SaaS companies face unique challenges due to a constantly evolving competitive and technology landscape. SaaS companies require specialized market research partners who can understand these challenges and design research that take these dynamics into account from the start.
The following case studies illustrate exactly how we’ve managed to, for over 16 years, meet the needs of SaaS companies when it comes to market research.
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B2B companies that utilize expert networks, rather than panel providers, to recruit participants for research studies see substantial benefits in the quality of market research respondents. However, expert networks are a fast-moving new industry that comes with both risks and rewards. To help weigh the pros and cons, we created this video to highlight some of the potential benefits B2B companies could gain – or what risks they might face – by working with expert networks.
What are some of the risks and rewards a market research team faces when they elect to go with an expert network provider to source sample first study versus a traditional panel provider?
Well, on the reward side, the first one is access to the niche. And why this is so, why expert networks do this so much better than panel providers I can illustrate with a really simple example.
Let’s take a research participant who is 52. At 51, let’s say they liked pasta and baseball, and at 52 they liked pasta a little less, and they liked baseball a lot more. Now, clearly for a B2C study, these shifts and preferences don’t happen that rapidly.
So a panel provider who’s sourcing participants for a B2C study focused on baseball or pasta, they don’t have to talk to this participant every day or every month to understand how their preferences might change. And that’s why a panel provider can use a much more static database to source participants for B2C studies, and you can still have a reasonable sample quality in that kind of scenario.
But the reason why this is so much more challenging for panel providers when we switch the context to B2B studies, is if we look at that same 52-year-old market research participant and we say, Hey, at 51 they were working for a large enterprise software company. And at 52, they’re working for a startup focused on AI initiatives.
Now, clearly the minute they make that job shift, they’re a really good fit for one study, but they’re no longer a good fit for a different type of study. And how do you know that that job change has happened? Well, expert networks pick up on those kinds of changes so much more effectively because they leveraged live databases like LinkedIn where the individuals themselves are updating that data on LinkedIn and other platforms and other tools, pretty much within hours or days after making a job change. And this makes it so much easier for an expert network to provide you a niche respondent.
And this leads to the next reward. When you work with an expert network provider, as the old proverb goes, it’s much easier to trust and then verify. Folks have known for years in the market research industry that you have to do a lot of quality checks and you have to put together a lot of screeners to ensure you’re getting the right respondents from a panel provider. And there’s a number of reasons for that. What I really want to highlight though, is that expert network providers give you an additional level of validation, sometimes several. For example, one of the most common is you can ask a respondent to reach back out to you using their work email. And this gives you a lot of confidence that you’re actually talking to the individual that you thought you were. And just that little bit alone is an easy way to trust and then verify.
Another big reward though, working with expert network providers, is speed. And this again relates to the last point I just mentioned. If you don’t have to bounce a ton of participants that aren’t a right fit, if you don’t have to marshal an army of potential respondents through a screener just to get to a few of the right people, well clearly you’re gonna be able to execute studies that much faster because you just don’t have to go through all of that time it takes to bounce all those wrong people.
And so that’s another benefit. But what are some of the risks? Well, one is cost. Frankly, an expert network provider is gonna charge two or three times the amount you’re gonna pay traditionally to source participants from a panel provider for a B2B study. So you have to know that upfront. But at the end of the day, if you’re building a study focused on the wrong participants, that’s never a good use of funds anyway. So I think it’s just something that just comes with the choice to get a better quality participant for a B2B study.
Another consequence of that cost though typically hits quant studies. So your average quant study, let’s say it’s a tracker, that’s focused on maybe tracking, you know, kind of brand awareness and things like that.
Let’s say that an NA 1000 study is run once a year, and now if you switch from a panel provider to an expert network provider, well now that is a lot more expensive. You know, it’s two to three times more expensive to get that sample, and that really adds up when you’ve got an NA of 1000. So now your choices are, let’s just say, interesting.
You can go to other senior stakeholders and say, well, we’re going to continue to use panel providers, but we’re not sure about the sample quality. That’s probably not the best idea. Or, you could say that we need two to three times the budget to run the tracker at the exact same size, the NA of 1000.
That can be challenging. Or, you may just have to run a smaller tracker and take the consequences that come with that. Maybe you can’t survey certain geographies through the same depth you used to in previous versions of the tracker, or a whole host of other decisions you might have to make if you turn that tracker into, let’s say, an NA of 500, instead of an NA of a thousand.
And then there is one last risk, and this is really more contractual. A number of expert network providers will have a clause in their contracts that says something like, “You can’t reach out to this participant again unless you do so through our network and our company.” And clearly this doesn’t really scale, particularly if you’re doing a lot of projects in a lot of spaces.
