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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.

 

 

 

Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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When it comes to B2B studies, having the right people is just as important as asking the right questions.

The efficacy of a 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 market research recruiting is a recipe for disaster. It fails to snare respondents capable of answering the study questions. Unfortunately, rushed recruiting is the industry standard. 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 tend to have an idea of who should be in a focus group, receive a survey, or have an interview. 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 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 for studies in-house, we know that the process can be challenging. However, our specialized studies bring extraordinarily powerful new perspectives to our clients. Those strategy-shifting results make the extra attention we place on market research recruiting well worth the effort.

Here is how we approach finding and enticing outstanding respondents to our B2B market research projects.

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. Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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.

Some of our new clients are startled at the emphasis we place on a typical market research recruiting effort. I recently had a client from a Fortune 500 tell me, “I want to talk to developers.”

“And?” I replied.

“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?” I asked. I 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.

I’ll share another example to illustrate how important it is to get specific about qualified respondents. 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. Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

A few years back, people would get very wary when I told them that we trust certain types of data from LinkedIn. They would stop me to 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 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 rival’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 probably 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” in 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.  Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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 most of 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.

For example, 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’ll 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. To summarize, don’t go the form letter route.

Don’t Rush The Recruit.

The wrong people can’t give the right answers. Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

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

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

This article is based off a B2B Revealed episode.

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

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

The tech industry spends a lot of effort figuring out the types of customers it has. Tech leaders obsess over how many customers are in the education sector, how many are in large or small businesses, how many have a hundred or more licenses, etc. Still, many companies have a gaping hole in their knowledge.  They don’t know the specific jobs customers are using the product or service for.

That’s a huge problem. Thankfully, Clayton Christensen‘s latest book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice” gives hope. It spells out how understanding “jobs to be done” will keep products and services relevant. The theory also explains how to spot an area ripe for disruption.

It’s extremely important for corporate researchers to understand “jobs to be done” in order to conduct effective studies.

Insufficient Innovation Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Early in the book, Christensen establishes that innovation today is troubled.  He writes,

“In a recent McKinsey poll, 84 percent of global executives acknowledged that innovation is extremely important to their growth strategies, yet a staggering 94 percent were unsatisfied with their own innovation performance.”

Christensen connects his latest book with his famous work on  Disruptive Innovation Theory. (For more info, check out “The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business.”)

He states,

“Despite the success and enduring utility of disruption as a model of competitive response, it does not tell you where to look for new opportunities.”

Disruptive innovation theory helps to illuminate companies ripe for disruption within an industry. However, Christensen admits that it doesn’t show how to find opportunities. “Competing Against Luck” does.

Does It Get The Job Done?Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Jobs theory drives at the reasons for purchasing and using a product or service. It can be used to figure out why customers chose to:

  • Purchase a solution.
  • Go with a different solution.
  • Stay with the status quo and purchase no new solutions.
  • Continue to use a solution.
  • Stop using a solution.
  • Switch to another solution.

Christensen explains,

“We define a “job” as the progress that a person is trying to make in a particular circumstance.”

It’s important to figure out what job your product or service is being used to accomplish. You also need to know whether your solution:

  • Makes the job easier.
  • Is the best solution for the job.
  • Justifies a purchase rather than doing nothing.

Got Data? The Right Data?

The core fallacies that prevent companies from understanding what is going on around them is a must-read section of “Competing Against Luck.”

“The Fallacy of Active Data Versus Passive Data” is a big one. Christensen writes,

“Instead of staying cognizant of and focused on the type of data that characterizes the rich complexity of the job (passive data), growing companies start to generate operations-related data (active data), which can seduce managers with its apparent objectivity and rigor but which tends to organize itself around products and customer characteristics, rather than Jobs to Be Done.”

I’ve seen this many times with our own client base. As a company grows, it becomes blinded by its data. Company leadership thinks current metrics of success are more important than continually revisiting the original assumptions that launched the company in the first place. The success of current endeavors is measured and over-measured while the validity of the company’s purpose remains assumed and unchecked.

Collecting market segmentation data on your customer base is great. You can’t stop there, though. It’s not enough. Gathering data on “jobs to be done” is just as important.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation DataChange Is Expensive

When analyzing jobs, it’s critical to take switching costs into account.

