How to Acquire B2B Customer Insights
Business to Business (B2B) purchase decisions are generally medium or high consideration purchases. Buyers apply a very conscience decision-making process. These purchases occur over a lengthy period of time. They involve multiple employees or buying committees and result in a high dollar expenditure.
B2B customer insights are the behaviors, emotions, reasons or actions responsible for buyer decision making.
This visibility to human behavior can show cause and effect relationships between customers and their providers. It can also help marketers improve customer engagement, customer experiences, offer conversions and repeat purchases.
As said by Paul Laughlin in the Digital Marketing Journal, insights deliver "a non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, can change their behavior for mutual benefit."
But capturing, synthesizing and acting upon these insights is easier said than done.
There are multiple ways to go about it. For most professional service firms, B2B customer insights are primarily created from market research. That’s a good start but lacks persona and behavior-based specificity to drive improved marketing outcomes.
Below are the methods we have used with clients to make insights calculable and predictable so they can be applied to marketing campaigns and other digital marketing programs.
01. Buyer Personas – The Best Starting Point
Customer persona insights identify the drivers and barriers for the procurement of products and services. They reveal when, why and how customers make purchase decisions.
Most professional service companies have the data to harvest these insights. But they often lack the strategy and technologies to synthesize and make the data actionable. Without action, insights are merely interesting.
There are two technologies that can help. Customer Data Platforms such as Microsoft Customer Insights or Salesforce Data Cloud can automatically capture, tabulate, and synthesize customer data. They can also insert it to the account record in the CRM system so it can be used for marketing campaigns and similar processes.
There are a few ways to then make that data actionable. You can use the workflow tools in your CRM or Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) to route data to the customer interaction points where it can be applied.
Most CRM and MAP applications also have AI tools for this purpose. The AI takes things to the next level. It can create insight-driven actions such as purchase propensity modeling, offer conversion predictions, next best offer recommendations and other predictive analytics.
02. Journey Mapping – Integrate Personas with Customer Journeys
The first step is to map the persona-based purchase journey. The second step is to then align that buying process with the company’s engagement process. This allows service companies to create and automate insightful context, so they are delivering the right message at the right time.
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the customer’s interactions with your organization. Initial objectives are to understand the customers end to end path in completing a transaction and the customers goal at each touch point. With this information, you can streamline processes, remove friction points, eliminate drop-off conditions, orchestrate effortless progressions, and better satisfy customer goals.
Journey maps also help identify siloed operations which complicate processes, create interaction differences among channels, and produce inconsistency or gaps between departments.
When these insights are acted upon the advances will collectively improve the customer experience and transaction conversions.
Journey maps can get complex as customers engage at different points. There are many on-ramp and off-ramp locations and channels, and customer sequence is inconsistent. Trying to predict customer movement is less important than trying to satisfy customers at each touch point.
03. Ethnographic Research – Align Observations with Outcomes
As Yogi Berra says, "You can observe a lot by watching."
Ethnography is a data collection technique that observes a situation, identifies input or association variables, and records the customer behavior and response. This method isn’t looking for generalized understanding. It’s seeking quantitative findings where each customer situation results in a stimulus-response connection or cause and effect relationship.
This type of situational observation can be deciphered and analyzed with online tools. Online behaviors can be measured with heatmaps, telemetry and digital footprints.
Once the data is captured and analyzed, these insights deliver empirical evidence of how different types of buyers respond to various conditions. These insights can be ranked, modeled, replicated and scaled.
04. Empathy Interviews – Good Stories Deliver Good Insights
According to advertising guru David Ogilvy, "The trouble with market research is that people don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say."
An alternative to market research is an empathy interview. This type of interview replaces Q&A with customer provided story telling. It's a listening exercise where the interviewer is fully attentive to the customers every word.
Occasionally, the interviewer will prompt the customer to continue speaking, explain their thinking, or share an experience, all in the form of a story. The interviewer then extracts the emotional and behavioral elements and relates them to the outcome.
It takes an experienced interviewer, but when correctly done, it uncovers the buyer's subconscious needs and reveals why they took an action, such as making or not making a product or service purchase. This understanding is important because B2B purchase decisions are often made for personal reasons but justified with business reasons.
Except for a leading question which prompts the customer to tell their story about a purchase, empathy interviews have no agenda. The point is to get the customer to talk. You want to understand their frame of mind, emotions that play a factor in their decision, what they consider to be relevant or important, and how they go about their task.
Empathy interviews are well suited to uncovering unknown or unstated needs. As Henry Ford said, "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
05. Design Thinking – The Fastest Path to the Top Insights
Design thinking is a people-focused method that applies deep empathy for customers and collaboration among multi-disciplinary teams to surface what's most important to customers.
Unlike most other methods, Design Thinking is done in a group-based workshop. It starts with customer personas. It then creates persona-based empathy maps. That’s followed by documenting the As-Is processes. With this data, the cross functional team then performs an ideation exercise to find new ways to satisfy customers throughout their purchase journey.
I've led dozens of design thinking workshops. They consistently find the shortest path to revealing the most influential insights.
06. Focus Groups – Not for B2B Purchases
I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up focus groups as a method to generate buyer insights. They can work for B2C purchases, but experience shows they don’t deliver the same result for B2B considered purchase decisions.
The primary challenge with focus groups is that they rely on buyer memories, which deteriorate quickly and are notoriously inaccurate. Another challenge is that focus group participants often exhibit a context-bias or exaggerated responses.
Many customers also show a propensity to recall favorable experiences with higher dollar purchases. This behavior stands in contrast to more immediate survey data, and suggests buyers want to positively rate higher dollar purchases as a means to feel good or justify their decisions.
One More Point
While there are several methods to acquire insights, what each method shares are the quest for understanding and customer empathy.
Applying insights to the right customer at the right time on the right channel will certainly improve customer experiences and conversions when compared to applying generalized data to a broad audience.
Insights are essential to create content that will engage, offers that will convert and customer experiences that will deliver repeat purchases.
