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Message Testing: Because Intent ≠ Interpretation

Message Testing: Because Intent ≠ Interpretation

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Somewhere between intent and interpretation, a lot can get lost in translation.

Many B2B marketers suffer from this problem. Some focus heavily on one buyer persona and ignore the other key figures in B2B purchase decisions. Others fail to communicate what sets their product apart from the crowd. Buyers balk at cocky messaging or jargon that goes over their heads.

Make sure you’re leaving target customers with a favorable impression. Read on for the most common problems revealed by our message testing research for B2B technology companies.

You Have Buyer Personas. Plural. Woo them all.

Research shows that B2B tech purchases tend to be group decisions. Your messaging should target each buyer persona involved in the purchase.

Don’t just focus on the big guns. There are more people involved in B2B buying decisions than the executive signing the purchase order. Messaging that only focuses on C-levels or VPs is doomed to fail, as it ignores other important decision-makers such as end users, department heads, and business group leaders.

Your Differentiators Should Be…Differentiated.

How different is your messaging from your competitor’s? Are both websites a list of the same “itys”? Do both websites boast of fantastic reliability, security, manageability, and usability?

Instead of trying to score on every possible differentiator, pick one and nail it.  Perhaps you uniquely meet a target persona’s “job to be done.” Maybe you can boast of exceptionally smooth integration. Or perhaps you offer pricing models that are far more attractive than those provided by your competitors. Speak to your real strengths.

Don’t Pretend To Be Buyers’ Only Hope.

Most business problems existed before your company appeared on the scene. Be cautious about claiming to be the only solution capable of solving a problem.

Instead, strive to convince buyers that your solution is the best at solving the problem it was designed to solve. That way, you won’t inadvertently insult buyers who have been tackling the problem in another way.

Don’t Skip The Basics.

Address user experience in your messaging. Ease-of-use, integration, and adoption rates nearly always factor into B2B buying decisions.

These elements don’t need to be at the forefront of your messaging, but it wouldn’t hurt to weave them in (when you can back them up).

Use Acronyms Smartly and Sparingly.

Make sure you’re not using acronyms that are alienating to your audience.

Yes, use acronyms that are common knowledge within the vertical or business group you’re targeting. This helps to demonstrate a shared expertise in the buyer’s field.

Be very careful that you’re not using acronyms that are only common knowledge within your own company or amongst isolated groups of market analysts.

Know the difference before you flood your messaging with acronyms.

Anticipate “Too Good To Be True” Concerns.

There may be a downside to the benefit of your product or service. Buyers will be looking for one.

Do you offer a flexible platform?  Customers might worry that implementation will take too long. Are you providing a point solution to a single problem? Buyers may fear that the challenge of integrating with their other solutions outweighs the benefit.

Sing the praises of your solution’s benefits. Then address concerns about tradeoffs.

Answer The FAQs.

Make sure your marketing answers obvious, initial questions. Front-load your home page with answers to questions like “what does it look like?” and “how much does it cost?”

If buyers can’t find answers quickly, they probably won’t work very hard to figure it out.

That said, strong messaging should raise enough intrigue to make potential buyers want to learn more.

Are They Getting The Message?

While these guidelines will help you to convey the message you intended, it’s important to learn how your buyers are interpreting your marketing.

Market research, to the rescue! Message testing compares the “message received” to the “message sent,” diagnoses disparities, and provides insights to correct strategy.

This blog post is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Our research helps marketers craft messaging that resonates with target buyers.

B2B Breakups: 200+ Interviews With The Ones That Got Away

B2B Breakups: 200+ Interviews With The Ones That Got Away

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Never waste an opportunity to learn from a lost deal.

While each win-loss analysis is unique, over the years, we’ve found many common themes that keep costing B2B tech companies customers and deals. From inflexible pricing, to misguided messaging, to bad sales strategy, we’ll talk you through some of the most common B2B blunders and how to avoid them.

These insights have been distilled from more than 200 recent interviews with B2B buyers, decision makers, influencers, and product/service evaluators.