You’ll have to look further than the mere cost of the new solution. Think of it like the cost of moving to a new house. What you end up paying isn’t just the price of your new home, but also the cost of the moving company, the technicians to install various appliances, painters, etc.

This is a frequent area of study for us. We often must ask, “What did you remove to make room for the new product or service? What will have to be integrated with the new solution?”

Typically, new products and services have to be integrated with the company’s existing systems via APIs or other means.

Integration can take months or even years to finalize. Since a long time span must be factored into integration, many potential customers may have only an estimate of what it would cost to switch to a new solution.

Post-Purchase Questions Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

Christensen also has a great section about what he calls the “Big Hire” and the “Little Hire.” The big hire is when the money is laid down and the purchase is made. The little hire happens again and again as the individual or business puts the product to use over time.

In our studies, we ask, “Which features were considered a key reason for purchase? Are you still using them?”

This line of inquiry is designed to surface the “little hires” of the product. After the customer has been using the product for a while, did the justification for the big hire diminish? Perhaps features that sold the customer on the purchase did not live up to expectations.

Another great question to ask is, “What features are you using more than expected?” This is another “little hire” question. The answer may surprise you. Perhaps a lesser known feature is driving strong customer loyalty.

The Jobs That Aren’t Getting Done

Christensen’s discussion of non-consumption is vital.

He says,

“You can learn as much about a Job to Be Done from people who aren’t hiring any product or service as you can from those who are. We call this “nonconsumption,” when consumers can’t find any solution that actually satisfies their job and they opt to do nothing instead.”

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

Disruption Red Flags Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data

There are many ways to complete a job. Many companies make the mistake of assuming that solutions capable of completing the task will be similar. They’re not always.

Tech companies are often challenged by this. They invent the class of products and then struggle to imagine any other class of products that could meet the same need.

The battle between Yahoo and Google is a perfect example. Yahoo basically invented internet portals, but they took a card-catalog style approach to indexing the internet. Google built a powerful search engine based on the actual structure of the internet. It was much more efficient than Yahoo’s approach. This was one of the key drivers of Google’s triumph over Yahoo. Eventually, Google will be bested by someone who looks at the problem of surfacing information on the internet and finds a completely different way to do it. It’ll probably come from “a different class,” of solutions as Christensen would say.

I’ll give another tech example of this form of disruption. Going as far back as IT departments have existed, there has been a job called “create a server.” For the longest time, the fastest way to create a server was to buy one. Then you had to install an operating system on it, get a management agent, and work with the physical server over a number of years because changing and learning a new one would be an expensive hassle. Then, bam! Along comes VMware. With their virtualization stack, VMware had a whole new way of creating a server quickly. Then VMware got disrupted by players like Amazon Web Services, which had another way of creating a server quickly.

Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation DataYour Solution Was Hired To Do a Job. Is It Doing It Well?

A purchase doesn’t guarantee that the customer is satisfied. Understanding whether your product or service is helping customers to accomplish specific jobs is critical to gauging success.

Market segmentation data is not enough. Post-purchase qualitative research is just as important.

Christensen explains,

“What job did you hire that product to do? The good news is that if you build your foundation on the pursuit of understanding your customers’ jobs, your strategy will no longer need to rely on luck. In fact, you’ll be competing against luck when others are still counting on it.”

“Jobs to be done” theory breaks us free from an almost obsessive focus on market segmentation across the corporate research industry. Instead of getting caught in the cycle of gathering endless data on “who,” we can also approach the more interesting question of “why.”

Christenson takes us back to a fundamental truth: all products and services are hired to do a job. Figure out what that job is. Do it better than anyone else. Watch your success reach new heights. You won’t need to rely on luck.

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

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.

 

 

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 sales and marketing efforts.

Why is the company searching for a replacement solution?

It’s good to start with the organizational or business need that caused the search for a replacement solution in the first place.

The solution isn’t needed to solve a problem that appeared out of thin air. If companies are looking for a new solution, they have realized that there may be an opportunity to do an old job more efficiently.