You don’t want to be just beholden to one expert network provider. So, it just is important to take a look at those contracts you’re signing with expert network providers, potentially modify that clause or maybe have it exercised. So you have the ability to work with a variety of different expert network providers over time.
But in the end, we are wholehearted proponents of using expert networks to source sample for B2B market research studies. We think the rewards far outweigh the risks and generally speaking, we think it’s a very strong choice that any market research organization should consider when they’re trying to determine how to get sample for a market research study.
Two crucial elements of any B2B market research project are:
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.
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.
What was the last movie you watched? Maybe it was Top Gun: Maverick or Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now, imagine that you’re a cast member on the set of one of these movies. If you have the movie script, you’re going to understand each character’s role in the movie, what their lines are, and what motivates them. In fact, if you understand the story well enough, you might just improvise an iconic scene. However, if you show up to set without a script, you won’t know what the story is, what your lines are, or how you should even respond to the characters around you.
The same idea applies to B2B sales. Fundamentally, you need to understand how the buyers and stakeholders in your target accounts talk to each other and how they embark on and conclude a buying journey. Buyer personas give you a sense of how these conversations start, end, and what type of “dialogue” each character uses. Most importantly, buyer personas give you a broader view of the decision making process.
One of the most common mistakes salespeople make is the failure to recognize that there are several decision makers involved in the buying process. In fact, Gartner reported that an average of six to 10 people are involved in most buying decisions. Our experience shows that many sales teams struggle to even identify five roles involved in the decision making process.
Moreover, Buying Facilitation author Sharon Drew Morgen calls out a key point about sales when she states, “a seller is in a unique position to serve a buyer by helping them discover the how, what, when, where, and why needed to solve a problem within the parameters of their culture.” She follows a bit later in her book with this key point as well, “[a single] buyer cannot know all of the answers to your questions because the odds are huge that they have a decision team working with them.”
So, how does a seller go from not knowing an organization to understanding their culture? How does a seller go from knowing one member of a buying team to understanding the needs of the entire buying team?
First, sales teams need to slow down and ensure they are meeting the needs of each stakeholder. The best way to do this is to establish some baselines as to what a typical stakeholder for your product or service might want from a vendor.
Secondly, sales teams need to be certain that the messages they are sending align with the needs of the buyers. Similarly, marketing teams need to ensure that any account based marketing (ABM) content or broader based content addresses these needs as well.
Third, marketing and sales teams need to understand how a stakeholder makes decisions over time. In nearly all cases, some members of the buying committee have a role to play at the start of the journey, middle, end, and a limited number will be involved in the project from start to finish.
For example, when a movie starts, we might have some sense of the climactic battle, but we don’t know the role that every actor might play. Is the character we meet in the opening scene going to be with us throughout the entire movie? Or will they “be brief and be gone”? Is the character we meet towards the end the true person our hero has to defeat in the end? Or is there someone lurking in the shadows who is even more powerful?
We see this idea play out in the Hobbit movie trilogy. It might be obvious as the first movie begins that Frodo is going to be with us through the end of the story. But Sam is the real surprise, as without his help, it wouldn’t be possible for Frodo to defeat Sauron.
The key takeaway: If you fast forward through the entire movie, would you really understand the plot (sales process)? You might understand how the battle (or sale) was won or lost, but you wouldn’t really understand how it happened. You wouldn’t understand which actor (or persona) was critical to the story, and you wouldn’t understand who was rooting for the hero (the seller) or against them.
We once worked with a client who had successfully built relationships with leadership at several universities. This client wanted to develop buyer personas for university c-suite roles to inform their marketing strategy and related materials. The goal was to take a role-based approach rather than leading with a product-first strategy.
To make this pivot successful however, the sales and marketing teams in our client would require a deeper understanding of the needs of key buyer personas. In particular, our client was focused on the needs of a VP of Research and a Chief Academic Officer in a university setting.
In a typical university, a VP of Research and a Chief Academic Officer have different responsibilities. A VP of Research is responsible for directing the university’s mission, focusing on policy issues, and establishing community relations. A Chief Academic Officer ensures academic quality in all departments, programs, and services within the organization.
Our client learned that each persona would need to hear a different message if they were to develop an interest in our client’s solution. The sales team would best be able to develop rapport with the Chief Academic Officer by discussing fundraising in academia. Similarly, the VP of Research might be interested in communicating to the student body about research grants or new partnerships.
The key takeaway: Buyer personas give you an essential look into the motivations and needs of each buyer you’ll meet on the journey to a successful sale.
We recently conducted a buyer persona project for a client who sold a SaaS solution of interest to law firms. They learned that law firms rarely make any recommendations to clients about what software to use because they don’t want to be liable for anything.
However, Chief Legal Officers or General Counsels who work for companies about to go public might be interested in the software.
