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Data’s Cold Embrace

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David Fisher, author of Hyper-Connected Selling, knows that technology-enabled sales is great, but it’s never going to satisfy the need for human connection.

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B2B’s Amazon Moment

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Chloë Thomas, author of “B2B eCommerce MasterPlan” joins us to talk about B2B eCommerce. Yes, B2B companies need to go online. No, they shouldn’t be taking their cues from the Amazon consumer experience.

Chloë’s book: http://a.co/fZpuzum

The best way to listen to the episode is through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Overcast. You’ll be able to listen to past episodes and subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes.

As we mentioned in the show, if you’re enjoying the B2B Revealed show we’d love it if you would leave a nice review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to the show.

   

 

Heat Up Your Cold Email

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How can sellers use cold email to engage rather than irritate?

In this episode of B2B Revealed, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell chats with Replyify Co-Founder Ryan O’Donnell on how to use cold email to increase audiences and avoid the spam filter.

Obviously, cold email is more likely to be welcomed when it is relevant to the recipient. But Campbell mentions how common it is for him to open a cold email that has nothing to do with his work. “…It wasn’t targeted, it wasn’t relevant, there wasn’t appropriate research done, [and] it wasn’t packaged correctly,” he said. Clearly, the seller hadn’t bothered to make sure their outreach was of value the recipient. This is a big no-no.

Instead, start with those who already have demonstrated an interest in your product or service. “The easiest place to look, if you already have clients, is your existing client base,” O’Donnell explained. These folks are much more likely to find your outreach applicable to their work than someone contacted out of the blue.

O’Donnell provides some helpful guidelines to prevent sellers from flooding customers’ inboxes and trying their patience. “We like to see 3-5 sentences per email. We like 5-10 emails delivered over the course of 30-45 days, with a mix of give-and-take. You’re giving the [audience] something of value,” O’Donnell said. Make sure buyers can quickly grasp the point of your communication and how it relates to their work. While an occasional follow-up is OK, don’t just keep bugging people who haven’t replied. Instead, focus your energy on those who have chosen to engage in a conversation.

Streamlining your cold email processes is possible through automation platforms such as Replyify. “Replyify helps you manage replies and to-do items, automatically send emails, manage unsubscribes, update contact information, and move folks around,” O’Donnell said. “Once you actually create these different sequences, and you put a strategy around reaching out to these different segments, or personas. It becomes really easy to keep that going because once the automation takes over on the email side, you’re just feeding the beast.” This platform allows sellers to monitor all of their cold emails for legal compliance as well as assess and hone targeting efforts.

In essence, cold email shouldn’t be a shot in the dark. It should be a clear, targeted message with direct relevance to the recipient. Aim to start a conversation, not bury the buyer in a deluge of unwanted email. Add value, not spam.

Defrost Your Cold Email Writing Skills

Want to improve your cold email writing skills, but don’t know where to begin? Listen to the full episode for more on this topic and check out our guide to sending legal cold emails along with tips for effective written communication.

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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.

Coaching Your Channel: An Interview With Steve Smith

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Business buyers have shoved IT out of the spotlight.

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

Surprisingly, IT service firms are failing to adjust to this new reality. Ill-advisedly, they continue to target IT departments rather than business buyers.

In this episode of B2B Revealed, Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell interviews Steve Smith, president of GrowthSource Coaching, on IT service firm survival. They discuss how failures in communication lead to bad sales strategies, and how companies can course-correct.

Smith is an expert in business management, leadership, and marketing.

Rediscover The Vision Of Your IT Services Company. Listen To Learn:

  • Red flags that your IT service firm has neglected its business goals.
  • The importance of understanding your business buyers’ “trade talk.”
  • How to translate your company’s value into terms that matter to your business buyers.
  • The difference between transactional and consultative selling.
  • Realistic business-building strategies.
  • How to be a better IT service firm leader or manager.

Notable Quotes:

“If you don’t know where you want to go, any place you end up at is going to be okay.” – Steve Smith, cautioning IT service firms to prioritize their business goals.

