The Best B2B Market Research Planning Template
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If you’re a B2B marketer, you know that marketing to another business is fundamentally different from marketing directly to a consumer.
It often involves a higher price point, a longer sales cycle, a more complex decision-making process—with people in all different roles, with different goals. All of these factor into a B2B sale. So in order to have a successful B2B market research study, you must first implement a few key steps in the up-front planning process.
Your Newest B2B Planning Template:
Define your goals
Hold stakeholder interviews
Select the best methodologies
Have a kicka$$ team kickoff meeting
Draft appropriate questions
Ultimately, you take the time to really understand the client ahead of time. This B2B Planning Template will give you all the steps necessary to get enough information to begin your study in a curated and targeted way!
Define Your Goals:
Why should people care about this research? What business objective does it align to?
The #1 reason companies fail to get what they need out of their B2B research is because they haven’t defined their goals.
Research goals are questions established at the start of your project that guide your research and serve as your success metrics once the project has finished. Too many times companies skip this step and launch right into an interview guide or survey draft. And then they’re left thinking “why aren't we learning what we need?”
4 Best Practices for Setting Research Goals:
Fewer goals help focus the research.
Get specific on 2-3 research questions you want to know the answers to. A few clear, focused goals is far more helpful than a huge list. Brainstorming is great to start, but at some point, you have to make a decision about what’s most important to you.
Prioritize your goals.
Without prioritizing, you’re going to wind up diluting the research with a bunch of questions that seem good to know, but don’t matter to your bottom line. And you won’t have time to dig into a few areas that really do make a difference.
Research goals need to make sense in context.
You have to also take a look at whether the questions are premature. Your goals need to make sense in context. For example, I had a client recently who wanted us to uncover pricing research—how much the company should charge for a new product. But, they weren’t even clear on what the product should be. How could you expect to get willingness-to-pay data on a product that you can’t even describe?
Phrase goals as questions.
Instead of stating your goal as: Determine optimal pricing
Ask: “What’s the most a financial analyst has in her budget for this service?” These questions will help you clarify your goals and decide what techniques to use to uncover the answers you need to know.
When you are planning for your B2B market research, defining your goals in a focused way is the #1 thing you can do to set your team up for success.
Photo by Julia M Cameron
Stakeholder Interviews:
Define your outcomes that you would like to see. What are your research goals?
A good B2B researcher understands that knowing the customer is only half the battle. The other half is getting a company to buy into the findings and actually implement the recommendations.
The most successful kickoff phases I’ve seen are the ones where we take the time to meet with internal stakeholders one-on-one to listen to the various perspectives.
Benefits of one-on-one stakeholder interviews:
Identify goals and outcomes from different stakeholders
Expectations and outcomes vary quite a bit between people with different roles in any organization. Identifying goals from different stakeholders allows us to ensure that we’re setting up the project to meet the needs of the different parties involved.
Clarify what success looks like
Completing stakeholder interviews also helps us determine metrics for what success means to the research project overall.
Buy-in across the organization (increasing likelihood of adopting recommendations)
Even more important… is listening to internal stakeholders and then showing them you care. You do this by putting their feedback directly into your plan, which increases a feeling of ownership for the project. Stakeholders will feel like they’re a part of it, and this really helps with turning recommendations into reality once the project has ended.
Internal interviews set the tone for your project and can make or break success. So when you’re doing research for a complex B2B project, make sure you are including the right people, and asking great questions from the start.
Select The Best Methodologies:
Qualitative or Quantitative? Primary or Secondary? What mix?
Selecting the correct research methodology can determine the success of your project and the overall quality of your data. It is essential to get this right.
First, you’ll need to decide whether your study is most appropriate for a qualitative or quantitative technique.
Qualitative Research vs. Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is typically used to collect numbers that will confirm your theories, assumptions, and hypotheses. This is where we’d get into surveys, experiments, analytics, clickstream data, or content analysis.
Qualitative research is typically used to understand the mental model of your customers: the thoughts, concepts, and experiences your audience goes through. Qualitative techniques might include interviews, focus groups, video surveys, or diary studies.
To determine which methods to use, you’ll need to ask yourself: “What am I trying to find out here?”
Go to the research goals that you’ve documented in the first step of the planning process, and look at the questions. If you’re trying to get into the mind of your consumers, choose a qualitative method. If you have some assumptions and are trying to confirm that they’re true, some quant research couldn’t hurt.
Remember that you can always combine research methods too. I often plan our studies with a “sandwich approach” to research - a sequence of qual / quant / qual.
The biggest takeaway here is to really spend the time and energy up-front to set the foundation for your study and consider what methodologies make the most sense, based on what you’re trying to get out of your research.
Photo by fauxels
Team Kickoff Meeting:
What audience are you going to try to recruit?
Too many times in research studies, kickoff meetings are either skipped or used for just introductions.
If facilitated properly, the kickoff may be the most important meeting you will have throughout your research project.
The primary goal of project kickoffs for B2B market research projects is to get people participating in defining their audiences and research objectives so we really understand what outcomes the organization needs. That way we can plan the best possible approach to the study.
In a successful kickoff, you should take the time to cover:
Research goals and priorities
Audience segmentation assumptions and theories from the client
Insights from past data or competitive analysis
Qualification criteria for participant recruiting
Expectations about outcomes and deliverables
Metrics for success
Timelines, check-ins and next steps
Ultimately, your kickoff is way more than a recap of what you’re going to do. It’s a hands-on workshop to collaborate with everyone involved to make sure you’re designing a study that gets to the results you need.
Drafting Questions:
Where can you best reach your target customer audience to engage them to participate in your study?
The questions you’ll want to ask participants in a B2B study are fundamentally different from B2C.
Because you’re selling a higher ticket item with multiple parties involved, your research questions need to be more focused on the challenges and pain points each audience goes through, and the buying journey itself, so that you can figure out the best way for your product to solve their challenges and fit into their everyday lives.
5 Common Question Types:
Participant and Job Role Questions
Tell me a bit about your company.
In your job role, how do you personally interact with machine learning?
Behavioral or Usage Questions
What are some of the use cases for how your organization uses machine learning?
When it comes to machine learning, do you typically build in-house or buy a solution? Tell me about your approach.
Challenges and Pain Points Questions
You mentioned you’re building your AI models in-house. What are the key challenges there?
How are you making sure that your data is accurate and unbiased—that it will build the models you want?
Purchase Process Questions
What departments influence your purchase? Can you walk me through the steps?
Be sure to hit all points in the buyer journey: Awareness for a product or service, Consideration on which product or service to buy, Purchase process and Post-Purchase process.
Pricing Questions
How much have you spent on a similar product or service in the past?
In thinking about this offer, at what price would you think the product is…
So inexpensive that you would question the quality and not consider it?
A bargain?
Getting expensive but you still might consider it?
Too expensive to consider?
Based on these questions, you can narrow down a closer range than you were before, and experimentation will help you get the rest of the way. Ultimately, the types of questions you ask determine the success of your research study. Good thing you have this guide—because now, you know to outline your interview guide with all the questions you need!
There is a fair amount of up-front prep work needed before you begin collecting any market research. However, it really makes a difference in your outcomes, because how you prepare defines your success.
➡️ The Ultimate B2B Research Planning Template ⬅️
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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.