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market research recruitment

B2B Market Research Recruitment: Right People, Right Questions

November 23, 2022/in B2B Market Research Blog, Videos /by Raeann Bilow
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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

October 5, 2022/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Videos /by Raeann Bilow
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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

September 6, 2022/in B2B Market Research Blog, B2B Marketing Blog, Uncategorized, Videos /by Raeann Bilow
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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

B2B Market Research Firms: We Deliver Bad News to Good People

July 28, 2022/in B2B Market Research Blog, Videos /by Raeann Bilow
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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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Raeann Bilow

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