“The longer you’ve been at your business, or your occupation, or your particular trade, the more you start thinking and speaking in trade talk.” –Steve Smith, emphasizing the importance of sales teams being able to speak the lingo of their business buyers.

“You have to get out of your own head, if you stay in your own head for too long, your head will be your biggest competition.” – Steve Smith, discussing the importance of communication and getting sales teams comfortable with the human dynamic.

Mentioned in this Episode:

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This Is Your Brain On Notifications: An Interview With Jill Konrath

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Thinking about taking a break to check your email? Think again. These few minutes are costlier to your productivity than you think.

“70 percent of emails received are attended to within 6 seconds within arriving in our inbox. The recovery time for that interruption is 10 to 20 times the length of the interruption.” – Jill Konrath, Time Savior.

Well-known author and a thought leader in the sales field, Jill Konrath, speaks with Cascade Insights CEO Sean Campbell. They discuss key points in her latest book, “More Sales, Less Time” and the importance of taking control of your time.

Everything asks for a notification these days: email, slack, calendar, text, etc. Jill explains how to turn off these notifications, save for texting alerts from family, along with important apps that will help you prioritize. “Our time is our greatest asset, and blocking off times when we can really focus on what really matters enables us to get it done certainly more quickly, but at a higher caliber,” Jill says.

Today’s distractions are killing our creative and strategic potential. “The more time we spend in an environment that gives us quick hits of seemingly vital, but likely irrelevant information, the harder it is for our brains to do the kind of creative and strategic thinking that is so necessary.” She says.

Jill explains how to control your time and live by design instead of by default, along with making a habit of saving time and completing priority projects.  Jill also shares a number of productivity apps you can use to stay more focused during the day.

Unlock Productivity Wisdom. Listen To Learn:

  • Why you’re addicted to checking notifications and what you need to do about it.
  • The true costs of distractions when it comes to personal productivity.
  • How you can stop responding to every notification, at the moment it arrives, with one or more of these productivity apps: RescueTime, SaneBox. Unroll.Me. Freedom.
  • About her first book which focuses on how you can be more effective in “Selling to BIG Companies.”
  • Why she wrote her second book, “SNAP Selling,” and her third, “Agile Selling.”

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

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Mastering The Mid-Market: Lessons In Leadership With Charlie Nooney

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If you’re going to transition from one market segment to the other, you sometimes just have to “rip off the Band-Aid hard,” according to MobiTV CEO Charlie Nooney.

CEO of MobiTV, Charlie Nooney, explains how to lead through a market transition and the evolution of IPTV services in this podcast interview with Cascade Insights’ CEO Sean Campbell.

They also discuss the future of IPTV and the significant role MobiTV has to play in creating that future.

The conversation wraps with a great discussion on some of the leadership lessons Charlie learned from his time at Walt Disney company and what it takes to build a great company culture.

In short, you’re going to love hearing what Charlie has to say.

Change Your Company Culture For The Better. Listen To Learn:

  • All about the US IPTV market and how they’re changing.
  • How cable operators (large and small) will have to evolve to survive.
  • How to re-structure sales and marketing efforts you so you focus on mastering the mid-market.
  • Why you should, as Charlie says, “never let a failure go to waste.”
  • Learn why Charlie believes that, “The culture is in many ways in direct relation to the product… it’s hard to overcome not being excited about what you’re doing.”

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

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Sell Like The Avengers: Learning From Nic Read

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The Avengers of Marvel fame have a wide range of abilities and personality styles. To be successful they need to blend their skills in a way that leads to success and not merely open conflict.

In much the same way, modern B2B sales teams need to find a way to blend all of the team’s skills and abilities into a single sales process.

Nic Read, the founder of SalesLabs, co-founder of RGI and EdX, researcher, author, consultant, and teacher, shows us how in this podcast interview with Cascade Insights’ CEO Sean Campbell.

They discuss old sales habits that need to change and new approaches that need to be taken.

All based in large part on the extensive amount of research Nic has done over the years.  Including a recent series of 1,000 interviews with B2B sales professionals and their managers.