Rigid Pricing Models Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsWe found that inflexibility in pricing models was a major deterrent for B2B tech buyers.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all pricing model. Some buyers prefer CAPEX pricing models with large sums paid upfront and depreciation and amortization as favorable accounting practices down the road. However, most customers favor OPEX models born of the cloud and as-a-service offerings. Others want something in between. Even within these two models, there’s room for named user pricing, concurrent user pricing, and add-on module pricing.

Choice is key. One product manager told us, “We started with an investigation of a transactional price, and all the vendors were able to do that. But then we wanted to move away from that and get an all-you-can-eat model. That was a real challenge for some of the vendors.”

While you don’t want your pricing to be super complicated, you want enough flexibility to be able to have a pricing structure that matches customer needs and can win the deal.

Whose problem is this?

  • Pricing teams developing which pricing models to offer.
  • Marketing teams positioning the pricing models.
  • Sales reps when customers ask, “How much does this cost me today and tomorrow?”
  • Enterprise vendors caught between on-prem and cloud business models.
  • Start-ups and SaaS technology pure-plays with inflexible pricing models.

Key Lessons

Strategize how you can be flexible without being complex. Consider how different CAPEX and OPEX pricing models may complement corporate spending cycles. For instance, we found that offering quarterly pricing in addition to annual and monthly has tipped the scales on some deals.

Customers often switch vendors when a big contract is up for renewal. Take away that trigger by offering OPEX pricing options or an early renewal incentive. This is becoming commonplace even for on-prem offerings.

Research Remedies

Research buyer personas, customer satisfaction with your pricing models, and competitor pricing models to determine the options that would be most appealing to target customers.

All-Or-Nothing Attitude

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade Insights
Company leadership usually wants sales teams to pitch the suite or even the entire platform to customers. This is often much more than B2B buyers want.

In our research, we heard many complaints about upselling or being forced to buy more than was needed. “I feel like you’re always in a sales environment where they’re trying to sell you their next solution even though you haven’t figured out how to use what you have,” one B2B buyer told us.

All-in-one is an appealing concept, but many customers are cautious whether such a pitch is too good to be true. Concerns are raised about integration, customization needs, lock-in, and lower adoption due to the replacement of favored tools.

A platform that does too many things at once can scare buyers away if they aren’t ready for the seismic shift of ripping and replacing critical systems.

Buyers also get annoyed when they sense that sales reps are more concerned with making another sale than they are with making sure the customer gets the solution they need. This ruins all possibility of strengthening the relationship with the buyer.

“As soon as you get on the phone with these guys, they’re ready to upsell you,” another customer complained to us. “They’re ready to [say], ‘Well if you get this tier, you can get this. If you get this tier, you can get this’…[But], I really wanted something specifically tailored to do what I want to do.”

Vendors should make sure they have offerings that match buyers’ requirements, not just expensively exceed them. Don’t let short-term goals cloud long-term strategy. Being pushy about closing this deal, now can cost you lasting relationships with buyers.

Whose problem is this?

  • Sales leadership when setting sales strategy.
  • Sellers when pushed to “sell the suite” to the detriment of lasting customer relationships.
  • Product leaders needing to build solutions that can be used piecemeal when necessary.
  • Marketers failing or neglecting to show how each piece works independently of the other.
  • Marketing teams determining the minimum SKUs.

Key Lessons

Recognize that some customers simply don’t need everything you have to offer right now. Have offerings that let customers bite off what they can comfortably chew.

Our research indicates that land-and-expand models tend to win more deals than pushing a top-down sale from the get-go.

Technology buyers increasingly want partnerships instead of transactional relationships. Our research indicates that vendors who prioritize land-and-expands sales are getting more wins than those that are driving for all-in-one.

Research Remedies

Researching key buying criteria, buyer personas, and go-to-market strategies can uncover how sales and marketing can best speak to buyers’ specific use cases and how product teams can build solutions that can accomplish customers’ “jobs to be done.”