Look at the way the Internet of Things (IoT) is shaking up industries. Say you own a fleet of vehicles. With the IoT in play, you’re probably thinking very differently about how to instrument, track performance and price those vehicles than you would have 10 years ago.

Did the company consider DIY? Why are they looking to buy?

It’s also important to consider whether the company could perform the job themselves. Why did the company decide it was better to purchase an outside solution?

No outside solution can truly fit the needs of a company better than the company could itself. However, many companies don’t have the resources for such a DIY approach.  Before investing a lot in chasing after a potential customer, make sure they don’t have the internal capabilities or organizational structure to develop their own solution.

If they don’t have the internal capabilities or organizational structure, make sure to highlight how your solution solves problems without requiring them to meet those needs.

What functionality is lacking in the company’s current solution?

Nothing is perfect. With any business solution, the company has to compromise. Maybe the features were great but the price is a little steep. Maybe one important integration is awesome and another only so-so.

You should find out what compromises the customer made to go with their current solution.

If your solution is of similar quality but wouldn’t force the same compromise, you have yourself a market opportunity. You may need to make some adjustments to meet that opportunity, either in product development or in what is being amplified in your sales and marketing efforts.

Which features tipped the scales?

Next, ask which features were considered the main reasons for making the purchase.

Do you have these features? If not, they should be on your roadmap.

Is the company still using the features that drove the sale?

Maybe a competitor’s sales team got the company excited about features that weren’t actually that great when put to real world use.

This is particularly true in the software industry, where the term vaporware was invented.

In-depth interviews with competitor customers can bring a wealth of information. Targeting these folks can reveal the features that remain beloved and in use.

Which features are companies using more than expected?

Competitors tend to talk up the features they think are the most important in their marketing efforts.

However, their customers may value some of the features that get far less airtime.

Again, in-depth interviews with employees of companies that have been using the solution for months or years can reveal important features that aren’t as visible when examining the companies’ marketing materials.

Is this solution one of many bought from the same vendor?

Another area to probe is whether this product was actually the second, third, fourth, fifth product that was bought from a given vendor.

When a customer opts for the competitor, you want to know whether you’ve lost to a product or a platform. Does this customer prefer to buy individual products that are best-of-breed? Or would they prefer a platform from a single vendor?

Microsoft, Oracle, and a lot of long-standing tech companies have leveraged the platform model for quite some time. Now newer companies like Amazon and Google are essentially doing the same thing with their various cloud offerings.

Many customers prefer a platform instead of a collection of point solutions. This preference needs to be factored in when considering key buying criteria.

How much did price drive the sale?

You want to figure out if the customer was willing to pay a premium and if it was a factor in their key buying criteria. Was low cost the primary concern? Or was money no object?

You also want to identify which features they were willing to pay a premium for and which features were merely table stakes.

Does the company prefer a subscription or perpetual pricing model?

In the technology sector, many products are turning into services. Customers are getting increasingly used to the idea of a subscription or rental model as opposed to some kind of perpetual license or upfront costs.

In-depth interviews with competitor customers may tell you that even though you have comparable features and greater capabilities, customers would rather rent a solution than buy it outright.

In other words, your pricing model (and not your price) could be losing you deals.

Key Buying Criteria over Features

Many organizations focus on producing all the features customers might need.  Others focus on matching every competitor in the market, feature by feature.

Neither approach is the right one.

The focus needs to be on buying criteria.  That way you know what features to build today, which ones to never build, and which ones you can plan to build at some point in the future. That’s the way to win in B2B.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.

Image used courtesy of Maxsim/Fotolia.

Find Your Competitor’s Achilles’ Heel: Post-Sale Questions for Customers

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Competitors’ customers are treasure troves of insight. Not only can they tell you how satisfied they are with the competitor’s product or service, they can also clue you in as to why they picked the competitor in the first place.

In other words, you may learn why you missed out and how you can have the winning solution the next time around. Here are a few good questions to ask customers who have been using the competitor’s products for a period of time.

Episode 122: Post-Sale Questions for Competitor CustomersThis article is based on a “B2B Market Research” podcast episode. If you would rather listen to the podcast episode. You can do so below.

How often was the user or organization engaged with after initial sign-up?