Sales Is Your Mission, Don’t Make It Impossible. Listen To Learn:

  • Tips sales teams should take from superheroes and Mission Impossible.
  • How sales teams can effectively blend multiple individuals into a single sales process.
  • Why selling competency is more about knowing the customer’s industry than being social.
  • Learn why Nic believes that, “There are too many salespeople who seem ill-equipped to talk about a customer’s business as if they were an industry insider.”
  • Why old school selling is dead.  And what modern selling, in a B2B context, looks like.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. Want more B2B brilliance? There are lots of ways to follow us.

Big Data Ethics: Math Responsibly

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Big data can be used to create a powerful supporting argument for nearly anything. Wielded foolishly or maliciously, the potential for harm is great. It has never been more important to use math responsibly.

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

That’s the core premise of “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy” by Cathy O’Neil. The book demonstrates the importance of looking critically at big data analytics. Especially now that analytics increasingly sway the decisions made by powerful institutions such as business, technology, and government. I highly recommend this book for anyone who leverages big data and/or works in tech.

Business Loves Big Data

We have access to more data than we’ve ever had before. Companies of all types have embraced big data. Retail, healthcare, education, political campaigns… and tech. There are many, many examples of this.

MarTech

Consider the huge amount of data in an average marketing technology stack.  You can:

  • Track clicks on your site.
  • See which site visitors were on before coming to yours.
  • Determine how often visitors came to your site before clicking “add to cart” or filling out a Contact Us Form.
  • View the content visitors download from your site.
  • Gather exponential amounts of data on social media, content analytics, brand engagement, etc.

Product Teams

Think of the amount of data that cloud services product teams have to consider. A typical SaaS product manager will look at:

  • Sign-in frequency.
  • The percentage of users that take a certain action within the product.
  • How often a customer persona uses certain features.
  • Retention stats on customers.
  • Churn metrics.
  • A customer’s lifetime value.
  • Etc.

#Mrx

By the nature of the job, market researchers also add to the piles of data company leaders have to consider.  Every in-depth interview, focus group, survey, and usability study adds to the pile.

Things To Consider

So far, I doubt I’ve said anything controversial.

You probably have a sense of the breadth of big data your company collects and relies on to do business.

It’s less likely that you’ve deeply considered the validity of your data.

Are you confident that your company uses big data ethically? How about sensibly?

Let’s explore.

Bad Big Data

O’Neil argues that there is a dark side to big data collection. To be clear, O’Neil is not advocating stopping all big data efforts. Instead, she asks us to acknowledge both the good and bad side of big data.

O’Neil is more than qualified to comment on such a complex subject. She has a Ph.D. in math from Harvard. O’Neil has been a Barnard College professor, a quant in the financial industry, a data scientist, and other impressive titles. In addition to authoring 2016 National Book Award nominee “Weapons of Math Destruction,” O’Neil wrote “On Being a Data Skeptic” and co-authored “Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontlines.”

She gives numerous “weapons of math destruction” examples. The stories cross all different types of businesses, from social media to education, travel to finance, and so on. She also tackles how weapons of math destruction are affecting the political process.

Here are a few of the “weapons of math destruction” that she describes.

Proxy Problems

O’Neil explains how insurance agencies use big data analytics to generate price ranges that vary dramatically from one consumer to another. In many cases, prices are based on proxy data like the neighborhood the person drives through or their credit score. Shockingly, proxy data sometimes holds more sway than the individual’s driving record. 

This is quite harmful. Consumers are not graded on merit (driving behavior). Further, consumers may have little to no personal control over the proxy data they’re being graded on.

Insurance companies also leverage big data to develop byzantine pricing structures. Such structures are far too complex for most individual consumers to understand.

As O’Neil puts it in the book, “These pricing tiers are based on how much each group can be expected to pay. Consequently, some receive discounts of up to 90 percent off the average rate, while others face an increase of 800.”

This proxy data may have no real impact on the number of insurance claims filed over a driver’s lifetime. This results in a system that is less than fair.

