Cascade Insights Company History

Cascade Insights Company History: What We Don’t Do

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When embarking on a relationship with a services firm, they need to be able to concretely tell you where they provide value and where they don’t. This is our story of how we came up with that answer.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name’s Sean Campbell and I’m the CEO of Cascade Insights. In this video, I want to tell you a little bit about our history, and specifically I want to tell you about our history through the lens of a single question and its answer. And that question is, what don’t you do? And the reason why I think this question and its answer is so critical when you embark on any relationship with a services firm is that if that services firm can’t tell you where they provide value and where they don’t, where you should put ’em on the playing field and then you shouldn’t put ’em on the playing field – how do you have any prayer at all of figuring that out from the outside?

And that’s why I think an organization needs to be able to answer this question pretty concretely. And our journey to answer this question took a little while. So back in 2007 when we were founding Cascade Insights, we were coming off the successful sale of our first company, and our first company had just predominantly worked with Microsoft and Intel.

We had a smattering of other accounts. But we were pretty beholden to just Microsoft and Intel and Scott Swaggart and I, the two co-founders of Cascade Insights, we decided that we wanted to be broader than that. We didn’t want to just be focused on the needs of a few organizations. We wanted to work with multiple verticals and multiple company types and all kinds of things like that.

So that’s what we did. So for about 12 to 24 months, we not only worked with Microsoft and Intel. But we worked with the likes of 3M and Exxon and Merck, and a whole variety of companies, and we had a lot of fun traveling the world doing so, but it also taught us a lesson. That if we weren’t quick to define what we didn’t do, if we didn’t start to put bounds on who we were, we were gonna be so broad in terms of our knowledge base, that we would start to lose a lot of value.

Because I came to fundamentally believe that a consultant’s value is driven mostly by their ability to talk to you about organizations they know that are like yours. It’s not driven by, as is sometimes stated, the number of organizations they know that aren’t like yours, as if that provides some kind of broader context.

Organizations are so complex on their own that if you’re not talking to someone who understands organizations like yours, you’re already kind of outta luck in some ways in terms of getting meaningful insight with that organization. So we had to decide very quickly. What were we not going to do?

Who were we not gonna serve? And from our context, and our experience, we basically decided we were gonna define that pretty simply as we weren’t gonna work with B2C organizations. We weren’t gonna work with organizations that weren’t technology firms. We were gonna work with B2B technology organizations.

And that left us a wide playing field to work with, much broader than of course just Microsoft and Intel. And upon that initial decision that really fundamental answer to the question, what won’t we do? We built the keystone for what became a very firm foundation, and since the last 15 years or so, since making that decision, we’ve been fortunate to build a growing and healthy company and bring in a lot of talented people that have helped us grow.

And I would just say in closing that if you don’t have an ability to answer that question today, or worse yet, if you’ve never considered it as an organization, what don’t we do? Today’s the day to ask that question and quickly come up with an answer.

Expert Networks vs. Panel Providers for B2B Research Studies

Expert Networks vs. Panel Providers for B2B Research Studies

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B2B companies that utilize expert networks, rather than panel providers, to recruit participants for research studies see substantial benefits in the quality of market research respondents. However, expert networks are a fast-moving new industry that comes with both risks and rewards. To help weigh the pros and cons, we created this video to highlight some of the potential benefits B2B companies could gain – or what risks they might face – by working with expert networks.

Video Transcript

What are some of the risks and rewards a market research team faces when they elect to go with an expert network provider to source sample first study versus a traditional panel provider?

Reward #1: Niche Respondents

Well, on the reward side, the first one is access to the niche. And why this is so, why expert networks do this so much better than panel providers I can illustrate with a really simple example.

Let’s take a research participant who is 52. At 51, let’s say they liked pasta and baseball, and at 52 they liked pasta a little less, and they liked baseball a lot more. Now, clearly for a B2C study, these shifts and preferences don’t happen that rapidly.

So a panel provider who’s sourcing participants for a B2C study focused on baseball or pasta, they don’t have to talk to this participant every day or every month to understand how their preferences might change. And that’s why a panel provider can use a much more static database to source participants for B2C studies, and you can still have a reasonable sample quality in that kind of scenario.