As a salesperson, this discovery shows that you can’t always rely on referrals from every market segment you might touch. Without this information, a sales team’s outreach efforts would be fruitless. This knowledge allowed our client to utilize B2B buyer persona research to create extremely targeted outreach — maximizing the use of their sales and marketing team’s time.
The key takeaway: You can’t always rely on existing clients to evangelize for you. Sometimes, you run into people who aren’t interested in your services whatsoever. But with buyer persona research, you’ll be able to maximize the value of your efforts and minimize wasted opportunities.
Famous movie duos aren’t always in agreement throughout a movie. Take Maverick and Rooster, for example. Throughout the better part of the movie, Rooster resents Maverick after learning that Maverick pulled Rooster’s application to flight school, setting him back from his peers.
However, after Maverick gets shot down in an effort to distract the enemy jets, it’s none other than Rooster who risks his own life to save Maverick. The dynamic duo then steals an old enemy F-14 aircraft and barely makes it back to the base alive.
The beef between Maverick and Rooster created a riff across the entire team. This tension almost cost the entire flight crew their lives as they trained for the dangerous mission.
The same idea holds true for sales and marketing teams. When everyone is clear on what personas you’re going after you can provide unified sales and marketing content without confusion.
The key takeaway: It’s frustrating for a buyer to get different messaging from sales and marketing teams. Being in alignment internally creates a better outcome for your buyers which is the ultimate goal. Aim for cohesion, not confusion.
In Top Gun: Maverick, Hangman only gets 35 minutes of screen time. (In contrast, Maverick gets 113 minutes, and Rooster, 66 minutes.) Although Hangman is an integral part of the jet fighter squad at the beginning, he isn’t selected for the death-defying mission. However, just as Maverick and Rooster are about to be shot down, Hangman comes in and saves them in the most heroic way possible.
The moral here for B2B sales teams is clear. Even the characters with the least amount of screen time can make a big impact. It’s easy to focus on the stars and forget that other actors can help you achieve your goals. Like Frodo and Sam, or Maverick and Hangman, you need to understand all the key personas, not just the ones with the biggest titles or the most screen-time if you want to win the deal.
Finally, don’t ask your sales team to win a deal without giving them the knowledge of all the players that matter, especially those folks who seem to be merely a supporting actor at first glance. We can help you get that early first look at the script of the buyer’s journey so you’ll know before anyone else how the story turns out in the end.
With 15 years of experience in B2B tech market research, Cascade Insights understands the value in knowing your buyer personas. Learn more about our sales services here.
Special thanks to Sean Campbell, CEO, for advising on this piece.
Marketers often find themselves stuck when trying to create the right messaging frameworks for their organizations. Maybe it’s because they are nervous about suggesting a new messaging framework without the data to back it up. Or perhaps they weren’t hired to solve that type of problem; they were hired to drive existing marketing campaigns. So, they’re not confident in their ability to create new messaging. Or maybe it’s because they’ve been sitting at their end of the table for so long that they no longer even know what their buyers’ needs are.
It’s no secret that the tech industry has been experiencing some unsettling circumstances recently. Nearly every week, another major tech company announces more hiring freezes or layoffs.
While much of the tech space is entrenched in uncertainty, there are certain segments within it that remain resilient. One such area is healthcare cybersecurity – one of the fastest growing among venture capitalists right now. In fact, the healthcare cybersecurity market is expected to reach $35B+ by 2027, more than triple its size in 2020.
During such a rapid growth period, companies run the risk of making the wrong decisions and quickly squandering any potential success. Conversely, making the right business decisions during this time can help a company to expand and scale sustainably.
B2B market research is a key component to helping a rapidly-expanding healthcare cybersecurity startup grow in the right direction. Here’s how market research – particularly buyer personas, brand research, and competitive landscape analyses – can all be instrumental in setting a new company up for success.
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Asking the right people to participate in your research study is just as important as designing and asking the right questions. You simply can’t have a successful market research project with a rushed recruiting effort at the start.
Sometimes, this means using a research vendor to assist with fielding the right participants. Vendors such as panel providers and expert networks are frequently tapped to identify respondents for research studies. But if you are using a research vendor and still throwing out a large number of respondents or are having trouble making sense of the data, it’s time to dig into the problem. And that may mean it’s time to switch to a new sample provider.
This is one of several blogs in our latest series, “Delivering Bad News to Good People,” where we explore different types of bad news we’ve had to deliver and how these discoveries help companies create meaningful impact within their organizations.
Marketers often have their own preconceived notions about a competitor’s success or failure in the marketplace based on anecdotal stories they’ve heard in the industry. A competitive landscape analysis can confirm many of these assumptions. However, it may also disrupt some of these beliefs by revealing unexpected challenges.
This is one of several blogs in our latest series, “Delivering Bad News to Good People,” where we explore different types of bad news we’ve had to deliver and how these discoveries help companies create meaningful impact within their organizations.
