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B2B Products

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

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After hundreds of market research projects for B2B tech companies, we know the warning signs that a product will fail.

Before your next B2B product launch, make sure you aren’t experiencing any of the following symptoms.

1. You’re challenging the incumbent without a superior product.

To beat the incumbent, the new product needs to be at least twice as good. Even then, customers may be reluctant to move away from the familiar.

Your new product can’t just be a little bit better than the incumbent. It needs to be a lot better. Feature and price parity alone won’t cut it.

Toppling the incumbent is no easy task. Why do we all still use PowerPoint? Why has no other business networking site come close to taking LinkedIn’s place? Do you honestly expect a serious rival to Amazon’s e-commerce in the near future?

If taking on an established incumbent, product managers must build a product that is so good it can’t be ignored.

2. There are no distinguishing features.

Successful products have something that sets them apart.

Customers need a reason to pick your product from the sea of competing solutions. They shouldn’t all look the same.

Think of how many marketing solutions are out there. B2B marketers have to choose from hundreds of SEO tools, social media trackers, and newsletter platforms. Not to mention analytics.

A new marketing product really needs to stand out from the crowd. And it’s a big, big crowd.

It’s very important to understand your target customers’ “jobs to be done.” What will your customers use your product for? Do other solutions get the job done? Does your solution do it better? If not, hold off on that product launch.

Know the “jobs to be done” your solution aims to solve before you build your go-to-market strategy.

3. The product is hard to use. 

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

To be blunt, B2B software companies are infamous for releasing unusable products. It’s sad, but true.

For example, a well-known Fortune 500 client of ours was hoping to tackle a new market. However, their product required significant time to learn, whereas competitors were turnkey. When interviewing our client’s customers and our client’s rival’s customers, we quickly learned that ease-of-use was causing most buyers to go with the competitor.

Product managers, don’t forget that intuitive use beats complexity any day.

4. First-time-users are intimidated. 

Many larger companies with an established product and user-base fail to consider first-time-use.

Customers who have been around for decades have benefited from experiencing incremental improvement in the product over a period of years. A new customer experiences all the product’s capabilities at once.

In this scenario, you’ll probably get the confusing feedback that established customers love the complexity, but new customers complain that it’s too difficult to use.

This is a huge red flag. It’s a red banner. A red tapestry. It’s practically guaranteed that a startup is getting ready to disrupt you.

Competitors will notice this dissonance. They’ll build a solution that is simple, tuned to meet a few key business needs, and is relatively cheap compared to you.

If you’re in this situation, it’s time to spend that research budget. Interview customers who’ve chosen one of the upstarts. Don’t dismiss startups for being small. They may be providing a more usable solution than you are.

5. The partners aren’t helping. Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Sometimes, the partners matter just as much as the product.

For instance, one of our Fortune 500 clients had a wonderful software product. But their partners couldn’t be trusted to assist customers in deploying it in mission-critical environments. The competition, on the other hand, had a slightly inferior solution but a partner network that was top-notch. Guess which product won? The inferior one.

Don’t underestimate the importance of partners.

Make sure you’re including questions about partner relationships in your market research studies on customers and competitors’ customers.

6. The product aims to do a job that companies can easily do themselves.

Each month, we interview hundreds of people who use technology to solve business problems.

We’re constantly amazed by what a company can do with Excel, people power, and a bit of duct tape. It’s just amazing what developers can do with free, open source tools.

This ingenuity often removes the need for a commercial software solution. It’s very important for product leaders to understand this.

Is your product trying to do what your customers can already do themselves? If so, you’re competing against your own customers. Obviously, you don’t want to do that.

Before you build that product, make sure you understand your target customer base through in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and onsite visits.

7. The product is superfluous.

Don’t exceed the needs of the market.

We see this all the time with tech companies. Our clients are often so innovative that they’re ahead of the market. Way ahead.

This sounds positive, but it’s not necessarily. The product may be awesome, but if there isn’t a real-world use-case for it, B2B customers aren’t going to buy it.

Cool does not necessarily lead to profits. It needs to be practical too.

If you’re constantly giving demos but rarely getting a sale, it’s time to reconsider usability and how customers will use the product in the real world.