But the reason why this is so much more challenging for panel providers when we switch the context to B2B studies, is if we look at that same 52-year-old market research participant and we say, Hey, at 51 they were working for a large enterprise software company. And at 52, they’re working for a startup focused on AI initiatives.

Now, clearly the minute they make that job shift, they’re a really good fit for one study, but they’re no longer a good fit for a different type of study. And how do you know that that job change has happened? Well, expert networks pick up on those kinds of changes so much more effectively because they leveraged live databases like LinkedIn where the individuals themselves are updating that data on LinkedIn and other platforms and other tools, pretty much within hours or days after making a job change. And this makes it so much easier for an expert network to provide you a niche respondent.

Reward #2: Trust Then Verify

And this leads to the next reward. When you work with an expert network provider, as the old proverb goes, it’s much easier to trust and then verify. Folks have known for years in the market research industry that you have to do a lot of quality checks and you have to put together a lot of screeners to ensure you’re getting the right respondents from a panel provider. And there’s a number of reasons for that. What I really want to highlight though, is that expert network providers give you an additional level of validation, sometimes several. For example, one of the most common is you can ask a respondent to reach back out to you using their work email. And this gives you a lot of confidence that you’re actually talking to the individual that you thought you were. And just that little bit alone is an easy way to trust and then verify.

Reward #3: Speed

Another big reward though, working with expert network providers, is speed. And this again relates to the last point I just mentioned. If you don’t have to bounce a ton of participants that aren’t a right fit, if you don’t have to marshal an army of potential respondents through a screener just to get to a few of the right people, well clearly you’re gonna be able to execute studies that much faster because you just don’t have to go through all of that time it takes to bounce all those wrong people.

Risk #1: Cost

And so that’s another benefit. But what are some of the risks? Well, one is cost. Frankly, an expert network provider is gonna charge two or three times the amount you’re gonna pay traditionally to source participants from a panel provider for a B2B study. So you have to know that upfront. But at the end of the day, if you’re building a study focused on the wrong participants, that’s never a good use of funds anyway. So I think it’s just something that just comes with the choice to get a better quality participant for a B2B study.

Risk #2: Decreased Quant Samples

Another consequence of that cost though typically hits quant studies. So your average quant study, let’s say it’s a tracker, that’s focused on maybe tracking, you know, kind of brand awareness and things like that.

Let’s say that an NA 1000 study is run once a year, and now if you switch from a panel provider to an expert network provider, well now that is a lot more expensive. You know, it’s two to three times more expensive to get that sample, and that really adds up when you’ve got an NA of 1000. So now your choices are, let’s just say, interesting.

You can go to other senior stakeholders and say, well, we’re going to continue to use panel providers, but we’re not sure about the sample quality. That’s probably not the best idea. Or, you could say that we need two to three times the budget to run the tracker at the exact same size, the NA of 1000.

That can be challenging. Or, you may just have to run a smaller tracker and take the consequences that come with that. Maybe you can’t survey certain geographies through the same depth you used to in previous versions of the tracker, or a whole host of other decisions you might have to make if you turn that tracker into, let’s say, an NA of 500, instead of an NA of a thousand.

Risk #3: Contract Issues

And then there is one last risk, and this is really more contractual. A number of expert network providers will have a clause in their contracts that says something like, “You can’t reach out to this participant again unless you do so through our network and our company.” And clearly this doesn’t really scale, particularly if you’re doing a lot of projects in a lot of spaces.

You don’t want to be just beholden to one expert network provider. So, it just is important to take a look at those contracts you’re signing with expert network providers, potentially modify that clause or maybe have it exercised. So you have the ability to work with a variety of different expert network providers over time.

But in the end, we are wholehearted proponents of using expert networks to source sample for B2B market research studies. We think the rewards far outweigh the risks and generally speaking, we think it’s a very strong choice that any market research organization should consider when they’re trying to determine how to get sample for a market research study.

B2B vs. B2C Market Research: Key Project Differences

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The components of a B2B vs. B2C market research project are very different. From the sales cycle, to the buyer’s journey, to the customer base, to pricing models, to the product complexity and more, almost every aspect of a B2B product is different from B2C. Here’s how those differences result in different strategies and approaches when conducting B2B market research.

