Mastering Differentiation, Best Practices in Business Research
Glyn Luckett CMRS
Director Advisory Services I Insights Professional | Expert in Customer+Employee Experience+B2B | Transforming Research Objectives into Actionable Insights I 20+ Ys Experience I Insight 250 Award I More in About section
During our conversations with business customers, we often explore challenges such as:
How they can explore and break into new sales territories
How they can get closer to their customers and create an in depth understanding of needs
Generating more high value opportunities
How they can differentiate in a busy sector
What research can help them develop long term partnerships
How they work with customers to understand new service needs
The answer lies in engaging Business research.
Business research provides companies with the insight they need to build stronger client relationships, grow market share and throw shade on competitors.
While similar research techniques and tools apply to business-to-consumer (B2C) research, B2B research is a very different animal.
With over 20 years’ experience of conducting business research and analysis for SME's, leading global companies and start up's, here are our best practices for uncovering breakthrough customer insights that make a real difference to business growth, differentiation, resilience and adapting to change.
Understanding the B2B Decision Making Process
B2B sales are more complex than B2C for several reasons. For a start, the B2B business model, selling products and services to other businesses, comes in many forms, from companies supplying physical goods, such as IT equipment and stationery, to companies supplying digital services, such as eCommerce systems and social media, to companies delivering business services, such as construction, accountancy and marketing support.
B2B sales cycles take longer, often involving several company decision makers (with different criteria depending on their position and expertise), each assessing whether a purchase makes sound commercial and strategic sense.
Due to the scale and long-term nature of supplier agreements, B2B sales are often high value transactions, and vendors often engage in continuous sales and service support. ?
Like B2C, the B2B sales landscape is also changing.
Once about face-to-face sales meetings and nurturing individual client relationships, B2B is evolving, investing in channels and platforms to service customers remotely, keeping up with customer demand for a convenient, ‘one click’ purchase experience or enterprise-based procurement systems. Because businesses are different their needs will be different, by keeping pace with these changes makes customers decisions to change suppliers harder.
Buying behaviour is also shifting too. B2B decision makers now have more choice of solutions than ever before (putting pressure on vendors to add-value at every turn) and are increasingly connected, using social media sites like LinkedIn to assess potential suppliers and scour customer feedback.
What does this mean for B2B research?
Discovering the wants and needs of today’s B2B customers is complex. Developing effective research design relies on understanding the unique factors at play in a B2B decision-making unit. A crucial in road we always take is to de-construct the decision-making process in a set business environment, uncovering how purchasing decisions are made and internal and external influencers involved. This includes identifying:
Every buying scenario is different and, depending on the value of the order being placed, is often subject to an intricate evaluation matrix. One of the biggest challenges for researchers is uncovering what this matrix looks like from the perspective of each member of the decision-making group.
Our studies show that decision makers rely heavily on Influencers, so cutting data by these groups is an important aspect of research. Understanding the softer areas of these relationships – not data-driven – about how these individuals work together can make the biggest difference to the research outcome.
An example is a?Contract Director?role versus a?Contract Manager?role.
When assessing supplier value, the?Director?will want to be able to access and appraise hard data, such as deliverables on time, within budget and to quality.
While the Contract?Manager?is likely to be part of the team responsible for resolving issues, negotiating aspects such as to whether a supplier can deliver goods earlier, increase the order size at a certain location or customise a load so that it is delivered in plain packaging.
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It is the researcher’s role to elicit this insight - through asking productive questions and other techniques – to map out the buying process and decision-making hierarchy. This allows us to pinpoint who the client needs to target, the best way to communicate with them and the messages they need to convey to secure stronger relations and potentially more sales.
Identify and Cater for Priority Customers
In a B2B setting, some customers are high value, key accounts. The Pareto principle applies, with 20% of customers accounting for 80% of revenue. Customers in the 20% are priority accounts and the decision-making process often varies, involving stakeholders with different roles and contractual arrangements, such as sole supply. It is vital that the research survey content reflects and caters for different customer segments and that results highlight the differences and commonalities between customer groups.
Understanding different customer segments, their motivations and concerns, will not only help improve interactions with existing buyers but shape the perfect proposition to sell to new customer groups effectively.?
Choose B2B Research Specialists
Conducting high-value B2B research demands a project team with a unique mind and skill-set to capture and interpret information.
A significant part of our success in the B2B market is having research staff who understand the nuances and challenges of working exclusively with B2B clients. Unlike interviewing consumers, who may have fleeting interaction with a brand. Targeted B2B customer research involves garnering critical understanding from key decision makers and personal contacts a company engages with regularly, identifying their emotional drivers are a lever to success.
Relationships have often been cultivated over time, during which an array of challenges will have cropped up, from pricing to product/service quality issues, all of which have required delicate handling and negotiation.
Managing these relationships is complicated and the skill and professionalism of the research team play a pivotal role in project success.
From the get-go establishing a positive connection between us and your client is essential for winning the trust and co-operation. Setting the right tone during initial contact is key for securing a customer’s time and commitment to giving constructive feedback, so professional introduction emails and communication is key.
Our behavioural science based approaches enables us to garner insight using our technology based tools through visual semiotics, in addition to a wider offer of solutions, whilst we are not moving away from structured questions to ask probing questions – our System 1 approach extracts emotional insights, sometimes reaching into B2B customers’ problems and pain points that may not have been previously understood.
These high level must haves are always present within our best practice B2B research processes:
Tailored B2B Research
Every Business is different. Making sales involves interacting with multiple personnel, each with their own agenda and strategic priorities. Each offers different services and solutions using different software and processes. Each varies in size from three man-bands to multinationals. For meaningful survey results, designing and developing a tailored customer survey is a must.
All our business research projects should start with a research design and development workshop. Attended by the client’s key stakeholders – including sales team leaders and account managers, who often have a wealth of untapped customer knowledge - the workshops typically uncover:
Not only does this set clear, defined research objectives – the foundation of any research project, as you need to know what you are aiming to improve - but also pins down the best type of approach.
Businesses are often busy multi-channel operations – finding the right research method that works for them is important to maximise the response rate. There are several viable research methods to choose from, including:
Address B2B Wider Business Needs
Many B2B research programmes are set up to support a strategic business need, such as understanding specific market challenges or testing customers’ response to a new product or service. Depending on the business dynamic, these are usually run on an as-needed basis, typically occurring every six months to a year.
But just as B2C customer perceptions about a brand are constantly changing, so too are B2Bs. Many B2C companies use a combination of our traditional and behavioural science methods to identify customers’/market expectations of relationships, services, and products, helping them hone their offering and gain competitive advantage. As the market changes it is as important for Businesses to understand their customers’ needs, what these need to look like and how the business needs to change to address them. It's important to identify customer/market requirements against their perceptions, identify where gaps exist, and the improvements actions to meet their needs.
Keeping in touch with the market reality regularly rather than intermittently enables a company to fulfil its customers’ expectations better, in turn improving customer relationships and customer retention.
There is great value in talking about research process, value and how it can help organisations to anticipate change and instinctively adapt and transform.?
If you would like to know message me or email - [email protected]