B2B Market Research Methods
In-depth Interviews, Surveys or Both?
A version of this post was included in my super-fun weekly email for marketers with tips, tricks and stories. Click here to sign up and never miss out on the fun!
In-depth Interviews
Ok, you’ve heard me say it before…
When it comes to B2B market research, there is no better tool for gathering insights than IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS.
Surveys have long been a popular tool for corporate research, but they have huge limitations. First of all, it’s hard to get enough people in a niche B2B audience to take a survey. And on top of that, they can only reinforce or dispel theories that you already have.
Interviews, on the other hand, can uncover context that you didn’t even know to ask. And that’s one of the reasons I’m such a proponent of conducting interviews as part of any market research project.
Photo by Alex Green
Let's talk about the kinds of things B2B interviews can reveal…
Decision-making process your customers go through to select a product or service
In-depth interviews are great for understanding complex value chains and buying processes. You’ll get insight into who’s involved and how, and who influences who to buy your product or service. This includes the departments and stakeholders and job titles involved in a B2B buying decision.
Factors that could have changed a decision
What I’m talking about here are the moments in the buying journey that really made a difference. Interviews can help you understand all the factors your buyers are considering before making a purchase, and which ones matter most. For example, let’s say you know that you’re generating lots of interest, but losing business after sending a proposal out. Why is that happening? Is it the timing of the proposal? Is it the price? Is it the way you’ve described what you do? Is it the visuals? Is it something else entirely? In a survey, you wouldn’t even know to ask that question—and to be honest, your participants may not even realize what that “why” is until you’ve talked it out with them.
Direct feedback from customers on your product (especially if combined with usability testing protocols)
You’ll discover so much more than just a satisfaction score—you’ll understand what works for them about your product or business model or sales cycle, and what needs improvement, and the granular details around that. In-depth interviews yield a tremendous amount of information about who is making B2B decisions, how they’re making them, and why. Learning to conduct this type of interview is essential to your success as a B2B market researcher.
Even if your project will have a quant component to it, doing interviews up-front will help you know what questions to ask for creating effective surveys or what to look for in your analytics.
B2B Surveys
We talked about how in-depth interviews can help you develop hypotheses about your target audience. Once you have a few theories based on your qualitative research, you can use quantitative methods to validate them to make sure they scale across a larger population.
Differences between B2B and B2C surveys
First, B2B surveys are more targeted. Many times they only seek professionals with certain job titles, or in specific industries. This kind of hyper-targeting is not found in B2C surveys.
With B2B surveys, responses aren’t always anonymous either. You have to make sure that the participant is legitimate, and this often involves asking them for their name, department, job title, and sometimes even a link to their LinkedIn profile to verify they are who they say they are.
Because a B2B audience works in a professional environment, responses rates can prove to be difficult. It's not unrealistic to see response rates to B2B surveys at 2% or less. B2C response rates are often much higher.
Sometimes B2B surveys need you to send multiple reminders to respondents. Other times, you may have better luck if you call people and conduct the survey over the phone. It’s worth mentioning that, because B2B surveys are hyper-targeted, you don’t need as many respondents. There are fewer people in the population size who work in specific job titles and roles, so your sample size could be significantly lower.
A survey might be right for your B2B project if you’re getting inconsistent responses in qualitative research. You might find there’s some segmentation you’re missing.
Surveys can also be used when you have a specific B2B offer and you want to gauge willingness to pay from a specific group of people.
Photo by Alexander Suhorucov
Next, surveys can help you understand how to better serve the various business professionals your brand interacts with. You can discover pain points in a digital experience, know which content assets like reports or white papers work best for them, and learn preferences about what communications they want or need to hear from you. Surveys can tell you where different audience types hang out—where you can reach them for lead gen. Are they on LinkedIn a lot? Are they going to conferences? Are they relying on trade shows or associations to find vendors?
Finally, if you’re not 100% sure who’s involved in the end-to-end purchase decision, a survey could be a good option to understand the various inputs. For example, if you’re selling manufacturing materials to a food company, the buyer who procures the materials may be very different from the food scientist who decides which materials work best.
What About Interviews + Surveys?
Typically we see companies do 2 rounds of research: a set of interviews plus a survey. But there’s a better way to combine qualitative and quantitative research.
Here’s what happens in most companies:
They know they need both qualitative and quantitative data. So they do some interviews, then a survey. Or they do a survey and then some interviews. But I’m going to challenge you on this methodology, because you can do better.
If you do your interviews first, you know what to ask in the survey to see if it scales across a larger population, so that’s great. But, what happens here is that you end up learning something new and critical during the quantitative piece, and wind up kicking yourself for doing the interviews up-front, going, “I WISH we had asked this other thing in the interviews.” or “I wish we had dug into that more because it seems really important to my customer.”
On the other hand, if you do a survey and then interviews, you don’t know exactly the right questions to ask to get the data you need. The worst feeling is knowing that you’ve spent time and money on a huge survey, and you missed a key question.
There’s a very simple tweak you can make to your technique here. Split up the interviews. Do it in 3 parts instead of 2.
Introducing…
The Sandwich Method!
Instead of doing qual-quant
Or quant-qual
You end up doing qual-quant-qual.
I call it the sandwich method because you sandwich the large-scale survey in between two rounds of qualitative research.
Your first set of interviews is exploratory. The purpose of this starting point is really to learn about the customers, their challenges, and what motivates them to buy.
From here, you start to generate hypotheses about your customers. And the logical next step is to do that survey to make sure that these hypotheses scale across a larger population.
You inevitably learn new insights in the survey that you didn’t even know to ask about. So it makes total sense that you would account for that and schedule a portion of your interviews to go after the survey.
It’s the same amount of qualitative and quantitative research, and with this simple adjustment to your methodology, you’ll start seeing BIG results. Try it out next time you do a B2B Research Study and comment below how it worked!
***
If you liked this article, you might like…
Recent Blog Post on DIY Recruiting for a B2B Market Research Study
My B2B Market Research Course on LinkedIn Learning
InstaBrain : The New Rules for Marketing to Gen Z (grab your free chapter here)
Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser-focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.