Video Transcript

Hi, my name’s Sean Campbell and I’m the CEO of Cascade Insights. If we were to crack open your average B2B market research project and look at it from the inside, and we were to contrast that with the B2C market research effort, we would notice a lot of differences. And those differences are driven by market dynamics, like how B2B purchases and engagements play out versus B2C.

So I want to talk about a few of those because they drive a lot of the decisions you make when you’re designing a B2B market research study.

The Buying Committee

The first one is the buying committee. In a B2B purchase, a buying committee is typically going to be at least five to six people. You’re going to have C-suite. You’re going to have stakeholders. You’re going to have line-of-business people. You’re going to have technical people. You’re going to have procurement people.

So this buying committee’s going to be at least five to six people. It might even be ten. Now, when you contrast that with a B2C purchase a lot of times it’s just an N of one. I mean, maybe you have an influencer or two. But for example, if somebody goes out and buys Halo Infinite, that’s kind of an individual purchase, right?

I want this game for my console. And sure, they might be influenced by someone, but at the end of the day, they’re the one making the decision with their money. On a B2B standpoint, though, you always have a bunch of people signing off on the decision. For example, instead of buying Halo Infinite, if you were to buy a Boeing 737, there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to weigh in on that decision.

So the other thing that tends to drive kind of study design beyond this, who do we interview in the buying committee? Do we interview everyone or do we exclude certain roles? You know, what’s kind of our decision tree on that? Is this idea of an impulse buy versus something that might take months or years to come to fruition.

Length of Buying Cycle

In B2B, most purchases don’t happen overnight. They don’t happen over the span of a few weeks. In many cases, they take months or years to happen. And there are certainly some exceptions to that. Like, for example, some software as a service cloud services can be purchased fairly just right away.

But the evolution of that organization using that service more and more, and it propagating throughout the organization to the point where hundreds or thousands of users are using it. Even there, that’s going to take a few months. You contrast this with a B2C purchase where again, to go back to Halo Infinite, this is pretty much an impulse buy.

You can be sitting on the couch, decide you want to play it, put in your credit card, and minutes or hours later it’s downloaded and you’re smashing the buttons and playing away. Right? So, it’s a very different kind of time pattern that you’re dealing with. For example, when you’re conducting a research effort in B2B, you need to have the ability to kind of walk somebody through a purchase process that might have taken months or years. So, there’s a lot of probing to do there, just even from that standpoint alone.

Pricing Complexity

Then there’s this issue of pricing complexity. When we go buy a gallon of milk, we don’t have to bring a spreadsheet along with us to figure out what the milk is going to cost. But the same isn’t true for a B2B purchase.

Almost any purchase in B2B comes along with the complexity of a spreadsheet and multiple options. And what’s our price versus someone else’s price based on who we are as an organization and how many users we, or you know our usage pattern for the service and things like that. And certainly there’s some publicly stated prices in B2B, but what you find very quickly is that those are usually pretty quickly discounted for almost anybody.

So whatever you see as a public price might not really be the price that’s being paid. So if you’re trying to understand, for example, competitor pricing, it’d be kind of dangerous to just assume the public price is the price. So, obviously this leads to some design choices when you’re thinking about B2B market research.

Product Complexity

Another factor is product complexity itself. So there’s this issue of just the product by itself is just a lot more complicated. When you think of a video game or a video game console. By definition these things are not that complicated. I mean, sure they might be challenging depending on what game you’re playing, but they’re not complicated to implement or set up buying a passenger jet.

Completely different experience. You have so many different people that have to be involved in making sure that that aircraft is airworthy and that your pilots know how to fly it and that you have basically the right facilities to maintain the aircraft and all of that kind of stuff, right?

And so if you’re going to do research on a business to business space, very typically you need to actually know the space pretty well. You can’t just go from one project where you’re working on something for a candy company to then working for something for a pharmaceutical company and then go do something for high tech.