8. You’re targeting an extinct buyer persona. Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

Buyer personas need updating. This is very important. If your buyer personas haven’t been refreshed in years, you may be building a go-to-market strategy or designing a product launch to target a persona that no longer exists.

There has been so much ink spilled about how tech companies are selling to business decision-makers, how CIOs should think more like business leaders, and the plethora of SaaS solutions being bought directly by business groups within companies.

It’s obvious that IT roles have taken a backseat in B2B purchase decisions.

We find it a little surprising how frequently we have to educate product managers on this fact. An IT leader was a central buyer persona a decade ago. In 2017, the buyer persona that product managers most need to focus on is the business leader.

If you think you’re at a risk of selling to the last decade’s buyer persona, it’s easy to figure out via win/loss research or key buying criteria studies.

The Cure

These blunders are all too common in B2B product management. Luckily, market research can help you avoid these red flags and build products that your customers will love to use in the real world.


This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Have a business problem you need market research to slay? Give us a call at 503-898-0004.

 

an open letter to b2b sales leaders

An Open Letter To B2B Sales Leaders

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

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

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

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

1. Not getting up to speed. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

No prep, no win.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Over-reliance on the pitch deck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speak to all the buyer personas in the meeting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B2B sales reps should:

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

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

Be honest and direct to keep the customer coming back.

7. Not sending enough sales reps.

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

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

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

The sales entourage should include:

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

8. Being slow to respond. 

An Open Letter to B2B Sales Leaders

Obviously, being responsive to leads is extremely important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This state of affairs puts upstarts at an advantage.

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

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

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

How To Do Better

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

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


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

 

 

 

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.

 

 

Sales Needs A Say In Strategy

Sales Needs A Say In Strategy

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Your sales team is conducting qualitative research all the time. Talking to them is perhaps the lowest cost qualitative research project you could possibly do. It’s also your best chance to achieve a strong sales strategy in sync with the goals of your organization.

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

Unfortunately, many companies undervalue their sales professionals. This results in scores of missed opportunities and the alienation of the sales team.

Companies often make two big mistakes:

  1. Companies’ market research teams typically don’t have a great perception of their own sales team.
  2. Sales teams aren’t often invited to participate as major stakeholders in market research studies.

Having worked with many Fortune 1000 clients, I’ve seen this happen a lot. I know who gets invited to the table. Usually, representatives from marketing and product development are invited right away. If the project is important enough, a vice president or C-level executive gets an invite too. Sales leadership is skipped over far too often. That is a huge mistake.

Sellers and market researchers typically have very different personalities.

Sales and market research demand very different approaches to be effective at each job. Sellers and market researchers typically have very different personalities.

Think about how each role would behave in a meeting to discuss a research project. You’re probably picturing the following:

  • The salesperson will talk a lot and the market researcher will ask a lot of questions.
  • The salesperson will push the group to make a decision and the market researcher will counsel patience.
  • The market researcher will rely on data and the salesperson will rely on instinct.

Frankly, there may be an element of truth to these stereotypes. No problem.

Different perspectives are not a bad thing. The whole room will be pushed to consider possibilities they wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’ll give an example of the sales-as-an-afterthought syndrome. On a recent project for a Fortune 200 company, we received a list of stakeholders as the project kicked off. Since this project was large, the stakeholder list was understandably large as well. There were 15 names from all over the business. Product development, the executive team, marketing and, of course, market research team leads, were all represented. Oddly, not a single salesperson, sales manager, director of sales or even a sales VP were on the list.

To make matters worse, this was a project to figure out which opportunities the client should pursue in a market crowded with competitors. It’s hard to imagine that sales leadership wouldn’t have something worthwhile to contribute to the subject of sales strategy. They may have already had the answers to some of the questions that the researchers were after. At the very least, sales leaders undoubtedly had highly relevant questions on the topic and should have been given the opportunity to ask. Further, the outcome of the study was directly pertinent to crafting an effective sales strategy. It made zero sense to have no one to represent sales on the stakeholder list.

There is a false perception that products sell themselves.

This is another big reason why I think invites to sales leaders get “lost in the mail.”

Sellers and market researchers typically have very different personalities.

You see this bias crop up in many Silicon Valley companies. They might say, “We don’t worry about what the competition is doing. We just build great products.” They may proudly boast of their focus on “doing” over selling.

