In recent years, the B2B customer journey has become more complicated and more crowded than ever before.
Gone are the days of selling to a single buyer. Today, the average B2B purchase involves 13 people and 89% of deals span two or more departments.
We feel this day in and day out in our own worklives. Rarely are we ever renewing an expensive contract or onboarding a new vendor-partner without weighing the decision with teams and leaders. This all makes sense—these are decisions that could impact their company’s profitability, stability, and future growth.
So why are many B2B marketers and salespeople developing plans based on anecdotes from individual clients or prospects, or transactional data that provides little if any understanding of what’s driving buyers’ decisions?
That’s where B2B market research comes in. Think of it as your way to understand the buying groups you’re selling to before you sell to them. By gathering insights directly from these key decision-makers—CEOs, procurement leaders, engineers, end-users—we can understand their pain points, priorities, and what drives their purchasing decisions so we can develop go-to-market strategies that actually work.
The Changing B2B Buying Landscape
It’s not just that the B2B purchasing journey now involves more people – there are all kinds of forces at play that are making it harder than ever to break through to buyers.
- The Incumbent Advantage: During periods of economic uncertainty (like now), buyers are more likely to stay with incumbent vendors to minimize risk. For challengers, this means you can no longer win on features alone. You need strategic research to pinpoint acute, unaddressed pain points or white space in the customer experience where the incumbent is vulnerable.
- A New Level of Self Education: B2B buyers have long spent substantial time researching options before they engage with vendors, but buyers today are taking that to a new level. One recent study found that the average buying journey lasts 11 months, but buyers don’t speak with sellers, on average, until after 8 months. Many of today’s buyers would prefer to never speak with a seller. If your content and positioning don’t immediately signal value, they’ll move on before you even know they were looking.
- Sea of Sameness: In many sectors, product parity (or near parity) is rampant. As a result, the B2B buying decision is moving from “What is the best product?” to “Who is the best vendor to work with?” This includes everything from the digital experience to post-sales support. Strategic research helps you benchmark your entire customer journey against competitors to pinpoint the friction points in your CX that are causing pipeline leakage and identify the specific moments that truly drive loyalty.
- No More Feature Dumps: Buyers are already 70% of the way through their journey before talking to sales. They don’t need a recitation of your product specs–they’ve seen those! They need an application. Research provides sales and marketing teams with the strategic insights to elevate the conversation—moving from “Here’s what our product does” to “Here is the critical issue we’re solving.”
Why Understanding Decision-Maker Priorities Is Essential
While it’s hard for us to think of an aspect of business that wouldn’t benefit from research and insights, there are a few areas in which it’s completely essential to engage with decision makers.
- Brand Positioning: How do you position your brand so it’s differentiated from competitors but also compelling to prospective buyers? With B2B market research and research-informed strategy development.
- Brand Perceptions: Do buyers see your company as innovative or traditional? Aspirational or approachable? Research diagnoses the gaps between your desired brand positioning and market reality.
- Consideration & Preference Drivers: Which features and brand attributes move buyers from simply aware to actively considering and ultimately choosing your product or service? Again, you’ll need market research to figure that out at scale.
- Satisfaction & Loyalty Drivers: What makes your existing customers stick around? What issues drive them to consider your competitors? Satisfaction data is your blueprint for retention and growth.
- Unmet Needs or Feature Gaps: What problems are B2B buyers currently solving with clumsy workarounds? That unmet need is your next major opportunity.
- Risk Mitigation: Knowing exactly what features buyers value and/or what they’re willing to pay before you invest millions in development is the definition of strategic risk mitigation.
Core B2B Market Research Services That Rely on Decision-Maker Feedback
So, how do you get these actionable insights? You don’t guess. You research. Here are some examples of how we leverage research for our B2B clients:
Brand Research & Strategy
A strong brand strategy is one that is not only reflective of your company–its strengths and the vision your leadership has for its future–but also buyers. What matters to them? And where’s the sweet spot between their priorities, your strengths, and the white space in the market?
Brand Health Research
Think of this as your foundational check-up. We design and field brand health research to benchmark awareness and perceptions over time, and to deliver insights that will help you move those brand perceptions in the right direction. With driver analyses, we help you identify exactly what factors drive consideration and preference among key B2B audiences so you can evolve your strategy accordingly. And we field these studies regularly to track change and impact over time.
Customer Satisfaction Research
A loyalty study goes beyond a simple “Net Promoter Score” to explore various dimensions of satisfaction and identify what specific factors—product performance, service delivery, account management, etc—are driving satisfaction. Our loyalty studies also bring qualitative nuance to the conversation so we’re not just learning what’s happened, but what can be done to increase satisfaction (and retention) in the future.
Conjoint Analysis
Conjoint research simulates real purchasing decisions by forcing decision-makers to make trade-offs between various potential features and benefits. Do you want a construction vehicle from Brand A, at $X, with no smart technology, or from Brand B, for $Y more, but with tech-enabled safety add ons? Prospective buyers go through a series of many head-to-head choices between various product concepts. On the back end, we calculate which features and benefits are most important and what the optimal combination of features is to maximize market share.
Pricing Research
Pricing and willingness to pay can be tricky in any industry, but it’s particularly hard in the B2B space, where price tags can be high and competitor pricing can be difficult to access. We have experience incorporating pricing into conjoint studies like the one described above, but we also have experience designing and fielding research focused exclusively on pricing.
Message Testing
Even if you’ve done all the right research when it comes to developing a new product, your product doesn’t stand a chance if your marketing and messaging is off. Message testing ensures your product positioning, value props, and campaign creative will actually cut through and motivate action, reducing the risk of launching expensive, underperforming campaigns.
When to Bring in a B2B Market Research Agency
No one knows your product better than you. But when is it time to call on a partner to help you better understand buyers and the competitive landscape?
- When Internal Teams Lack Time or Methodology Expertise: Strategic research is a full-time job that requires specialized knowledge in research design, sampling, and advanced analytics.
- When You Need Validated, Unbiased Data from Qualified B2B Decision-Makers: We specialize in access. We provide better sample and research governance to ensure the people giving you feedback are actually the people who make and influence purchasing decisions.
- When You Need Support Turning Insights into Action: This is our promise. We don’t stop at the what; we focus relentlessly on the why it matters and the what you should do next.
- When You Need to Align Cross-Functional Teams Around Customer Value: We deliver the clear, concise, and compelling evidence needed to get Product, Marketing, and Sales speaking the same language about what truly drives B2B customer value.
Ready to understand what your B2B customers actually care about? Reach out.