It just doesn’t really work that way because you can’t really plumb effectively the complexity of that when you’re engaging with a research participant. And if it’s not about more of a qualitative approach where you’re engaging directly, the same thing’s true when you’re trying to design a survey instrument or something like that.

You wanna have it be something that really resonates and addresses the needs of that audience. So you’re getting at real world problems and then you can develop real world solutions.

Target Population Size

And then perhaps the final thing, and this is huge when it comes to designing B2B market research studies versus B2C, is just the size of the target population.

When we think about video game consoles, it’s probably fair to say that not everybody has a video game console, but lots and lots and lots of people have video game consoles. If you’re going to do research on a new game or a particular console, your issue really isn’t, does someone have one?

Your issue really is what slice of that market, you know, from a demographic standpoint, do I want to zero in on? And certainly if you make that narrow enough, it might be hard to find, uh, enough people that have a console with that demographic, but you don’t have this fundamental problem that not enough people have consoles to begin with.

You contrast this with B2B, you may have scenarios where an organization only has a couple hundred or at most a thousand customers because they’re very invested in their customers’ organizations, and they provide a very complex solution. For example, passenger jets are only sold to so many airlines around the world.

You know, certainly it’s more than a couple hundred, but we’re not talking about a million airlines. And so you have this kind of narrowing of the market that automatically impacts a lot of things. It impacts market research, recruiting. It impacts the kind of research effort you might be able to do.

Maybe you wanted to do quantitative, but you don’t have a large enough population that you’re targeting and you have to think about doing qualitative instead. And you just don’t typically run into this nearly as often with business to consumer research.

To sum up there’s a lot of things here that can impact a study design, and you have to know this going in. And if you know these things, you can be really well set up to design a well-crafted B2B market research study that’s going to drive really good business outcomes.

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B2B Market Research Recruitment: Right People, Right Questions

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Two crucial elements of any B2B market research project are:

  1. Recruiting the right people, and
  2. Asking them the right questions.

In this video, we’ll discuss the best ways to recruit the right participants for a B2B research study – and how to get the most valuable information from them.

Video Transcript:

Everyday life presents us with numerous examples of where you need to bring a few things together to make something awesome. For example, planes without engines – they don’t fly very far. Reese’s peanut butter cups –well you’re going to need peanut butter and chocolate to make one of those. And the atoms that make up the entire universe – for each atom, you’re going to need protons and neutrons and electrons.

So when it comes to B2B market research, what are those core elements? What are those core building blocks that you need to conduct a successful study? I would suggest that it’s two things, what I call right people and right questions. From a right people standpoint, what we’re talking about here is we’re talking about people that have the right background.

So they come from the right industry sector, they come from the right size company, they have experience with the right types of business problems that you want to investigate, and they maybe even have the right experience with certain technology stacks. But in this scenario, we also have to bring two things together.

In many cases in the market research industry, people turn to panel firms and expert networks to source these individuals, but that’s never going to be enough. You’re always going to have to layer on it another piece of the puzzle, much like that Reese’s Peanut butter cup I talked about earlier. And what that is, is a firm that has context.

More importantly, they have shared context with you. They have experience with your type of business. They understand the type of prospects and customers that you want to interact with. They understand the technology you sell and the type of products and services you go to market with. They might even have deep experience with the types of marketing and sales and product development strategies that you leverage.

And if you can marry a firm that has that context with an expert network or a panel firm that’s providing you, in essence, the raw material – now you’ve got a really good combination. And another way to think about this is, is just a trip to a grocery store. For example, you know, you can go to a Kroger or a Safeway or a Costco, basically kind of a big box grocery store, and they’ll present you with all kinds of options that you might want to consider.

This is somewhat akin to a panel firm. Lots of choices, not a lot of guidance from the panel firm or the grocer in this case as to what you’re going to put in your cart. And then you can take another step beyond that perhaps, and think about an expert network. When you think about an expert network, in the analogy of kind of grocery shopping, it’s somewhat akin to going to like a Trader Joe’s or a New Seasons or a Whole Foods.

Well, now maybe we’ve narrowed the pie somewhat. You know, our choices are now maybe more organic. They’re a little more focused. Maybe they’re more locally sourced, but we still have a fundamental problem. When we go down that aisle filled with 20 different types of almond milk, we’re the one that has to make that choice unless we have someone who can help us curate that.