I’ve even seen companies advertise that they don’t have salespeople. They do, but they make up a title like “customer success representative” to call them instead. I don’t buy it.

I guarantee you that every company has someone (or several someones) in sales even if they don’t title them like they are.

I’m sorry, products don’t just sell themselves. Someone has to tell the narrative that connects the product to a set of business problems or opportunities.  Someone has to develop and execute on a sales strategy.

Regrettably, judging from the overwhelming majority of stakeholder lists for studies, it looks as though many-a-market research project completely overlooks this fundamental truth.

The experience of sales leaders is unduly discounted as a valuable source of qualitative data.

The biggest reason why sales teams are not invited to the stakeholder team is that people tend to think that the data salespeople can provide is inherently biased. The experience of sales leaders is unduly discounted as a valuable source of qualitative data.

ALL data is inherently biased.

Download numbers, SaaS service trial counts, website page visits, feature usage, NPS scores… All that data has an agenda too. It’s collected for a specific purpose and intended to measure a specific thing. It doesn’t necessarily bring context along with it. (That’s what market researchers are for.)

In many ways, B2B salespeople are conducting qualitative research every single day that they work for your company.

Your first reaction to this statement may be, “No way. They don’t record the conversations they have. They don’t transcribe them. They certainly don’t code the responses, and they don’t build findings decks.” You’re right. They don’t.

They do have conversations with real and potential customers every single day. With each interaction, salespeople use their personal experience to influence the behavior of buyers. That makes their personal experience an incredibly important factor for sales strategy.

Conversations between salespeople and buyers drive:

  • Customer engagement.
  • Future conversations with potential customers.
  • The actual sales of your company’s product.

B2B sales cycles last months or even years. Sellers engage with a buying team of roughly 5-10 people through what might amount to tens or even hundreds of online, phone, and in-person interactions.

Basically, your sales team has a ton of untapped data on your customers and potential customers.

Each B2B sale is a mini qualitative research project.

What are some ways you can engage with sales to mine this kind of intelligence? How can you infuse your next research effort with sales insights? How can you learn more about your company’s sales strategy? Ask your sales team these three questions.

Can I see a demo?

You haven’t properly researched the product unless you’ve seen it demonstrated.

With B2C software solutions and products, this is usually an easy process. You can go down to the mall and see or buy the product, or read public reviews.

With B2B solutions, it’s different. These products cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, so you can’t just buy them yourself.

For some solutions, like technology products in B2B, you can’t be expected to fully understand the product unless you’re trained on it. Just like the people who are going to use this solution, you can’t be expected to just pick it up and run with it. A demo is the easiest way to get up to speed on a complex product. Simply ask for one.

Salespeople demo the product for real customers every single day. Asking for an hour of their time is a small price to pay to conduct effective research on the product or solution and its competitors.

Who do you sell to and who do you avoid?

So often, market research targets personas that have been in play for so long that they are no longer questioned.

The sales team knows what’s really working. They know the personas who bite and the personas who don’t.

Ask them who they go for first at the start of a sales cycle by:

  • Role.
  • Title.
  • Type of company.

This will tell you at least one of the buyer personas you need to target in your research efforts.

Then ask them the same questions about the big sales. The ones that take longer and require more effort but would provide more long-term benefits. You’ll surface additional buyer personas or even whole market segments that need to be considered.

Make sure to also ask the crucial question of who they never try to sell to by role, title and type of organization. You’ll get a sense of which customers are actively buying competing solutions or aren’t buying any solutions.

Pitch Me

The third thing you want to do is ask your sales team to share their pitch.

In complex B2B sales, there’s no script that a seller reads. It’s not a standardized process.

Your best salespeople hone their pitch using the positive and negative feedback they receive from talking to prospective and current customers. If they highlight certain features, you can guarantee there’s a data-driven reason for that. If they talk up pricing in a certain way, there’s a data-driven reason for that too. If they specifically comment on competitors, there is a reason why.

Inviting sales to the stakeholder team should be common practice.  It’s in your company’s best interest to make it mandatory. You’re guaranteed to get insights that will help shape your study in positive ways. You’re also likely to make all the other stakeholders in marketing, product development, and executive teams happier with the results. Not mention sharpen your sales strategy.

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.