Narrow Newsfeed

Elsewhere, O’Neil covers how Facebook modifies user’s newsfeeds. Unfortunately, this filtering often culminates in dramatically polarized results.

I’m sure this issue will keep drawing attention with the proliferation of fake news and various platforms filtering social media feeds. Given how much coverage it receives, I won’t belabor it here.

Rankings Run Amok

Perhaps the most compelling example in the book focuses on college rankings.

Since 1983, students and parents have relied on US News & World Report’s college rankings when choosing colleges. The report was designed to evaluate 1,800 colleges and universities throughout the US and rank them for excellence.

However, there was a problem early in the process.

“They had no direct way to quantify how a four-year process affected one single student, much less tens of millions of them,” O’Neil writes.

Sadly, the US News & World Report didn’t have data on the success rates of college students once they graduated. Surprisingly, they didn’t even know how to define success. Would it mean that they made X amount of money over their lifetime, or that they had a good credit rating, or that they somehow contributed to society?

Since they didn’t have more relevant data, US News & World Report relied on proxy data.

As O’Neil puts it, “They looked at SAT Scores, Student-Teacher ratios, and acceptance rates. They analyzed the percentage of incoming freshman who made it to sophomore year and the percentage of those who graduated. They calculated the percentage of living alumni who contributed money to their alma mater, surmising that if they gave a college money, there was a good chance they appreciated the education there. Three-quarters of the ranking would be produced by an algorithm – an opinion formulized in code – that incorporated these proxies. In the other quarter, they would factor in the subjective views of college officials throughout the country.”

Cheating By Proxy

Colleges have been racing to game the rankings ever since.  O’Neil makes this point quite clearly by examining the actions of Baylor, Texas Christian University, Iona College, and other institutions. (Read the book for these scandalous stories.)

For instance, a reviewer of the US News & World Report found that a Saudi university had contacted a host of highly regarded mathematicians and offered them $72,000 to serve as adjunct faculty.

O’Neil writes that the deal “…stipulated that the mathematicians had to work three weeks a year in Saudi Arabia. The university would fly them there in business class and put them up at a five-star hotel. Conceivably, their work in Saudi Arabia added value locally. But the university also required them to change their affiliation on the Thomson Reuters academic citation website, a key reference for the U.S. News rankings. That meant the Saudi university could claim the publications of their new adjunct faculty as its own.”

The Data That’s Missing


Importantly, O’Neil points out that the US News & World Report didn’t include data on tuition and fees in their ranking criteria. The absence of this meaningful data had a huge impact. Rankings didn’t suffer if colleges posed a huge and disproportionate cost to students.

Between 1985 and 2013, college tuition has skyrocketed 500 percent. While some of this can be attributed to other factors, the US News & World Report rankings are at least partly to blame.

Consequently, many students based their college selection on rankings that did not include any criteria for financial success. These rankings may lead students to pick expensive colleges with dubious payoffs. And remain in debt for their education for years to come.

O’Neil states, “…many poisonous assumptions are camouflaged by math and go largely untested and unquestioned.”

Misinformation That Keeps On Misinforming

You may be thinking, “Assumptions get fixed, right? Good programmers fix bad code. Good data scientists fix bad algorithms.”

Not always. Perhaps not even all that often.

In the case of the US News & World Report, there are assumptions that haven’t been challenged by real data in 29 years. The report is still living off proxy data. In other words, that’s one powerful weapon of math destruction.

This book teaches us that proxies are dangerous when not handled correctly.

Proxy Data Isn’t Always Bad.

In the absence of meaningful data, companies are often forced to rely on proxy data.

Many businesses must use proxy data when real data is inaccessible. Perhaps the appropriate research sample is too costly to obtain. In other cases, there is not enough time to gather real data before a decision needs to be made. In such cases, companies turn to proxies.

Is this an inherently bad practice? No. Sometimes it’s quite expedient.

