Your Surveys Suck! How to Get Results that Will Help, Not Hurt, Your B2B Marketing

This week I’ll be attending Qualtrics Insights Summit, the largest insight summit in the world.  Qualtrics is hosting a few from Apttus marketing, as we check out their technology and look for ways to improve feedback and information throughout the company.  For those attending their conference, and for those looking to expand their data utilizing surveys, I thought I would dust off a blog post I wrote a few years ago.  

Much of my early B2B marketing career and graduate program I studied survey design and methods to gain marketing insights and develop marketing strategies. Because of this, I have an understanding of when surveys are appropriate, how to get unbiased information from them, and how to measure their results.  That said, I have seen many, many surveys that didn’t follow best practices where I work. Often this is because a department in the organization is siloed, or because managers are using surveys as a way to justify their ideas – even if the results ended up being inconclusive or measured inappropriately.

There are a few different ways to deploy a survey. These include mail, phone (through automated prompts or a live person), on your website or through your community, via social media, in person, or a mix of any of these. To drive people to surveys, any of a number of tactics may be also used, including incentives (gift cards, cash, rebates, sweepstakes entry) and promotions (email, banners, log in pages).

While the method you choose to deploy your survey will have significant impact on its results, the promotion itself can skew or sway answers, especially if the survey taker believes that specific answers may lead to different incentives or improved chance of reward.

Why do we survey at all?  Typically, it is because we are seeking:

1. Industry information or market analysis
2. Benchmark information
3. Lead generation
4. Content Polls
5. Customer satisfaction surveys
6. Win/Loss surveys

While the blog post below briefly discusses each of these, you should make sure you are considering each of these in your marketing and customer lifecycle management programs. 

Below are some best practices for each.

• Industry information or market analysis.

Information about your industry or a general market analysis is usually best compiled by a third party. Ideally this is an analyst firm with people who understand your industry and can survey based on their deep, specialized knowledge.

By surveying through a third party, you eliminate the risk of bias from your own firm affecting the outcome. Also, participants are more likely to share accurate information if they are talking to an organization they know and respect.

That said, be sure your marketers clearly explain the information they are looking to gain to the surveying firm, so they don’t end up with a bunch of data that doesn’t answer your questions.

If you do decide to take this in house, and you share the data you collected with customers or prospects, make sure to be very clear about who you surveyed, the questions you used, your incentives, and how you interpreted results so that the readers can decide how much to rely on what you are presenting. 

• Benchmark information.

Benchmark information can be a very valuable type of survey data – it can be extremely interesting to the press, your customers, and prospects.

When putting together benchmarks based on your clientele, it is generally best to survey them from your own organization, via online, telephone or in-person surveys. If your organization lacks the survey know-how to do this, bringing on a consultant to help can be a great way to keep this in-house without giving up quality.

Alternatively, you can create this with information you’ve collected based on utilization of your product or service.  When doing this it is important to protect the privacy of every customer, so make sure data sets are large enough to ensure individual customer data cannot be uncovered. 

• Lead generation.

Often online or phone surveys are used by marketers for lead generation. An organization typically does this in one of two ways: either by surveying people in their database to understand Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (BANT) to understand when prospects may move forward in their purchases, or by surveying those who are not yet engaged in the sales process to see if they are a good candidate for a product or whether they may be making a purchase.

The first type – BANT surveying – is best done in-house or by working very closely with an appointment setting or survey company. The trick here is to make sure survey questions don’t ask BANT questions directly (like- will you have budget for this), but instead asking in a less direct way (like- what percent of your 2016 budget is allocated to the purchase of x).  If you do want to ask directly you should use a third party, but I still wouldn’t rely on the results to be true indicators of BANT information so you can target your sales efforts.  

The second type – surveying to find leads – is often done by a third party who has a database that includes those who are purchasers of your product. With this type of survey, you often pay a price per lead for those who answer questions with certain answers.  

• Content polls.

Many companies use online surveys as a method of creating interesting content. You may see this done via Twitter polls, with widgets on the side of blogs, in webinars and more.

Typically, these types of content marketing polls consist of only one (or a few) general questions that are unrelated to a particular product or service. These polls are then used for content to share back, either in the place where they were deployed, or by including results in a blog post or article.

It is important to remember that this type of surveying is often very far from having a random sample, so the results should not be presented back as scientific fact, and definitely should not be used to make strategic business decisions. (Example: “In a Twitter poll, we found that 70 out of 100 people said X.”)

• Customer satisfaction surveys.

At Apttus, we have at least a half dozen departments that want to survey customers online at any given time. These proposed online surveys often ask the same questions or intend to use the data to support a single goal or objective. The problem is, when multiple surveys go out per month, customers get frustrated or confused, and the organization itself looks disconnected.

A much better bet for your B2B marketing is to conduct a quarterly or annual survey of your customers. This will prevent list fatigue and force those who want the survey data to think critically about the questions they really want to ask customers.  Note: everyone at your company is not going to be a fan of this because they won’t be able to reach out to customers whenever they want, so it’s best to get executive support of this approach.

Because your company will rely heavily on this data, the survey should include incentives for those that participate. Also, you may want to consider using an organization that can help deploy and interpret results. You can deploy this online for practitioners and via a phone interview for more executive participants.

If you need to survey a CEO or other executives, this survey may need to be done with an in-person interview. A survey company can help you understand how many results will need to be captured to get statistically accurate and meaningful results. You don’t have to get feedback from everyone – but enough people so you can use the survey to make strategic decisions.

The exception here is following a specific interaction, like after a demo, after receiving customer support, or after a new product feature is released.  Here a survey should be deployed specifically after the interaction, and should be concise and focused only on feedback from the specific activity. 

• Win/Loss or Competitive surveys.

It is important for your company to get feedback on why people are buying, or not buying, your products.  Surveying prospects after they have purchased, or not purchased, your product is a great way to understand your market (why people are buying), your sales process or product (why people are or aren’t buying), how serious prospects learned about your product, and more.  Win/loss surveys can be done internally, or by a third party (who often specializes in capturing this type of feedback).  Two important notes about these surveys: 1. Capture feedback in a way that can be reviewed over time, like in your CRM system or a win/loss database and 2. Make sure you survey both customers who have selected your product, and those that did not. 

Finally, this post is just a very simplistic view of surveys in general.  I could write dozens of posts about each bullet point above.  What’s important is that you think about surveying holistically for your organization, before looking at each of the individual types of surveys, to make sure you are using surveys in the most strategic way.  Having an overall plan will not only save your customers and prospects time and frustration, but will also save your team time as well.

Happy surveying!