In-Depth Interviews

In-Depth Interviews: The Answer To ‘None of The Above’

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When it comes to B2B market research and competitive intelligence, there is no better tool than In-Depth Interviews (IDIs) for gathering insight.

In-Depth Interviews: The Answer To ‘None of The Above’

This article is based on an episode of the B2B Market Research Podcast. The audio version is available here.

Surveys have long been a popular tool for corporate research, but they have a significant limitation: they can only reinforce or dispel assumptions you already have.

In-Depth Interviews can uncover context that you weren’t even aware of. As such, IDIs are key to qualitative research. They are even essential to building effective surveys, as they illuminate the best questions to ask.

In-Depth Interviews can bring insight to business decisions from every angle, including:

  • The decision making process for selecting a product or service.
  • The stakeholders involved in the decision.
  • The factors considered before making the purchase.
  • What could have changed the decision.
  • Whether the customer or company is happy with the product or service they chose.

In-Depth Interviews: The Basics

To kick things off, let’s talk about what I mean by “in-depth interviews.”

Length

IDIs are typically 30-60 minute conversations with a business stakeholder.

In-Person Vs. Remote

Historically, IDIs, especially in B2C studies, were usually conducted face-to-face. These days, telephone IDIs are incredibly common.

At Cascade Insights, we even prefer telephone interviews as they tend to allow for more time with the respondent. It’s much easier to grab time on someone’s calendar if you’re just asking for a phone call rather than something that requires a face-to-face meeting.

Respondents

Interview respondents need to be able to provide insight into complex B2B business decisions. Often, studies will require respondents with a certain job title or highly specialized knowledge. To uncover powerful insight, you can’t just talk to anyone. Effective studies require talking to very specific people.

Incentives

To ensure response from the right people, it’s common practice to offer an incentive. Our incentives usually range from $100-200 in value.

Recruit

Finding good interview subjects can be done in a variety of ways. We frequently turn to LinkedIn, industry forums, and social media networks to identify knowledgeable respondents to reach out to.

The Interview

Discussions guides form the foundation of the interviews. These guides are not just a list of questions that are recited verbatim. A typical guide includes key focus areas and specific drill-down questions but leaves room for discovery and investigation during each conversation.

Clients may even influence the course of each discussion by communicating via a back channel with the researcher who is conducting the interview. As the researcher conducts the interview, the client may be in contact with the researcher through an instant messaging platform like Slack, Skype or Google Talk.

Why In-Depth Interviews?

IDIs are useful because they are uniquely able to get at the heart of customers’ decision making process. For B2B technology companies, business decisions tend to be complex and involve many different stakeholders.

To illustrate how useful IDIs are for market research and competitive intelligence, I’ll share some examples of how IDIs have uncovered key information for Cascade Insights’ clients.

The Upstart Competitor

Our client was focused on selling directly to the enterprise and had enjoyed being relatively unchallenged in that market for a period of time.

However, a competitor was moving away from selling to small and medium businesses and started targeting enterprise-sized companies. Back when the competitor had focused on SMBs, they had posed no threat to our client even though their technology was somewhat superior. As the competitor started moving up market, they posed a much greater threat.

Our client needed to know two key things:

  1. Was this competitor truly in a position to sell to the enterprise?
  2. If so, could the competitor be stopped?

To complete this project, we conducted in-depth interviews with:

Each one was able to provide a unique perspective.

Customers were able to tell us how the product was being tailored to meet enterprise needs. They could also shed light on how well the competitor’s sales team was able to engage with enterprise sized organizations.

The competitor’s former sales reps were able to tell us how much of a push there was to target enterprise accounts. They could also clarify which tactics were most often used when targeting enterprise accounts. Importantly, they could also tell us how often they were competing with our client for enterprise deals.

Talking to partners was beneficial because they were able to describe how much of the competitor’s business was pivoting towards the enterprise. Typically, partners have a unique perspective on the markets that their vendor partner is targeting. If your competitor is attempting to move up market, that will probably be reflected in requests to their partners to reshape their sales and marketing efforts. An ambitious competitor may even reward partners who have been successful at changing their strategies to attract enterprise deals.

Key Buying Criteria and In-Depth Interviews

IDIs are also incredibly useful for understanding growing industry segments such as the cybersecurity market.