For example, if you want to know the size of a tech company’s employee base, you might look at LinkedIn data. LinkedIn will give the number of employees who work at the company. Obviously, LinkedIn’s data won’t be 100 percent accurate. LinkedIn can only base its estimates on employees with LinkedIn profiles. Luckily, for tech companies, LinkedIn’s employee estimate will likely only be off by a few percentage points. For companies in industries that don’t utilize LinkedIn as much, that margin of error will probably grow. However, LinkedIn data is a reasonable source of proxy data when tech companies don’t publicly release their employee counts.

Here is another example of the reasonable use of proxy data. You might look at search traffic to a competitor’s site to estimate their growth.

Essentially, you just need to recognize when you’re looking at proxy data. Wherever you can, add real data to your evaluations.

Are You Using a Weapon of Math Destruction?

These are warning signs that you’re using proxy data dangerously:

  • Proxy data models influence decision making at scale.
  • Unclear criteria form the basis of accepted data models.
  • There is huge potential for damage to individual consumers, citizens, or businesses.

We Need To Think Hard About The Validity of Our Data.

This book forces us to ask hard questions about big data ethics. We should be asking ourselves: 

  • Am I looking at proxy data? If so, am I okay with that?
  • Is the model I’m using fair? Does it need more real or qualitative data?
  • Does the data model I’m using qualify as a weapon of math destruction?
  • Do I need to build a new data model?

To be able to answer these questions, every tech sales, marketing, or product development leader should read this book.

In closing, I’ll let O’Neil have the final word.

She writes, “Data is not going away. Nor are computers—much less mathematics. Predictive models are, increasingly, the tools we will be relying on to run our institutions, deploy our resources, and manage our lives. But as I’ve tried to show throughout this book, these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to—and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral.”

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.

 

Market Research Recruiting: How To Get A Superb Sample

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When it comes to B2B studies, having the right people is just as important as asking the right questions.

The efficacy of a B2B market research study hangs on the knowledge of its survey respondents, interview subjects, and focus group participants. Clearly, research teams should invest in recruiting study respondents that are qualified to bring insight to the business problems in question. It’s only logical. Otherwise, why bother with a research project at all?

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

Sloppy B2B market research recruiting is a recipe for disaster. Rushed recruiting is the industry standard, unfortunately. Especially for panel firms.

B2B tech companies typically have a vague sense of who they’d like their market research teams to talk to. They usually have an idea of who should be in a focus group, receive a survey, or have an interview. But, this does not go far enough. Vague guidelines are not sufficient for an effective respondent recruitment process. Speed should not be the top priority here.

Finesse and focus are required.

In order to find first-rate respondents for a B2B market research study, you need specialized knowledge of the industry. Much more so than you would for a B2C consumer study. Context is crucial. To use a skiing analogy, B2B market research is not a bunny hill. It’s a black diamond.

As a firm that does most of our market research recruiting in-house, we know that the process can be challenging. However, our high-quality respondents bring extraordinarily powerful new perspectives to our clients. Those strategy-shifting results make our elite market research recruiting well worth the effort.

Here’s how we do it.

Market Research Recruiting: Don’t Just Take Anyone.

Narrow it down.

Not everyone is qualified to be a good study respondent. At Cascade Insights, we spend a great deal of time figuring out exactly who we need to hear from to illuminate gaps in our clients’ knowledge.

Many teams we work with aren’t as meticulous. Like the skier afraid of anything with a steep slope, these teams have fallen into the habit of asking for only a limited number of requirements for market research recruiting.

Panel Firms Get It Wrong.

Sadly, panel firms are a frequent go-to for tech companies when they want to shove off their recruiting efforts. This is not a good practice. For niche audiences like the ones B2B tech needs to hear from, panel firms typically lack industry knowledge and expertise. Panel firms simply don’t have enough context to identify and recruit respondents who can provide valuable insight.

Often, our new clients are startled at the emphasis we place on typical market research recruiting efforts. We recently had a client from a Fortune 500 say, “I want to talk to developers.”

“And?” we asked.

“What do you mean?” they said, sounding surprised.