Sales Not Doing Their Homework

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsB2B buyers notice when sellers are not up-to-speed on their company and use case. Customers can easily spot a canned demo, especially when requirements have been shared via RFP or similar.

If a sales rep doesn’t do their homework on target buyers, there are many tells. To name a few examples: a noticeable lack of the buyer’s industry context, not knowing customers’ “jobs to be done,” or offers that wildly miss the mark of buyers’ needs.

For instance, a marketing manager told us about sitting through a sales pitch where the seller clearly should have realized that the pricing model they were offering wasn’t feasible. “My total marketing budget is only about $700,000. For everything. That’s all my mailings, all my postage, all my creative, all my digital. So, obviously, a 50 or 80 thousand dollar spend just doesn’t make sense,” the marketer told us.

Another word of caution: sales reps, don’t assume your product or service is superior to the competition. You have to listen to your customers to know how they are evaluating potential solutions. Humility and curiosity about the customer’s needs are sure-fire methods for shedding the superiority complex.

Whose problem is this?

  • The C-suite when setting sales goals. Focus on long-term relationships not just end-of-the-quarter deal-closing.
  • Sales leadership hiring sales talent and setting best practices for engaging with customers.
  • Sellers during client conversations and initial engagements.

Key Lessons:

Sales needs to do their homework on buyers’ particular use cases and specific business contexts. Prepare for the sales pitch and listen to what customers say throughout.

Research Remedies:

Post-pitch follow-up calls and questionnaires gather important feedback from customers who said “yes” and those who said “no.” Win/loss market research studies uncover candid customer perspectives on sales performances.

Ignoring the Customer’s Existing Environment

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsB2B purchases don’t happen in a vacuum. Except in an unusual extreme overhaul, each new B2B purchase will have to interact with the products and services the buyer is already using. Hence, “How well will this solution play with our existing environment?” is an inevitable question in the B2B buyer’s journey.

In the words of a CIO we interviewed, “We can’t get past that roadblock. In our minds, it was like, ‘We can’t get to how it’s going to integrate with our system because you can’t demonstrate you can do it.’”

Of course, it’s not always obvious how a new product or service will fit in with existing solutions. In these cases, buyers need to know how much customization and configuration is in their future.

Product managers, remember that customers shy away from solutions that require months of coding, specialists, and other customization hoops. Whenever possible, buyers favor integration that can be accomplished with configuration rather than development.

Also, product managers, make sure integrations won’t break every time a vendor rolls out an update.

Marketers, avoid messaging that says the product can do anything for everyone. Instead, demonstrate how the solution can be used within the context of what particular customers are trying to accomplish. Targeted marketing and customer referrals are helpful here.

Sales, promising there will be no integration headaches is usually disingenuous. Just because you sell it doesn’t mean the customer won’t bail when implementation turns into an unexpected disaster.

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Product managers when prioritizing the goals and attributes for a new product or service.
  • Marketers when crafting messaging about use cases.
  • Sellers when explaining to the buyer what customizations and integrations they should anticipate.

Key Lessons:

Don’t overpromise seamless integration for everybody. Set accurate expectations for customization and integration in the buyer’s specific context.

Strive to make customization a process of configuration. Avoid code-heavy methods of customization. (Unless your target persona is a developer, in which case, go nuts!)

Research Remedies:

Key buying criteria and buyer’s journey research can determine how heavily customers are weighing configuration capabilities in their buying decisions.

Messaging Is Speaking The Wrong Language

Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsMessaging that focuses on the technical aspects of a product when targeting business users is a common B2B misstep. This leads to poor awareness of the product’s business capabilities and may influence the buyer to believe the product is too complex for their case.

A business process improvement specialist shared their frustrations about sellers assuming that business users are also IT experts. “The business user pops in there and says, “Wait a minute, this feels like that IT mumbo jumbo that IT typically speaks at us. That makes no sense to us and we just shut down,” they said.

The same problem can appear when marketing overemphasizes the business angle when they should be targeting IT buyers.