For example, lately, we’ve had a lot of work researching solutions that protect organizations from viruses, malware, and the like. We’ve spent a lot of time interviewing cybersecurity professionals about the features that matter most in endpoint protection programs.

In such a crowded marketplace, knowing exactly what features cybersecurity professionals want, which ones they aren’t interested in paying for, and what features will matter five years from now are all critically important.

In researching these issues for our clients, we conducted IDIs with network security specialists, network security architects, and cybersecurity thought leaders. We reached the people that could personally answer these questions with the authority of having worked with the solutions in question day in and day out.

Uncensored Customer Feedback

Another big advantage of IDIs is that significant client engagement is possible. All throughout the research effort, clients get to listen in on the interviews and hear how the research process is progressing.

There’s nothing like hearing the voice of your competitor’s customers as they tout the virtues of your opponent’s products and lay out 10 or more reasons why they believe they made a smart decision in choosing your rival.

It’s often the case that companies’ tribal knowledge of their brand’s image is very different from how they are currently perceived. There is nothing like a direct quote from a lost customer when it comes to battling the bias within your own company about the competition.

I can personally attest to scores of times during IDIs when a client was dismayed by the strength of a customer’s advocacy of a competitor.

Meeting Stakeholder Needs and In-Depth Interviews

IDIs don’t just bring hard truths to light. They can also help various stakeholder teams accomplish their goals more effectively.

B2B Sales

Sales leaders often commission win-loss studies. Win-loss studies provide insights on what sales teams are doing most effectively, what they need to stop doing, and what the competitor does better.

Win-loss studies can also help identify the types of buyers that your sales team struggles to engage with and those they excel at selling to.

These studies frequently involve 15-60 minute IDIs with the client’s current customers and with their competitors’ customers.

Sales leaders also appreciate key buying criteria research. This type of research is typically based on IDIs with current customers, competitor customers, and partners.

B2B Marketing

IDIs can also bring insight key to the strategic development of content marketing assets. There are so many “how to do content marketing” resources out there and a plethora of blogs, articles, podcasts, video streams, social campaigns and more from your competitors and partners. With so much out there, it’s hard to know which type of content marketing to invest in.

To create content that has a real impact, you need to conduct real-world research. Certainly, you can look at statistics from your website, blog, and social media efforts, but it’s also important to actually ask current and potential customers what type of content drives them to buy.

For example, one very well-known tech company asked us to study which content drove developers to engage with their cloud service and which content helped educate them on the service’s features. Armed with the knowledge of which content initiatives were resonating the most with customers, our client was able to strategically concentrate their marketing efforts to drive even more engagement with their product.

In-Depth Interviews are also key to building great buyer personas.

One of our clients hired us to give them a greater understanding of the different types of buyers of advanced analytics. The aim of the project was to determine archetypes of different types of buyers from business leaders to tech specialists.

For this project, we conducted roughly 10 IDIs with each type of buyer. Through the IDIs, we learned what motivated each archetype to buy, the type of relationship they preferred with suppliers, the key buying criteria that drives them, and many other factors in their decision to purchase advanced analytics solutions. Obviously, all of this insight greatly improved our client’s marketing and sales efforts.

Product Development

IDIs with customers, potential customers, competitors’ customers and aspirational customers can reveal information that is critical to product development. You may learn:

  • Which features customers wish you had.
  • Which features drove customers to buy a solution; yours or your competitors’.
  • Why customers use a particular feature.

Today, most companies have a lot of data on what their customers are using but they don’t always understand the context around that use. IDIs can clear that up.

IDIs are also great for digging into how customers rate companies on the “itys” of tech: security, manageability, reliability, scalability, interoperability, etc.

Challenges with In-Depth Interviews

Now that we’ve talked at length about the benefits of IDIs, I’ll acknowledge some of the risks of using this methodology.

Mistaken Stakeholders

Stakeholders sometimes push for quantitative measures when the research demands qualitative data.

Many stakeholders know that they can obtain a quantitative view of their own customer base quite easily. With direct access to their customer base, they often assume it will be easy to get a good-sized sample.

However, things change when you need to hear from competitors’ customers. Finding enough of these folks to have a meaningful quant study of their views is less likely, definitely not easy, and most likely expensive. A better first step is to go with a qualitative research effort that includes IDIs with competitor customers.

Needlessly Infinite In-Depth Interviews

Another related challenge is that stakeholders often want more IDIs than are necessary.

