• Twitter
  • LinkedIn
(503) 212-0687 | hello@cascadeinsights.com
Cascade Insights
  • Market Research Services
    • B2B Customer Experience Research
      • Buyer Personas
      • Buyer’s Journey Research
      • Key Buying Criteria Research
      • Jobs-To-Be-Done Research
      • User Personas
      • Customer Satisfaction Research
    • B2B Product/Service Research
      • Market Opportunity Research
      • Concept Testing
      • Go-To-Market Research
    • B2B Marketing Enablement Research
      • Data-Driven Marketing Research
      • Message Testing
      • Brand Research
      • Thought Leadership Services
      • Partner Enablement
    • B2B Sales Enablement Research
      • Competitive Landscape Analysis
      • Win-Loss Research
      • Churn Analysis
      • Channel Research
  • Marketing Services
    • Marketing Strategy
    • Messaging
    • Content Marketing
    • Sales Enablement
  • Insights and Perspectives
    • B2B Market Research Blog
    • B2B Marketing Blog
    • B2B Resources
  • About Us
    • Our Story
    • Our Clients
    • Client Testimonials
    • Careers
    • Ethics Policy
    • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us
  • Search
  • Menu Menu

Tag Archive for: B2B Buyer Persona Research

B2B vs. B2C Market Research: Key Project Differences

February 13, 2023/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Videos /by Alexis Ford
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

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.

Buyer Personas

Why B2B Organizations Need Buyer Personas

October 5, 2022/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Videos /by Raeann Bilow
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

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.

B2B Buyer Persona Research: Truth Over Templates

B2B Buyer Persona Research: Truth Over Templates

April 29, 2022/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Blog Posts /by Ashley Wilson
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

The power of a strong B2B buyer persona is undeniable. In the past, creating them brought a competitive advantage for companies that used them. Today, it’s more than just a benefit; it’s a necessity. However, if your personas are so generic that you can’t effectively reach your target audiences, you might want to think about basing those personas on a firmer foundation of truth.

Read more

B2B Buyer Personas: 6 Key Insights to Build Effective Marketing Strategy

B2B Buyer Personas: 6 Key Insights to Build an Effective Marketing Strategy

October 12, 2021/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog /by Alexis Ford
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

As a B2B marketer, it’s crucial you know your intended buyers. You must know what kind of content to create to attract them to your business, move them through the funnel, and bring them into contact with your sales team. Read more

buyer personas

5 Risks of Conducting Your Own B2B Buyer Persona Research

April 8, 2021/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Blog Posts /by Raeann Bilow
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

Imagine your company is about to launch a new product. As a B2B marketer, it’s your job to lead the charge on developing buyer personas. You need to gain insights into the people who will be buying your company’s new product.

To begin your research, you scroll through Google and see dozens of guides with instructions on creating your own buyer personas. There are templates you can fill out. They have checklists you can follow. There are sample interview questions for you to ask your current customers.

Initially, this may seem promising. However, given the importance of getting this research right—and the level of risks that are involved—DIY buyer persona research can be added to a growing list of things that are better left for the professionals.

Other projects like updating your kitchen, changing out your snow tires, or cutting your own hair may all seem like things you could potentially handle on your own. However, unexpected setbacks are bound to pop up along the way. These setbacks threaten to leave you with results that range from lackluster (at best) to catastrophic (at worst).

Similarly, marketers who attempt to take on a buyer persona research project on their own can expect to face setbacks that result in a reduced quality of output. These issues can lead to generic, run-of-the-mill, and sometimes even inaccurate information for companies.
Read more

Buyer Personas

Mistakes B2B Marketers Make Without Buyer Personas

March 19, 2021/in B2B Buyer Persona Research, B2B Market Research Blog, Blog Posts /by Raeann Bilow
Share this entry
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

Buyer personas are the multi-vitamin of market research efforts. Without them, companies grow weak sales and marketing efforts. With buyer personas in hand, companies can confidently take on new markets, new buyer types, and new opportunities with ease.

Yet this truth is sometimes ignored by marketers who are taking over a new position. Whether it’s a newly promoted marketer or a marketer at a new company, we’ve traditionally seen these people focusing on brand studies first vs. buyer persona efforts.

We think this is a mistake. While brand research is important, of course, it can sometimes be nothing more than a sugary snack that supports rebranding efforts, especially when compared to the multi-vitamin of buyer personas.

Is choosing a new website palette, a new logo, a new company name, or the design for a new website fun? Yes. However, we suggest marketers not take this step until they understand a fundamental question first: Am I saying the right things to the right people? That is a question that buyer personas are well suited to address.
Read more

GET IN TOUCH

hello@cascadeinsights.com

(503) 898-0004

WHAT WE DO

Market Research Services
Marketing Services
Subscribeto RSS Feed

Blog Categories

  • B2B Buyer Persona Research
  • B2B Channel Market Research
  • B2B Churn Analysis
  • B2B Competitive Landscape Analysis
  • B2B Customer Experience Research
  • B2B Customer Journey Mapping
  • B2B Go-To-Market Research
  • B2B Market Opportunity Research
  • B2B Market Research Blog
  • B2B Market Segmentation Research
  • B2B Marketing Blog
    • Uncategorized
  • B2B Messaging
  • B2B New Product Launch Research
  • B2B Thought Leadership
  • B2B Usability Testing
  • Brand Research
  • Concept Testing
  • Content Marketing
  • Customer Satisfaction Research
  • Data-Driven Marketing Research
  • Jobs-To-Be-Done
  • Key Buying Criteria
  • Marketing Enablement
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Message Testing Research
  • Partner Enablement
  • Product/Service Research
  • Sales Enablement Marketing
  • Sales Enablement Research
  • User Personas
  • Videos
  • Win/Loss Analysis

Written by

Avatar photo
Raeann Bilow
Sean Campbell
Sean Campbell
Avatar photo
Philippe Boutros

Connect With Us

503.212.0687

hello@cascadeinsights.com

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

B2B Market Research

  • Customer Experience Research
  • — Buyer Persona Research
  • — Buyer's Journey Research
  • — Key Buying Criteria Research
  • — Jobs-To-Be-Done Research
  • — User Personas
  • — Customer Satisfaction Research

  • B2B Product/Service Research
  • — Market Opportunity Research
  • — Concept Testing
  • — Go-To-Market Research

  • Marketing Enablement Research
  • — B2B Data-Driven Marketing Research
  • — Message Testing
  • — Brand Research
  • — Thought Leadership
  • — Partner Enablement

  • Sales Enablement Research
  • — Competitive Landscape Analysis
  • — Win Loss Analysis
  • — Churn Analysis
  • — Channel Research

B2B Marketing

  • — B2B Marketing Strategy
  • — B2B Messaging Services
  • — B2B Content Marketing
  • — B2B Sales Enablement

About Us

  • — Our Story
  • — Our Clients
  • — Client Testimonials
  • — Careers
  • — Ethics Policy
  • — Privacy Policy

Blogs

  • — B2B Market Research Blog
  • — B2B Marketing Blog
  • — Cascade Insights Blog
Cascade Insights is proud to be a member of the Inc. 5000.
Scroll to top