The answer to this question shows you whether or not the competing company was high-touch. It can also show you whether the customer felt they were engaged with as much as they would have expected.

Was the transition from sales to implementation smooth?

Some of your competitors are going to be very good at selling and not so good at implementing. This is a potential win-back opportunity for your firm.

Did the implementation go well?

What were the pain points? What went smoother than expected? Again, this can highlight whether your competition is good at selling but not so good at implementing.

Now that the product has been in use for some time, which features are being used more than expected and which are being used less than expected?

The features the customer is enamored with may not be the ones that you expect.

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Dig into this question to figure out which features drove customer engagement and which features have grabbed and held the customer’s attention after deployment.

Did third parties influence the customer’s decision to go with the competitor?

Were there partners involved while the application or the service was being deployed and integrations between the new product or service and existing solutions were being established?

How fundamental were those partners to the success of the deployment of your competitor’s product?

How was education handled for the product or service?

Buying is one thing, but having a product or service that you can learn well enough to actually use in a real-world setting is another.

How much support did the competitor offer?

What type of support did the competitor provide? Was it predominantly focused on community support or were paid support vehicles available? This can help you decide what types of support assets you need to invest in.

Which type of support did the customer utilize the most?

Which type of support did the customer find the most useful? You may realize you should consider webinars, “how-to” style content, reference architecture guides, or something completely different.

Was the customer satisfied with the mechanism of payment?

Did the customer feel that they were paying for the product in the way they wanted to? Were they forced to sign a yearly agreement when they would have preferred a monthly agreement? Were there certain tiers of pricing that they didn’t necessarily agree with? Were there areas in which they wished there were more options available?

Did the actual cost of the solution measure up with expectations?

Ask whether the solution began to cost the organization more and more over time. This could happen due to increasing support costs, challenges with integrating the new purchase with existing systems, or even the cost of educating users on how to use the new product or service effectively.

Does the customer foresee a time where they will outgrow the solution now that they’ve had it in production?

What could cause the company to outgrow the solution? The answer to this question could help you predict a win-back opportunity. Even if you have lost that company as a potential customer for the time being, you might have the opportunity to win them back months or years down the road. Factors such as vertical, company size, number of users, etc. could be indicators that it’s time to get your customer back.

Find The Competitor’s Achilles’ Heel

All of these questions are designed to bring insight to:

  • How the customer came to the competitor.
  • How satisfied they are with the competitor’s solution.
  • Whether and when they may be looking elsewhere.

Obviously, having that sort of knowledge of your competitor will give you an edge.

Any one of these questions are guaranteed to generate insight in your next research study. Go out and ask them.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Check out our podcast for more episodes and articles on B2B Market Research method.

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Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps

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Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps

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The people who used to sell for competitors are valuable competitive intelligence and B2B Market Research assets. And they’re extremely underutilized.

In this podcast episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell shares 26 questions to ask sales reps who recently worked for a rival. The questions are designed to bring insight into:

  • The Key Buying Criteria of Competitor Customers.
  • Strategies & Tactics Used by Rival Sellers.
  • Industry and Market Drivers.

Talking with ex-sellers can bring powerful market, competitive intelligence and customer insights.

A quick caveat: for the best market research data, it’s important to speak with people who recently worked for the competition. Someone who worked there two or three years ago won’t be able to clue you in to the current state of the company.

Here’s what you should ask the competition’s former sales team members:

1. What were the key selling points?
This question cuts through all of the B2B marketing lacquer and gets to the root of what the competitor really thinks will drive the sale.

2. What product features were clients most interested in?
Again, this question lets you peer through the filter of case studies and general marketing messages to see the strongest aspects of competing products.

3. What buying criteria did clients have?
Was it cost, specific features, unique services, etc.? These questions help you to get inside the mind of the buyer. Further, when this information is analyzed along with other direct interviews with competitor customers and partners, you gain a detailed understanding of the competitor’s stakeholders.
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4. What features left customers uninterested or unimpressed?
It’s common to assume customers are dazzled by competing products with grand and abundant capabilities — especially if they’re produced by a large and imposing rival. However, this broad pantheon of features may be more than some customers need. Many B2B buyers are looking for very specific features. A former salesperson for a competing company can let you know what those specific features are.