Frankly, you don’t need that many IDIs to have an effective study.

If you think about a study that focuses on an average B2B sales process, the sample you need to target is already pretty darn small. Just some basic criteria shrinks the pool down a lot: customers who bought a certain solution from a particular competitive landscape (example: 4-6 vendors) for the purpose of completing a specific job, for instance.

Further, clients typically commission a study to understand a certain type of buyer persona such as a technical or business leader.

Once a study is dialed in this tightly, it’s usually better to conduct a set of 10 -20 IDIs with stellar respondents than to launch an enormous (and expensive!) quant study.

Stakeholders also sometimes fail to recognize the difficulty that exists in targeting the customer base of small startup companies with a quant survey. For example, at least 10 times a year, clients call on us to research a company with a customer base that only numbers in the hundreds. For studies like these, it would be unwise to go with a quant survey. With such a small customer base, and factoring in typical response rates, you won’t be able to get meaningful insights about a startup’s customer base with the number of surveys that would actually get completed.

Luckily, 10-20 IDIs can give you a ton of insight about a customer base that numbers in the 100s.

Recalcitrant Respondents

Interviewees, particularly for B2B studies, often need to be pushed.

For B2B tech market research and competitive intelligence studies, we’re not asking people about sensitive medical conditions, their kids, or their failed dreams. We’re just talking to them about business and technical issues. Hence, it’s fine to push for a meaningful answer that has a strong industry context.

For example, if someone tells one of our analysts that they decided to go with a competitor solely based on price, we are not just going to drop it there. We will ask them to justify that response, maybe even a couple of times, because business decisions are rarely that easy. In B2B tech, there are multiple stakeholders that interact as part of a very complex decision tree. It’s important to get at those secondary and additional factors that drove the decision. Perhaps price played into the decision, but it was really a particular integration or support offering that landed the competitor the deal.

Interviewers That Don’t Get the Jargon

For effective IDIs, the interviewer needs to be nearly as knowledgeable as the research participant.

How often have you been at a party and struggled to explain your day job to someone who isn’t in the same line of work? Instantly, you start dumbing things down so that they can understand what you do day to day. In casual conversation, that’s just fine. However, for B2B market research, the respondent dumbing things down is the last thing you want. Ideally, the respondent should speak to the interviewer like they would speak to a colleague. Only then do you know you’re getting in-depth answers that have real industry context.

The Drive-Thru Interview

Another challenge with IDIs is that you can’t control the interviewee’s environment. If the interviewee is ordering a cheeseburger, they aren’t really paying attention. The same is true if they’re focused on their email as much as they are the phone call you’re having with them.

A skilled interviewer versed in the technical and business aspects of the industry tends to solve this problem as well. As soon as interviewees realize that the person interviewing them really gets the challenges in their industry, they tend to quickly focus on the phone conversation. The interviewer just has to be knowledgeable and personable enough to be more interesting than the subject’s email or cheeseburger.

…Why Do In-Depth Interviews

There is just no better way to solve the puzzle of B2B business decisions and find out what customers really, really want.

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 AldanNa/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.

Image Courtesy of Florin Deloiu/Shutterstock.com

Win-Loss Analysis: 4 Tips for B2B Market Researchers

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B2B Market Research Podcast – Top of the Charts for 2015 – Podcasts, How-To’s, and Industry News

Listen below:

Need to recruit customers for a win-loss study?

In this episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell discusses the pros and cons of four recruiting techniques for B2B market researchers and CI professionals.

Sean covers:

  • The benefits and shortfalls of using internal assets such as CRM data and sales teams.
  • Why you should go outside of your own data set.
  • Why it’s important to examine both internal and external data for insight on dead deals.

Did you enjoy this podcast? Let us know! Review the B2B Market Research podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

In this episode of the B2B Market Research Podcast, we’re going to talk about four techniques B2B market researchers can use to recruit customers for a win-loss analysis.

#1 – Check out your CRM data

One of the most obvious assets for recruiting customers for your win-loss analysis study is your own customer relationship management (CRM) data.

However, using CRM data immediately presents challenges. You’re probably going to have less data about your losses in your CRM system than you’ll have about your wins.