Someone who’s akin to somewhat of a personal shopper of sorts so that we don’t have to think about all the different types of almond milk. The right one is just going to end up in our basket. And that’s what happens when you marry a market research firm who understands the context you live in as a B2B organization with that raw fuel that you get from a panel firm or an expert network.

And when you combine those, then you can get to that core goal of getting the right people in your study. And if you don’t have the right people, well then frankly, you’re just asking questions of the wrong people and what’s the point in that? The second thing is that point about right questions. So this also is an issue of shared context.

If you don’t have enough shared context with the participants of the study in this case, you’re never going to be able to ask deep enough questions. And deep questions are what leads to great insights. An example here from everyday life is when you think about your job, if a child asks you about your job, you’re going to tend to kind of take a slightly broader approach to answering a child’s question about your job. You’re going to use broad based analogies. You’re not going to get into the nitty gritty of the technical and business problems that you face every day. In essence, you’re going to dumb it down a little bit, and that’s not a bad thing because you want that child in that case to understand, at least at a rudimentary level, what your day has been like.

But how does that change when you talk to a peer, when you talk to somebody who has that shared context? Well, now you’re going to get into all this deep detail about the technical challenges maybe you faced in implementing a solution or the business problems you surmounted. You know, you get a lot more depth and context, and the only way to elicit that kind of response is if you have some shared experience. That comes from having talked to a lot of people, like the people you’re talking to at that moment. You have a lot of experience with that type of prospect or that type of customer or that type of business problem. And then you can dive deep and that leads to meaningful insights.

So in sum, I would say that the two major elements that anyone needs, if they’re about to embark on a B2B market research project is the right people and the right questions, and if you don’t have those, it’s probably better not to start at all.

Buyer Personas

Why B2B Organizations Need Buyer Personas

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Buyer personas are table takes for any B2B organization. These are the times when it is particularly crucial for an organization to procure buyer persona research.

Video Transcript

Today I want to talk to you a bit about why an organization embarks on buyer persona research, either for the first time or to update an existing set of buyer personas. And I would say if you break it down, there’s really two major reasons an organization embarks on this kind of initiative. The first is sales-focused.

It’s just simply harder to sell than it was in the past. So maybe that’s a difference between this quarter and a few quarters ago, or this year and a few years ago. But for whatever reason, it’s harder to sell and you’re not just getting the uptake that you would expect.

Another motivation to conduct buyer persona research is that your marketing isn’t doing as good a job driving leads as it should. So perhaps when prospects get further down the funnel and they interact with your sales team, things are fine. You’re able to convert those people into paying customers. But from a marketing standpoint, you’re not driving the kind of leads that you expected a few quarters ago or a few years ago, and both of these reasons can be very good reasons to consider buyer persona research.

Now, if we pull back a little bit and ask ourselves, what are some of the shifts that are causing these things to happen? Like what’s causing the kind of sales and marketing pain that leads an organization to embark on a buyer persona research effort? Well, there’s a few things. One is on the sales side. So you might have just had a leadership change or a change in tactics and strategies, and it’s just not working like you expected, but you don’t really know why.

A good example of this came across in one piece of research we did once. We had a client who decided to basically ship a bunch of born and raised US sales executives and managers and sales team members over to a particular European market to grow that market for this organization. And what we found is that the cultural mismatch was just so high that the sales team, in essence was getting in the way of closing new business. The product itself was actually pretty good, but customers said the sales team is just not behaving in a way we expect. They’re not following our cultural norms. They’re not engaging with us in the way we want. And so in the end, this organization had to make some very major shifts in the sales leadership in that country, and in the end were much more successful as a result. And all that came out of conducting the buyer persona research and really asking buyers what happens in the journey for you on your path to purchase? What kind of engagement do you want to have with vendors? What’s kind of appropriate for your region or your geography? All those kinds of things. And all of that led to really good conclusions for our client.