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Sellers during sales pitches.
  • All facets of marketing.
  • Marketers tasked with lead gen especially.
  • Vendors entering a new market (vertical or solution-specific).

Key Lessons:

Talk to buyers in a language they’ll understand.

Research Remedies:

Messaging and positioning testing, buyer’s journey mapping, buyer persona, and go-to-market studies are specifically designed to inform customer targeting efforts. These research efforts explore all facets of the B2B buyer’s purchasing experience.

Star-Crossed Use Cases

 Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsSometimes it’s just not a great fit.

Ideally, your sales team spends their time pitching to buyers whose needs match the solution’s key features and core competency. But that isn’t always the case.

Yes, it can be hard to retreat after investing time and effort in a target buyer. However, it’s much smarter to leave a doomed deal and refocus your energies where they will be more successful.

As one IT manager told us, “The partner was really wanting to get into customizations and how we can make this work for our business. We were taking the approach of, ‘Well, we want this product to work for us in a way that it’s designed for [rather than] trying to make this product work for us by forcing [it] to use our processes.’”

It’s essential for sales to recognize a doomed deal early in the relationship with a potential customer. That way, sales can refocus on buyers that would benefit from the solution’s core competency and features. You know, deals they might actually win.

At the same time, don’t make the buyer feel ditched. Be honest that you’re not a fit, leave them in a good place, and re-engage with other products down the road that are more in the sweet spot.

Success comes from fitting the product to the customer, not the customer to the product or service.  

Whose Problem Is This?

  • Product teams during the design process. It’s best to design for specific “jobs to be done” rather than just shooting for the moon.
  • Sales when deciding which customers to prioritize. Devote the most time and effort to buyers that benefit from the product’s core competency.

Key Lessons

If you’re building a product for a particular buyer persona, make sure you have a firm grasp of their “jobs to be done” that need to be accomplished via your solution.

Target buyers that have a need that can be met by the core competencies of your product or service.

Research Remedies

Customer journey mapping, key buying criteria and market opportunity assessments uncover why buyers are looking for a product or service in the first place. This research determines the functionalities needed to accomplish buyers’ “jobs to be done” along with the features that customers prioritize the most.

Turn Loss Into A Strategic Gain

 Win-Loss Analysis Cascade InsightsEach lost deal, when properly analyzed, yields useful information to hone your product, sales, and marketing strategies.

It all boils down to understanding buyers’ wants and, more importantly, their needs. This insight gives you the ability to:

  • Determine which customers to target.
  • Strategize ways to expand existing customer accounts and form lasting relationships with new customers.
  • Build products that satisfy buyers’ “jobs to be done.”
  • Create solutions that don’t give and charge buyers way more than they need or want.
  • Use messaging that speaks to buyers in terms they understand.
  • Offer pricing model options that will appeal to target customers.
  • Recognize use cases that aren’t a good fit and devote sales efforts elsewhere.

Want to turn your lost deal into an insight gain? Get in touch.

Research for this analysis was conducted by Jacob Dittmer, Tyler Honsinger, and Scott Swigart. Learn more about our research for B2B technology companies.

Your Favorite B2B Posts of 2017

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It was a good year for B2B content. As we reflect on 2017, we bring you a countdown of our most read articles of the year.

10. What To Read In B2B

Our “B2B Book Reviews: One-Sentence Recaps” page offers an efficient path to seeking wisdom from experts and staying on top of new trends.

We provide you with some of the best classic and recent books on B2B – and a few we don’t think are worth your time.

For example, here’s what we had to say about these books:

This list will provide you the opportunity to improve your B2B skills, and is continuously updated with new books to rush order or avoid like the plague.

Have a book that you want us to review? Let us know.

9. #Mrx Pro-Tip: Interview Your Competitors’ Ex-Sellers

“Running B2B Market Research? 26 Questions to Ask Sales Reps” reveals the wealth of insight you can access by interviewing former members of rival sales teams.