“Do you want to talk to them about DevOps or the Internet of Things? Do you want to talk to development managers, architects, corporate developers, developers working for startups, developers building SaaS apps, developers who work with AWS or Azure?” We could have gone on and on.

You need to drill down like this right at the start of a B2B market research study. Without this kind of specificity, you won’t get the right people.

Get reallllllllyyyyyy specific.

Qualified respondents are essential to B2B market research studies. Say we want to talk to competitor customers for a qualitative research project. We would never stop at simply “competitor customers” as a parameter for market research recruiting. Instead, we would narrow our focus to customers that:

  • Bought from a specific competitor company.
  • Purchased a certain product or service from that competitor.
  • Belonged to a vertical or company size range that was of interest to our client.
  • Fit the buyer personas most relevant to our client.

Having the answers to these questions makes for a much more exciting and useful study. It’s also great for the client to have this type of strategic clarity and focus.

Get beyond broad phrases like “competitor customers.” You can do better.

Think more along the lines of, “Slack users who work for enterprise organizations in the manufacturing sector where the Slack deployment is sizable and has been in use for less than 12 months.” Now that’s a good respondent profile. You’re ready to start recruiting!

Catch a Quality Candidate.

Look for them in their social media habitats.

The best place to start looking for excellent study respondents is LinkedIn.

A few years back, people would get very wary when we told them that we trust certain types of data from LinkedIn. They would say, “You can’t do that. My sister’s cousin’s best friend doesn’t believe in LinkedIn and he never updates his profile. That’s proof that it’s a faulty data source.” That’s what we call reasoning from a specific. Not a quality you want in a research firm.

LinkedIn is a goldmine.

Take a step back. Microsoft recently invested $26.2 billion in buying LinkedIn. That’s a huge investment to make in a platform with crummy data. It’s safe to assume Microsoft found some value (billions of dollars worth!) in LinkedIn’s data. Don’t let your sister’s cousin’s best friend arbitrarily discredit a great resource for your study.

When we approach B2B market research recruiting via LinkedIn, we hone in on study candidates’ titles, companies, and locations. Just those three pieces of information are quite valuable for identifying qualified respondents. Also, a subscription to LinkedIn Premium is much cheaper than hiring a panel firm or buying a third-party list to get the same information.

One caveat: take the job description section (not the title) with a grain of salt. LinkedIn users supply this information themselves and may play up or omit certain things. Other times, they may have neglected to refresh a dated description.

In our recruitment process, we take the job description section into consideration but we don’t value it as highly as the title, the company, and location. Before you start fretting about dated, obsolete profiles, remember that you’re not conducting a census, you’re drawing a sample. Every profile you look at doesn’t need to be perfect.

Company, title, and location = powerful data.

For example, let’s say you need 30 knowledgeable people to interview for a qualitative study about your competitor’s sales process. Search filters for company, title and location may give you a pool of, say, 2,000 profiles to consider. That means that it’s perfectly acceptable- even necessary- to rule out a majority of the candidates. You’ll still end up with more than enough stellar potential respondents. You don’t have to worry that some of those initial 2,000 people may have since changed jobs and not updated their profiles. That’s what screening is for.

From our experience, the title, company, and location data for potential B2B tech study respondents is rarely wrong. It happens maybe 5 percent or less of the time in our recruiting efforts.

There is an obvious reason for this. Lying on your LinkedIn profile is like lying on your resume. Someone is going to find out. When they do, that lie damages your professional standing and employment viability. Most people implicitly understand this. Sure, just like on resumes, many people inflate the truth a bit. But no data set is perfect. This is why we take the job description with a grain of salt. It would be much odder to lie about who you work for, where you are, and your specific job title. All of that information is rather easy to prove or disprove.

Basically, don’t worry about the occasional rotten apple amid the millions of LinkedIn profiles, there is the whole rest of the orchard! For B2B market research study recruitment, LinkedIn’s data is very high quality. The network has 467 million members, and two or more new members join each second.

A little social savvy goes a long way.

Though LinkedIn is our favorite respondent hunting ground, we also sometimes leverage Twitter to great advantage.

