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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

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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 

We 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


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

B2B 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

B2B 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

Messaging 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

Sometimes 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

Each 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.

SEO: The Balancing Act of Visibility and Utility

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How should marketers balance the need to be visible with the need to be relevant and useful?

Search for B2B Revealed on your favorite podcast player (iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and more) to subscribe.

In today’s episode, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell talks to Phil Singleton, CEO of Kansas City Website Design & SEO. Singleton is the author of “SEO for Growth: The Ultimate Guide for Marketers, Web Designers & Entrepreneurs.” He is also a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Consultant.

They discuss Google’s focus on prioritizing content that’s addressing a genuine need. Singleton explains why focusing on buzzwords alone isn’t enough to get the traffic you need. Campbell and Singleton explain why having a strong marketing strategy leads you to the right keywords.

Singleton shares why he thinks video and podcast guesting are great content strategies. YouTube is a platform in its own right, with its own traffic, and its own optimization strategies, so it’s great to have a presence there. Podcasting brings the guest visibility and establishes them as a thought leader. “[Podcast guesting] is the fastest path to building authority,” Singleton said.

Savvy marketers build helpful, user-friendly content, and don’t simply focus on keyword rank.

“The moral of the story is to always focus on providing really good content that is the answer to somebody’s problem, or research, or question,” Singleton said. SEO strategy isn’t just a mindless focus on keywords, but how you make sense of them for your audience.

What Type of Content Will Impress Your Buyers?

When looking for a solution, what, where, when, why, and how do your target buyers evaluate their options? Check out our research on key buying criteria, buyer’s journey, and more.

Do you need more B2B brilliance? Check out the many ways you can follow us.

Left Brain + Right Brain = Marketing Success

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The best marketers love data and the creative process in equal measure.

On this episode of B2B Revealed, “Analytical Marketer: How to Transform Your Marketing Organization” author Adele Sweetwood is our guest.

Sweetwood is the senior vice president of global marketing & shared services at SAS.

Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell and Sweetwood explore why an analytical mindset is necessary for a properly targeted marketing success strategy.

Master The Art of Analytical Marketing. Listen To Learn:

  • How to use data to shape your company’s marketing strategy.
  • Why having a Ph.D. isn’t necessary for becoming a data scientist.
  • How SAS transformed their marketing strategy.
  • Tips for navigating the challenges of large collaborative projects.
  • The dangers of over-communicating to customers.
  • Why being customer-oriented is even more strategic than being goal-oriented.
  • How to enforce team collaboration & dependency.
  • The importance of using metrics to gauge channel performance.
  • Why “orchestrators” and “analytical marketers” make great company leaders.
  • What to do when it’s hard to get the data.
  • How to apply analytical marketing techniques to a small business.

Notable Quotes From Adele Sweetwood:

“The days of marketing as simply an artistic endeavor are gone. That’s not to say that creative skills are not in demand, it’s just that [creative skill] alone [is] insufficient.”

“We’re killing our customers with messages.”

“Once you start the engine moving, you don’t want the pieces missing.”

“The sales relationship needs constant care and feeding.”- Sweetwood on communication between marketing and sales.

“Investment in technology and … [capturing] data and analytics in your company is better than an ad you might buy or an event you might go to.” – Sweetwood on marketing for small businesses.

Mentioned In This Episode:

Market Research Insights For Marketers:

  • Don’t confuse popularity with profitability. Make sure your method of evaluating marketing success measures the right thing. Learn more.
  • Is your marketing resonating with your customers? Is it even reaching them? Check out how we market researched ourselves to answer these questions.
  • Is your marketing strategy based on outdated assumptions? Find out.

Subscribe to B2B Revealed on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher.

Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

People-Centric Marketing: Wisdom From Tom Shoemaker

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Large companies lose touch with their customers all the time.

Search for B2B Revealed on your favorite podcast player (iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and more) to subscribe.

Luckily, you can reconnect one conversation at a time.

Without investing in customer conversations, marketing will be off message, sales will say the wrong things, and product sales will suffer.

Virtually or in-person, have those conversations. It’s worth it.

In this episode of B2B Revealed, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell and Tom Shoemaker, CMO of itslearning, explains why customer conversations should be at the center of your marketing efforts.

Don’t Let Your Marketing Be a Monotone. In This Episode, You Will Learn:

  • Key questions to ask during customer conversations.
  • Why you should double or triple the number of customer conversations you’re having.
  • Tips for adjusting your marketing strategy for enterprise and mid-market.
  • Warning signs that you’re taking your customers for granted.
  • The real-world strategy PTC used to effectively regain touch with their customers and build stronger relationships.
  • How to make a value roadmap and why it’s important.
  • Why aspiring marketers should strive to pass “The Beer Test.”

Notable Quotes:

“Don’t be afraid to raise your hand, jump in, and do what needs doing.” – Tom Shoemaker on maintaining career success.

“Regardless of how many customer conversations you have, you should probably have twice as many, or more.” – Tom Shoemaker discussing how to properly conduct customer satisfaction research.

“What are the things they care about, what are their drivers.”– Tom Shoemaker on focusing on the customer’s story.

“We systematically talked about the things that mattered throughout the process of going from design to manufacturing to service. Then we articulated the things that companies ought to be looking for in a technology provider.” – Tom Shoemaker explaining his company’s change in their outlook as a true process-oriented, customer-oriented and value-based selling, consultative selling B2B software company.

Subscribe to B2B Revealed on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher.

Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sales Needs A Say In Strategy

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

This article is based off a B2B Revealed episode.

You can listen to the episode or read the article below.

B2B Revealed – ON: iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play

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

Companies often make two big mistakes:

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

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

Sellers and market researchers typically have very different personalities.

Sales and market research demand very different approaches to be effective at each job. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a false perception that products sell themselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest reason why sales teams are not invited to the stakeholder team is that people tend to think that the data salespeople can provide is inherently biased. 

ALL data is inherently biased.

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

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

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

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

Conversations between salespeople and buyers drive:

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

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

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

Each B2B sale is a mini qualitative research project.

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

Can I see a demo?

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

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

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

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

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

Who do you sell to and who do you avoid?

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

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

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

  • Role.
  • Title.
  • Type of company.

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

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

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

Pitch Me

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

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

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

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

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. We specialize in market research and competitive intelligence for B2B technology companies. Our focus allows us to deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Got a B2B tech sector question? We can help.