B2B brand research can help to measure the relationship customers have with your company’s products or services. It may either confirm brand awareness hypotheses you already have, or it may surface new opportunities or unexpected perceptions among your buyers.
Sometimes, the findings uncovered in brand studies come as an unpleasant shock. Although initially upsetting, confronting the truth is a necessary first step to success. Once you understand where your brand stands, you can begin to address the gap between customers’ existing perceptions and how you want them to perceive your brand.
Perception precedes reality. – Andy Warhol
At Cascade Insights, we are often the messengers who deliver bad news to good marketers. Below, we’ve laid out four examples of bad brand news we’ve had to deliver, and how they were able to use that information to change the tides of perception — and reality — for their brands.
The context: We once worked with a cybersecurity client that was initially interested in learning about how their product compared to competing offerings.
In the survey that we administered, we asked respondents which cybersecurity organizations they were aware of. Their responses showed that our client’s product was not as well-known as what they had thought.
Key takeaway: Marketers often don’t like what the brand research tells them. But information — especially of the unpleasant variety — inspires action.
Once this client fully grasped the reality of their situation, they then had the leverage they needed to launch a smart B2B brand awareness strategy.
The context: One of our clients commissioned a brand study to investigate how recognizable their core offerings were to their clients. This client explained that its core offerings were foot traffic data, geo-contextual awareness, and point of interest data. Yet, at the same time this client wanted to expand from being seen as purely B2C focused to someone who could handle B2B needs.
We found our client had a very positive brand perception among B2C consumers. While this company’s social media presence was well-known, its B2B offerings were not as recognizable. In fact, almost 20% of survey respondents weren’t aware that this company offered foot traffic data. Given this client wanted to grow their B2B footprint, this was a challenging finding.
Key takeaway: While this may be perceived as bad news for our client, the study revealed key insights regarding its varying B2B and B2C awareness that enabled them to react, adapt and realign themselves with target customers.
The context: One client of ours had recently made a significant effort to engage with the open source community and invest in a number of different open-source projects. After this investment, they wanted to conduct brand research to see if buyers recognized them as friendly to open-source.
Unfortunately, our research uncovered that buyers felt our client was not involved in open-source projects at all. To make matters worse, despite our client’s efforts in the open-source space, buyers didn’t feel that our client contributed to open-source projects. Further, our research revealed that buyers were more likely to work with a company that they perceived to be open-source friendly.
Key takeaway: Initially, this news was frustrating for our client to hear after already working to establish themselves in the open-source space. But, the research made it clear that they had more work to do. Additionally, it reinforced the value buyer’s placed on organizations who truly embraced open-source.
The context: We conducted a brand study with a cybersecurity client who needed to determine their level of brand awareness. Our survey asked respondents what brand characteristics they felt were most important and how they would rate other cybersecurity on these attributes.
After completing the survey, we discovered that our client had a relatively high level of brand awareness. This result was a positive takeaway considering the market was so segmented. Despite this, only 5% of respondents said they would actually consider switching to our client from another vendor.
Key takeaway: You won’t be a good fit for everyone. But if you aren’t appealing to the customers you want, you need to know why. This brand study unearthed customer values that could inform the strategic messaging pillars to use in the company’s sales and marketing efforts.
We’re not always the bearers of bad news. We’ve also seen instances where companies’ key brand attributes aligned exactly with what the market cared about.
For example, one of our clients wanted to conduct brand research to measure how well their customers’ perceptions mapped onto the company’s brand values. Our client believed they were perceived as a caring, friendly, and responsive online HR provider. Our research confirmed this hypothesis, and the respondents emphasized how much they appreciated that our client’s values aligned with buyers.
The point is, brand studies don’t always deliver bad news. They can also confirm positive sentiments about your products and services. But until you actually conduct the research, you won’t know the reality of where you stand in the market.
In the well known game series “Portal,” Cave Johnson voices the following quote.
“All right, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! ‘I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these?”
Unfortunately, for Cave Johnson, and all of the rest of us, you can’t ask life to take its lemons back. Nor should you get mad about it. But you can make changes. Those changes can be a simple light that others in your organization can choose to follow. And that change in direction can lead to more prospects, customers, or market share.
If you’re tired of dealing with lemons, or you think you might have some lurking around, drop us a note. We can help you figure out what to do with them – instead of just throwing them back.
This blog post is brought to you by Cascade Insights, a firm that provides market research & marketing services exclusively to organizations with B2B tech sector initiatives. Want to learn more about the brand research we deliver? Our B2B Brand Research can help.
Special thanks to Sean Campbell, Co-Founder & CEO, Tyler Honsinger, Director of Research, and Raeann Bilow, Content Marketing Architect, for advising on this piece.
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.