For a recent project, we had to reach individuals who were quite familiar with the product Tableau. To find them, we searched for folks who claimed to be Tableau Zen Masters, a designation given to active members of the Tableau community. Searching for “Tableau Zen Master” on Twitter surfaced nearly a hundred viable candidates for our study.

Another time, we had to identify companies working out of the startup incubators funded by AWS and Google. These incubators provided startups with computing power, cloud services, and office space. The challenge with finding these startups was that the founders and development team members were unlikely to mention anything about their relationship with AWS or Google on their LinkedIn profiles. Further, unlike other providers, Google and Amazon don’t publish a list of the companies currently working out of their incubators.

However, both AWS and Google have Twitter accounts that market their incubators to new startups. With that knowledge, we started looking for Twitter users who were startup founders and were actively following one of the Twitter accounts aligned with an AWS or Google incubator account.  We then checked on LinkedIn to make sure these individuals were still with the startup listed on their Twitter profile. After confirming that the startups were residents of AWS or Google incubators, we just had to reach out to enough of these folks to get a good study sample. Of course, not everyone we reached out to was working out of one of the incubators, but a surprisingly large number were.

You can find them if you know where to look.

We aren’t shy about getting creative to recruit the perfect study respondents. In addition to leveraging social media, we might look at speaker lists for conferences that align with our market research study question. If we’re looking for competitor customers, we may take a gander at the competitor’s case studies. We might even look at websites like SlideShare or individual forums and communities online to mine participants from these locations.

However, that creativity requires extensive industry knowledge of the B2B tech sector. You won’t find that in a panel firm.

Form Letters Have No Game.

Make ‘em feel special.

Let’s talk about outreach. After you identify your dream respondent profile and find a sufficient sample of them, you’ve got to convince them to actually participate in the study.

Here’s another area where panel firms are likely to make a mess of things. Often, third-party firms specialize in mass recruiting. Their outreach efforts tend to be very templated and rely heavily on form letters. This is no way to woo a busy specialist working in a unique niche of B2B tech. These respondents need to be interested and intrigued before they are willing to take the time to engage. A form letter isn’t going to entice them. Outreach for these prized respondents needs to be more individualized and specific.

In one recent study, we were focused on looking for individuals who could meaningfully comment on app stores. To do this, we looked for professionals who had spoken at major conferences where app stores were the topic of conversation. We also searched for influencers who were regularly sharing content on the subject via blogs and social media.

Once we had identified a pool of qualified respondents, we crafted highly personalized outreach.  We demonstrated that we were specifically interested in speaking to each candidate based on the public information we found about them online.

We say why we want them.

In our outreach, we include context for why we’re interested in each potential study participant. We’ll include relevant details from their public LinkedIn or Twitter profiles or information that is readily available via web search. This automatically makes our outreach personalized. It gives the impression that the person we are contacting is not just a fill-in-the-blank on a form letter but an individual specifically desired for their expertise.

Let’s say we’re looking for companies that have deployed a certain type of product. We might start by looking for individuals who mentioned that they have experience with that product on their LinkedIn profile. We’ll scan their job descriptions to see if they’ve claimed to have led a business initiative that leveraged that product.

In the outreach, instead of saying something generic like, “Do you have experience with GIS solutions?” we’d say, “Given you’re responsible for running the GIS department for the city of Denver and you’ve got a team of 12 all focused on GIS concerns, we would love to talk to you about the products you use today to meet business needs.”

Understandably, this kind of outreach is going to get a much better response rate than a generic form letter. So, don’t go the form letter route.

Don’t Rush The Recruit.

The wrong people can’t give the right answers.

In sum, the next time you start a research project, ask yourself whether you know:

  • Who can best provide insight into the business problem.
  • How to find a sufficient sample of qualified respondents.
  • What information to include in the outreach to entice participation in the study.

If the answer is “no” to any of these questions, don’t worry. Send us an email or give us a call.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. With B2B focused market research and marketing services, Cascade Insights helps companies seize opportunities in the B2B technology sector.