release of diversity reports tends to draw media attention. However, news reports on ageism in tech rarely reference age data from company-released diversity reports.

This isn’t surprising. Not all companies release reports annually or even at all. Still fewer release statistics on their employees’ ages.

We’ll share an example from our recent study on the gender gap in tech. For this study, we looked at 50 big tech companies. Only 20 of those companies had released a diversity report with a gender breakdown since 2015.

Of those 20 diversity reports, only four also included statistics on the ages of the employees.

What LinkedIn Ad Targeting Reveals About Ageism In Tech

Though not cited in any news reports, we turned to LinkedIn ad targeting to find out more about ageism in tech. This data source had proved extremely valuable in our recent study on the gender disparity in tech. Luckily, LinkedIn ad targeting was also advantageous for researching ageism.

LinkedIn ad targeting uses the industry of the employing company to infer each user’s industry. This means that if you chose to target a LinkedIn ad at people in the computer software industry, your audience would be employees who work for computer software companies. (In other words, this data gets around the limitation of the BLS data.)

Compellingly, as we analyzed the ages of employees across several industries, we were able to examine a sample of more than 74 million people. (See the appendix at the end for details on how we found our data.)

When studying ageism, LinkedIn offers a clearer view of the tech industry than BLS data, and a much larger sample than PayScale provides.

Our Study

With LinkedIn ad targeting, we built a sample that comprised 74,200,000 individuals from all over the world across 17 industries. Our sample includes several tech industries like computer gaming, computer software, and computer hardware. Tech industry workers made up an estimated 13,860,000 of the profiles in our sample, from small businesses to corporate giants. For comparative purposes, we also looked at industries such as management consulting, defense and space, and pharmaceuticals.

As we examined this sample, ageism was obvious in the numbers. Here are a few of our findings.

Most Employees Are Under 35 In These Industries

Ageism In Tech: The Silent Career Killer

Data from LinkedIn ad targeting pulled in June 2017.

  • For every employee age 35 or older, there are about two employees under 35 in the Internet industry.
  • In computer gaming, there are more than two times as many 18-34-year-old employees as there are employees age 35 or older.

Other Industries Are Kinder To Those Over 35

Data from LinkedIn ad targeting pulled in June 2017.

  • There were more 35+ year-olds than 18-34-year-olds in only five of the 17 industries in our study. (Semiconductors, defense and space, government administration, management consulting, and pharmaceuticals.)

Workers 55+ Were a Minority in All 17 Industries In Our Study

Ageism In Tech: The Silent Career Killer

Data from LinkedIn ad targeting pulled in June 2017.

  • Of the industries we looked at, defense and space had the highest percentage of people over the age of 55 (approximately 13 percent), followed by management consulting (roughly 11 percent), and government administration (about 11 percent).
  • Only about 1 percent of computer gaming employees are 55 or older.

How LinkedIn Gets Its Data

For ad targeting, LinkedIn infers the age of the user from their last graduation year.

Our total sample size for this study was 74,200,000 profiles. LinkedIn was able to determine age for 33,390,000 profiles across all the industries in our study. It was unable to determine the age for 40,810,000 profiles.

Does LinkedIn Provide a Representative Sample for Tech?

Comparisons Are Tricky

In the absence of company-released age data and quantitative studies on age in tech industries, there isn’t much to compare our data to. This is unfortunate as it makes it difficult to test the validity of results.

The PayScale study examines age in certain tech companies. Since our study focuses on age by tech industry, it doesn’t make sense to compare the two data sets.

Similarly, BLS data takes into account the industry of the job but not the employing company. Looking at BLS data for computer software professionals doesn’t guarantee that we are looking at people from the computer software industry. Again, it isn’t an appropriate comparison.

The Scope of the Data is Compelling

Still, LinkedIn provides valuable information on ageism in tech.

From a market research standpoint, LinkedIn’s sample size (in the millions!) is incredibly worthwhile. In this study, we had a sample size of more than 74 million profiles. LinkedIn could determine the age for 45 percent of those profiles. In comparison to typical market research survey response rates, this is a huge success.

Business analysts, researchers, and journalists should not overlook LinkedIn as a useful source of data.

However, there are a few caveats to keep in mind about using LinkedIn ad targeting data.

Some Limitations of LinkedIn Ad Targeting Data:

  • LinkedIn rounds the estimated ad audience to the nearest thousand. These are approximations, not precise employee counts. For this study, the estimates did not meaningfully impact our results as the age buckets (18 to 24, 25 to 34, etc.) in our study represented an average of 490,000 profiles each. With such a large sample size, we considered LinkedIn’s ad targeting estimates to be worthwhile information.
  • The age buckets LinkedIn provides are fixed: 18- 24, 25-34, 35-54, and 55+. This makes certain comparisons difficult, such as the representation of employees in the first 15 years or their careers versus those in the latter 15 years of their careers.
  • Obviously, LinkedIn can only generate estimates from employees with LinkedIn profiles. If employees are unlikely to have a LinkedIn profile in certain industries, results may be skewed. Tech employees famously heavily utilize LinkedIn, but other industries may do so less.
  • Although LinkedIn data provides an incredibly wide sample for ageism research, it doesn’t explain why the numbers are the way they are. To find such answers, qualitative research would come in handy.

LinkedIn Is Actually a Huge Public Data Source If You Know Where to Look.

LinkedIn is essentially a massive source of public big data. To access it, you just have to get the hang of ad targeting. You don’t have to actually publish or pay for an ad to see all kinds of demographics info from age, to gender, to job title, company name and size, degrees, and more. Data like this could form the basis of any number of fascinating quant studies.

With a sample size of millions, LinkedIn ad targeting provides an opportunity to examine ageism in tech in several different ways. Writers and researchers interested in examining ageism in tech, take note.

This study was just a cursory glance at age distribution by industry via LinkedIn ad targeting. For tech fields, the numbers revealed a drastic shortage of employees aged 55 and older. The 18-34-year-olds were the majority in most of the tech industries we looked at (and several other industries too). Maybe it wasn’t all in Dan Lyons’ head.

 

Appendix: How To Find Ageism Data Via LinkedIn Ad Targeting

Finding a sample through LinkedIn ad targeting is easier than it sounds. Signing up for LinkedIn’s ad creator program is free and takes just a few minutes. To start, choose the work option from the top right-hand corner of the site LinkedIn and go to “Advertise.”

If you don’t have an account with their advertising program, the website will guide you through account creation.

Once you are set up, you’ll create a text ad campaign. By using text ads, you don’t need a professional business page or any premade ads to see the targeting information.

While creating your text campaign, it doesn’t actually matter what it says – no one will see it. Just fill in the website, title, and description in order to move forward with the ad creation. Once you draft the ad, you’ll be able to access the targeting page.

Although LinkedIn says that location is required, you only need to enter one initially. For example, we’ve entered the United States as a location, but as soon as we add another qualifier, we will be able to click the X and remove the location for worldwide results.

Finally, you can select your target markets to study. LinkedIn offers lists of the industries it categorizes companies by, but you can also type an industry in if you already have one in mind. With LinkedIn’s many categories to choose from, opportunities abound for studies.

LinkedIn will tell you approximately how many people are in the target audience for the ad. 

For example, when we select “Internet,” LinkedIn shows that there are roughly 4,800,000 people in this industry. When we narrow it down to see how many people ages 35-54 are in the Internet industry, LinkedIn shows an estimated 620,000.

If an audience is estimated to be less than a thousand, LinkedIn informs you that your target audience is “too narrow.”

This study was brought to you by Cascade Insights.