Global Development
Credit Reporting Company
Vice President,"We now have a strategy for Asia."
Global Development
Credit Reporting Company
Industrial & B2B Market Research: It's the "How"
In B2B industrial market research it is not who you know; it is not what you know; it’s how you find it out.
In business-to-business markets, the universe of customers and competitors is finite and fairly well defined. In industrial markets, the universe is typically even smaller and more defined, to the point where in some sectors it is possible to know all current customers and competitors. Because of this, companies often assume they know their customers and competitors well and do not require additional market insights or competitive intelligence. Our experience in Voice of the Customer research has shown that this is rarely the case and often clients themselves are surprised at what they can learn from existing customers though the right research approach and data analytics.
When B2B and industrial firms do hire a research consultancy it is typically to help them enter a new market. Again, they often fall victim to false assumptions about the nature of B2B research They seek and often select firms that have specific experience in that particular industry sector. While familiarity with an industry can be helpful, the selection of a research firm should be based on the firm’s ability to identify and access respondents and for their methodologies for analyzing data and producing market insights. Clients often ask us if we have contacts in a market sector they want to investigate. Often we do -- sometimes we even have an extensive database. What we have found, however, is having pre-existing contacts is of little value when we actually get into the thick of a project.
The nature of B2B and industrial research is that you are often looking for a specific decision-maker buried within a company (e.g., the person responsible for purchasing mold block material, outsourcing online learning, specifying polymer modified asphalt, choosing solar encapsulant, or purchasing control valves and actuators). It is unlikely that such a custom list exists, particularly when you add various screening criteria to the equation. Even when we do have extensive contacts in an industry sector, we find our existing contacts typically do not match our target group of respondents.
Certainly pre-existing contacts can sometimes help you identify the real respondents, but other methods such as old fashioned secondary research that includes diving into databases, mining published information, and tapping into social media, are more effective. For very specific industrial applications, we often develop our lists as we conduct our research, working our way through gatekeepers to respondents and then seeking referrals and other insights. For custom research, we have never found this method to fail, although it can be time consuming and tedious.
One can spend 30 years in an industry and have over 300 current contacts and still not have the right 100 needed to carry out a targeted study. When selecting a market research firm, I encourage clients to ask about the methodologies a firm will use to research and identify respondents as opposed to how many individuals the firm already knows.
Industry knowledge can be helpful to analysis but it can also affect objectivity. Industry knowledge that is dated can make you blind to new market trends, emerging technologies, and converging competition. It is much better to focus on a market research firms’ methodologies and approaches to analyzing data and producing market insights than to concentrate on their specific industry background. Market research and analysis is a science and the emphasis should be on ensuring an objective approach for gathering information and a sound methodology for analyzing it. Otherwise, you may end up with an ill-conceived opinion or worse, faulty analyses and flawed conclusions. It’s not who you know; it’s not even what you know; it’s how you find out what you need to know that counts in market research.