5. Which of the competitor’s product or service features were the most lacking?
A former salesperson would know, as they had to drive around weak spots to make the sale.

6. Were customers more focused on product features or the cost of the product?
Customers’ priorities can clue you in to how the competing company would have to respond strategically. Is it more important for the rival company to keep the product cheap or to maintain a cutting-edge feature set?

7. What were the most common reasons for losses?
The competing sales team didn’t win every deal and they are likely to remember the ones that got away. Chances are, they’ve put some thought into the reasons for those losses.

8. How often were buyers looking for net new solutions?
This is a great question to ask, especially if you are considering a win-loss campaign.

9. What was the market environment?
Did prospects abound with opportunity for all? Or was it a red ocean with competitors on every street corner battling for each deal?

10. Did the B2B marketplace seem saturated with solutions or was there room for upstarts?
This gives you a sense of whether the market landscape is too mature for growth or if there is a lot of untapped opportunity.

11. In the proposal process, what companies did the competitor’s sales team always seem to win against and why? 
This question is like panning for information gold. You may find out that you were the one that was always losing to the competitor in the proposal process. Learning why you lost out is invaluable insight.

12. Which companies did the rival sales team lose to?
With this information, your understanding of the competitive environment will grow broader than your own experience and win-loss database. This market research question alone can identify a whole host of new competitors that you might need to worry about.

13. What level of industry affinity did that competing solution have?
For example, was it really good for manufacturing and not so great for construction? From this you can learn which sector of the industry the competitor has staked their strongest claim.

14. Who had the best solution on the market?
The ex-salesperson will either feel that their former company had the best solution or recognize that a competitor did.  Either way, you’re going to get a good read on who stands tallest in the B2B marketplace.

15. Who had a feature set you couldn’t get anywhere else?
This market research question doesn’t drive at the best solution for every customer or the broadest set of customers. It simply teases out the most unique. You may learn about upstarts who may soon become competitors.

16. Were there any features or services that customers were requesting but vendors weren’t offering?
This question helps align your product development efforts with what the market really wants – this year and next year.

17. For go-to-market efforts, who was the best partner to work with? Who brought the most leads? 
These questions will help you to understand the web of your competitor’s channel players and partners.

18. Who was the worst partner to work with?
You can avoid them too!

19. Did clients view the salesperson’s former company as a high cost solution?
This lets you know if the competitor is a high-cost solution that provides sufficient value to justify their cost or if the cost isn’t justified by the value.

20. What pricing structures appeared to resonate the best with clients?
This will help you to wisely structure your own pricing model. It also helps when deciding what to lead with when discussing financial terms.

21. Did the sales team have leeway to negotiate the price with clients?
This lets you know whether the competitor starts high and works toward a lower number in sales conversations or if they start low and remain firm on that price.

22. How much would the solution sell for?
In B2B sales, enterprise customers rarely pay the “rack rate” for a solution. It’s often difficult to compare your price to what competitors are actually charging. Therefore, getting a sense of an average selling price or license cost for a given customer type is incredibly useful information.

Try to get the rep to break this down across different B2B segments: small business, medium business, large enterprise, etc. It’s also important to get the “all up” price — as in the cost of the solution itself as well as the price of service and support contracts, required training, travel etc.

23. How long were service contracts and how long was the sales process along the way? 
This lets you dig into a part of the pricing model that can be opaque for anyone not already a customer.

24. What was the cost to renew a service contract?
Sometimes it’s not the up front cost that kills you, but the costs over time – such as support and training costs.  Make sure to dig into those as well.

25. Who do you see as the market leader in three to five years?
Your competitor’s former sales rep probably has an interesting market perception. If they didn’t think the company they worked for had a bright future, you may even get their reasons for leaving the company.

26. What market trends do they see on the horizon?
Aside from the companies they were watching, the salesperson probably had their eye on trends as well. Which trends did they think were important and why? Which did they ignore and why?

In closing, ex-sellers can be a treasure trove of market research information about competitors and the market. Don’t miss out on this important competitive research asset.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Cascade Insights specializes in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our specialization allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Check out our array of free resources including our blog, ebook, podcast archive and newsletter.