This piece includes key questions to help you get the right data. For example:

  • What were the key selling points of the competitor’s product or service?
  • Which product features were clients most interested?
  • What buying criteria did clients have?
  • Which features left customers uninterested or unimpressed?
  • Which of the competitor’s product or service features were the most lacking?

Check out the full article for more key questions and best practices for interviewing ex-sellers to better understand your rivals.

8. “You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual.”

B2B tech is a niche field. As such, it can sometimes be extremely challenging or downright impossible to get an appropriate sample for a quantitative study. Luckily, qualitative research can get the answers without relying on a mathematically irresponsible sample.

Learn how to design the right kind of study to match your needs with “You Can’t Always Have Quant With Your Qual.”

7. If You Have a Point, Make It & Other Grumpy Writing Tips

If you’re in B2B tech, chances are, your job requires you to communicate through writing at some point. Read “Write Right: Convincing Content” for the best ways to get your point across.

Marketing Manager Isabel Gautschi encourages you to mean what you say, make smooth transitions, procrastinate strategically, and say it in fewer words. She didn’t earn her editing nickname “Half-As-Long” for nothing. Check out the piece for more curmudgeonly advice for writing compelling arguments.

6. There Are No Stupid Questions, But There Sure Are Some Smart Ones

In “101 Market Research Questions,” we share some of the sharpest questions we have based studies off of for B2B tech clients. Check out the smartest questions our clients have asked us to answer over the years.

5. “This Methodology Opens Numerous Possibilities.”

“Gender Gap: A Look at 50 Tech Giants” shows us that LinkedIn ad targeting opens the door for a number of studies of the tech industry.

We took a look at the workforces of 50 large tech companies to uncover insights on the gender gap and to reveal the demographic information accessible to researchers through ad targeting.

Yep, the gender gap is still pretty gapingly wide. The good news is that researchers are not forced to wait for intermittent diversity reports to study it.

4. Disruption Red Flag: Competitors Know Your Customers’ “Jobs To Be Done” Better Than You Do

Are you missing a critical measurement of success? Find out with “Customer Insights: You Need More Than Market Segmentation Data.”

It’s essential for companies to understand “jobs to be done” in order to build solutions that truly meet their customers’ needs.

Using Clayton Christensen‘s latest book, “Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice,” we examine essential questions for product teams:

  • What are target customers’ “jobs to be done”?
  • Does your solution get the job done?
  • Do you have the right data to measure whether or not it does?
  • Do customers have a “job to be done” that no current marketplace solutions meet? If so, this is an opportunity for innovation.

3. “Don’t Just Drop the Bomb and Leave.”

It’s difficult to be the bearer of bad news, but we share our constructive approach in “How Good Researchers Give Bad News.”

Check it out to learn how we turn bad news into constructive criticism. Advice includes:

  • Be direct.
  • Use data to defeat fear.
  • Acknowledge sample bias.
  • Describe the disaster you’ve averted.
  • Offer a cure.
  • Remember: There was a fire before you arrived.

Good researchers know not just share devastating findings and leave. Instead, they deliver the bad news, endure the pushback, and point the client in a direction that can improve their business.

2. Keep Your Presentation From Crashing & Burning

“The Pre-Flight Checklist for Research Presentations” provides a handy way to make sure your presentation is ready to soar to success. Relevant to anyone giving a business presentation, our advice shares practical tips for keeping your audience engaged.

1. Our Ageism In Tech Data Got Your Attention

Your favorite article of this year was, “Ageism in Tech: The Silent Career Killer.”

We examined government data, a Payscale study and LinkedIn ad targeting data to research ageism in the tech industry. Spoiler alert: the tech industry is not kind to those over age 35.

Thanks For Reading!

This year has provided us the ability to continue growing as a business, expanding our client base, and provide you with quality content that is important to you. We continue to appreciate our listeners and readers and encourage them to share their terrific feedback. We look forward to sharing more research, book reviews, and exciting interviews with you in the coming year. Thank you for your support, and we wish you the happiest of New Years!

This post is brought to you by Cascade Insights.

Failure To Launch Syndrome: Do You Have The Symptoms?

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.