Organizations providing products or services for other businesses, called B2B businesses, are regularly managing several challenges at the same time. On the one hand, they have to look 3-5 years in the future to keep an eye on market changes and determine what direction they want to move in. However, they have to also manage day-to-day issues and ensure that current customers are satisfied and retained.
It’s a difficult balancing act. But, with market research, B2B companies can overcome these hurdles. Using data-centric approaches to evaluate existing customer needs as well as future opportunities. B2B companies are empowered to both maintain high levels of existing customer satisfaction and build future growth and acquisition.
In this post, we’ll examine the four different market research approaches any B2B company should consider using.
1. Customer Opinion Or Sentiment Tracking
One thing that’s unique to B2B companies is that the value of individual customers tends to be higher than B2C companies. As a result, customer retention is a major need within B2B settings. This means that B2B companies must regularly understand customer sentiment and assess how well the organization is aligned with customer needs.
One of the most common approaches to do this in B2B settings is Net Promoter Score, also called NPS. This is a time-tested approach that uses a one-to-ten scale for measuring customer satisfaction. By asking customers to rate how likely they would be to recommend the company or the product to their fellow professionals, companies can quickly measure how satisfied customers are. Customers are likely to answer because of how easy it is to answer, and companies are able to quickly gauge customer satisfaction. When used over months and even years, B2B companies can measure longitudinal shifts in customer sentiment to see if changes they’re making internally have positive or negative effects.
As a follow up, B2B companies can then leverage one-to-one interviews for further insight. This is especially helpful in cases where customer sentiment is declining and organizations need to better understand what is behind that trend. These interviews allow for far more nuance, letting companies understand what is driving dissatisfaction so that they can readily address it.
2. New Product Concept Screens
B2B organizations looking to grow are regularly wondering how they can further expand into new or existing markets. This is largely because once they reach a level of success, they need new customers to further expand their growth. Often, this translates to developing new products or services to target a completely new customer base. However, because this translates to companies entering into new territories, there is often little existing intel as to what will succeed. Using new product concept screens helps build this intel.
Product concept screens are performed across a variety of market research methodologies including surveys, focus groups, or one to one interviews. With this approach, research participants are shown different new product ideas. Depending on where the company is in their development process, this can be a very basic high-level idea or it could be an extremely detailed mock up with a lot of information. Participants are asked to review these ideas and then probed on the ideas’ appeal and relevance. Often, there are multiple new product concept screens. As a result, by asking the same questions across all of the concepts, companies can measure the relative strength of each idea. B2B companies can keep the ideas with the strongest scores while discarding the weakest options.
3. Competitive Audits & Landscape Reviews
B2B purchase processes tend to be more deliberate. Buyers in these categories objectively explore products on the market to compare them against each other. As a result, B2B companies must understand what customers are examining when exploring the category, how they stack up against the competition, and how they can respond to customer inquiries about their value compared to the competition.
Competitive audits or landscape reviews are effective ways that companies are able to do this. This type of market research uses systemic, objective approaches to comparing unique aspects of products within a given market. This includes things like product features, pricing, positioning, and value propositions as well as marketing spends and marketing channels in use. It’s a comprehensive process that lets B2B companies readily compare organizations against each other.
A major upside of this analysis is that organizations can see where competitors are strong and own discrete markets as well as where they are weak. In turn, it allows B2B companies to identify where they have opportunities to successfully enter new markets.
4. Product & Feature Optimization Studies
B2B products often have a lot of complexity. And, with that complexity, a lot of features or benefits they could include. As companies build on these products, they need to determine what makes sense to include and what they should leave behind. It’s a necessary decision as companies must figure out how to use the finite time and financial resources they have, all while increasing the chances of customer satisfaction and new customer acquisition. To make these decisions objective, B2B companies often run product optimization studies.
There are two types of studies often run. One is called a MaxDiff which is a survey-based approach that forces participants to review a set of features from an extensive list. As participants see these features, they select the feature that is most important and least important to them. By repeating this process several times across each participant, and also across many participants, companies can see what features respondents really value.
A second frequently used approach is called a conjoint analysis. Also survey-based, this approach has respondents select their preferred product from a list of products with different features and benefits. Once again, this process is repeated multiple times for each participant and then across all participants. When complete, the data shows which features or benefits grouped together yield the greatest customer interest.
Each of the studies we just described include some level of complexity. It may come from deciding who to recruit into the study, how to best structure the study, or how to analyze the results. It’s a key reason B2B companies use a market research firm to support them in these efforts. As teams adept at working across B2B industries and verticals, market research firms come with a wealth of knowledge to not just advise on the best path forward but also to execute the studies companies need to make informed strategic decisions.