Most sales team members don’t have sufficient incentive to put in a lot of great data about their losses. You’re going to have whole accounts where the best information you’ve got is the name of the account, some brief detail about the opportunity and zero stakeholder information. This could be because of a lack of sales leadership and management skill, having hired the wrong sales people, etc.

Consequently, you’re going to have challenges with the response rate when you do outreach. If you don’t have data on your losses, you probably won’t have the most appropriate stakeholder to reach out to for insight into that loss. This leads to faulty win-loss studies.

It’s a different story when the CRM data is good. Good CRM data opens up a whole world of useful analysis for your win-loss study. You can focus on accounts in a given region or country, examine accounts that only bought a certain type of product, or look at accounts that have only been purchasing from a particular competitor. Hence, when the CRM data is good, you can find excellent and specific recruits.

#2 – Ask the sales team

Choice Concept

Another common way to use your own assets to generate interviews with customers is to ask your sales team for leads. In my opinion, this is the worst route to take when recruiting customers for win-loss analysis studies.

Simply because, sales teams cherry pick the accounts they give you.

It’s rare for a sales team member to actually give you the contact info for the worst loss they have ever had. In fact, they are even less likely to give you contact info if that loss was the result of their own personal behavior or actions.

Instead, they might give you a list of losses that have to do with a certain category such as price increases or the absence of a certain product feature. This sort of selection will skew your study.

The sales team’s primary responsibility is to sell. That puts helping with the analysis on the back burner.

Also, if you choose to go through the sales team, be prepared to wait a while for a response.

The sales team’s primary responsibility is to sell. That puts helping with the analysis on the back burner. Unless your organizational culture is unusually awesome at promoting that sort of support, there will probably be a lot of lag in getting the contact info you want.

If you have bad data in your CRM system but don’t want to use external sources for recruiting, you can ask the sales team to assist with contact info, but be aware that the sample will probably be somewhat biased.

#3 – Go outside of your own data set

Let’s talk about some instances that would require data from outside of your company.

If you go outside of your own data set, you might learn of other areas where you could be successful. For example, in most competitive landscapes, there are competitors who successfully engage with slices of the market buyer, industry and sub-industry personas. If you are producing a similar product, these personas could mark an opportunity for your company.

For example, say Company A goes roaring after public sector sales while Company B doesn’t have many public sector sellers to meet that need.

This could be an opportunity for Company B, especially if their product is similar to Company A’s.

Since Company B doesn’t currently have significant public sector engagement, they won’t have any meaningful deals in their data that show losses to Company A for public sector deals. Therefore, Company B wouldn’t gain valuable insight from a win-loss analysis based solely on internal data.

In sum, if you’re looking for new areas of opportunity to grow your business, your own data isn’t fully sufficient for a win-loss analysis study.

In sum, if you’re looking for new areas of opportunity to grow your business, your own data isn’t fully sufficient for a win-loss analysis study.

The same is true for deals you were never invited to. This is an important area to consider, especially if it was a deal you should have been invited to.

To consider these losses, you will have to look outside of your own data. Say you sell to the mid-market really well and yet your competitor seems to have a lot of activity with mid-market customers you’d never even heard of before. Your sales team hasn’t mentioned them and they don’t show up on your CRM data. Time to turn to outside information.

You’ll also need to look at outside data when you’re dealing with new competitors. As in the competitors who are going to steal money and time from you next year. These could be venture capital funded companies, or companies with impressively innovative business models, etc. Since you’re not losing deals to them now, they won’t show up in your internal data as a loss. However, their trajectory indicates they could soon become a problem and you should investigate them. To do so, you will need to use outside data.

#4 – Examining lost deals? Use internal and external data.

Using both internal and external data can really help when examining canceled projects, projects without a budget or a lack of response to initial outreach.

You can gain a lot of insight into why these projects flat-lined when you marry your own data set with independent information on the competitor.

You can gain a lot of insight into why these projects flat-lined when you marry your own data set with independent information on the competitor.

If you source that competitor’s customers independently, you may find that for areas of the market where you have had a lot of lost deals, the competitor has been really successful. That could indicate a problem with your company’s marketing, customer engagement, or with the product itself. Either way, it’s valuable insight.

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.

And if you want to know how we structure Win-Loss studies for our clients – including how we handle recruiting competitor customers – don’t hesitate to ask.