Another example of changes that can kind of drive this behavior is that perhaps your product and service mix has just gotten much broader. We see this happen all the time. For example, AWS versus GCP versus Azure. These are major cloud platforms that release a new service what seems like all the time. So if you look at the landscape of the services these organizations provide today, it’s much more vast than it was even just a few short years ago.

So clearly an organization that’s investigating these particular cloud platforms might have a different set of buyer personas that are engaged, you know, perhaps a few years ago, maybe a more lower level buyer was considering one of these platforms, but now it’s a much more strategic buyer. And so those kinds of shifts can happen all the time in tech in particular.

Another example is on the marketing side. Here you might have a scenario, as I alluded to earlier, where the organization just doesn’t have the right set of kind of tactics and strategies and content, and what they do have isn’t visible in the right places. And a buyer persona project can really help here because one of the things that happens in a buyer persona research effort is that you ask a lot of questions about how a particular individual makes decisions about the vendors or the products and services that they’re going to acquire and how they educate themselves on those offerings.

So you get a lot of good intelligence on things like the kinds of stuff they want to read and the kind of platforms they want to engage with to get that content and just even how they want it to be delivered. So that can really shape a set of marketing tactics and strategies very effectively.

Another good place where buyer persona research can come into play is when an organization has decided to shift into, let’s say, a different vertical. So maybe what they were selling before was pretty generalized to the market as a whole. But now they see a really big opportunity, perhaps in education or in healthcare, and they realize that the buying committee in that vertical won’t be that generalized.

It’ll be fairly specific to the vertical itself, and that vertical have its own needs and kind of sources of information and just even just kind of the buying decision may look a lot different in terms of the players that are involved and buyer persona research by digging. And looking at not just key stakeholders, but influencers in the buying committee can help that organization have a much better idea of how to craft sales strategies and marketing strategies and tactics and all those kinds of things.

So that’s just a few of the things that might drive a buyer persona research initiative, but another one. Is competitor activity because frankly, in general, competitors don’t stand still. So they may be producing better content than you. They might be producing better marketing strategies than you, or marketing campaigns.

They may have also structured their sales efforts in a way that they’re a lot more engaging. And obviously there’s a few different ways you could get resolution on a scenario like that. But while you’re conducting buyer persona research, you can. How the people you’re talking to engage with competing organizations or what do they think about the content competing organizations provide, or even the marketing strategies and tactics that these organizations seem to pursue?

And how that represents to that particular buyer. So competitors are also a big influence. And finally, there can just be kind of broad market shifts that mean it’s really time to update your buyer persona. For example, for a number of years now in the technology industry, it’s been known that the IT shop – or the director of IT, or the IT manager doesn’t really hold all the cards when it comes to like what an organization is going to buy or invest in when it comes to software or even sometimes hardware.

Line of business managers have a pretty large influence these days on these purchases. So an organization that was used to selling to that IT director, well now they’re going have to really think about the buyer personas they need to investigate as they step into these line of parts of the organization and maybe now have to sell to the CMO or the CFO or the chief operations officer or the folks that report to these individuals.

And so those kind of broader market shifts can also drive the need for an investment in buyer persona research. In some, you don’t want to fly with a lack of visibility if you feel that your buyer personas have grown stale. It’s a very straightforward project to. It tends to focus on qualitative research more than quantitative and leads to all kinds of great discovery along the way.

So if you have any questions about buyer persona research in general, you can always feel free to reach out to me directly and or to Cascade Insights at www.cascadeinsights.com.

How To Activate Your B2B Market Research Recommendations

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Strong and compelling recommendations should always be included in market research findings. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

At Cascade Insights, we always deliver recommendations – but we don’t just stop there. We take it one step further by helping you activate them. What might that look like? Well, we may develop messaging frameworks based on the message testing research that we’ve done. Or we could reset the content of your website based on the buyer’s journey research we’ve done. We may also help author content to reach specific buyer personas that came up during our buyer persona research.
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B2B Market Research Firms: We Deliver Bad News to Good People

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As a B2B market research firm, we need to deliver bad news to good people every day.

Maybe a company’s marketing and sales strategies are not working. Maybe the market they are trying to compete in is already overcrowded. Maybe their product or service is simply falling flat.

This is all bad news, but addressing it is the first step toward initiating change.

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