Should you use B2B market research firms – what are the benefits?

Key takeaways: 

Working with B2B market research firms that understand your specific sector, have a strong track record, and guarantee genuine respondents can provide valuable insights to inform your sales and marketing decisions. In this way, they can help drive business growth – but it’s crucial to choose the right B2B market research firm.

Why B2B market research matters

B2B market research has many benefits, but how it helps businesses grow often matters most. Robust data supports evidence-based decisions and tends to deliver better results.

The products and services in B2B are more complex and customized than B2C ones. The audience for each product type is much narrower too.

Therefore, any business-to-business companies looking for insights to help them grow needs B2B-specific research. The target audience, product type, distribution channel, buying process, and decision criteria all differ from consumer sales, so B2C research is not relevant.

Here are some examples of the impact of B2B research on company KPIs:

• Data-driven sales in B2B can lead to above-market growth and a 15-25% EBITDA increase, McKinsey reports
• Highly data-driven businesses are 3x more likely to see a significant improvement in their decision-making, according to Think With Google.

Crucially, data and insights help businesses understand how to keep customers satisfied and win new ones.

That’s vital in B2B, where 80% of frequent customers will change suppliers within a couple of years if their expectations are not fulfilled, Accenture reports.

In short, B2B market research services can help companies gain more customers, better satisfy current ones, and reduce churn.

Some of the main reasons to conduct market research in B2B include:

• Market segmentation for a target audience
• Assessing new markets to enter
• Informing brand development activities
• Analyzing the buying process
• Tracking customer perceptions
• Informing product development

How B2B research supports sales and marketing decisions

B2B market research projects that are well managed should collect actionable insights and data to inform various sales and marketing-related activities.

For example, market intelligence research can help businesses make forward-thinking decisions based on customer feedback, market trends, and competitive analysis. 

From a sales perspective, B2B market research can help companies:

• Inform growth strategies: Data and insights can support all growth models, whether inorganic or organic. It can inform the creation of new products or services to serve more customers or how to optimize internal processes to increase revenue.
• Strengthen customer relationships: By using feedback to improve customer experiences, businesses can create stronger relationships with their clients, which builds trust and encourages repeat business.
• Identify key sales drivers: Understanding what influences purchasing decisions helps sales teams focus on the most impactful factors when engaging with prospects.

And for marketing campaigns, the insights can help businesses:

• Target messaging: Insights from customer feedback help tailor marketing messages that resonate with specific audience segments. For instance, understanding customers’ pain points helps create content that addresses these challenges directly.
• Optimize campaigns: By analyzing the effectiveness of campaigns, businesses can adjust their strategies. This includes reallocating resources to the most effective channels or modifying campaign elements that underperform.
• Make strategic adjustments: Continuous monitoring of market conditions and customer sentiments helps companies pivot their strategies in response to new information. For example, if feedback indicates a growing preference for sustainability or a comprehensive ESG strategy in the professional services industry, companies can adjust their messaging to showcase their credentials.

McKinsey reports that 75% of B2B firms grew their market share when personalizing their sales and marketing directly to the individual customer. Market research can provide the recommendations required to support this growth.

Case studies: business growth led by B2B market research

In fact, for some companies, B2B market research can have a transformative impact – by leading to increased revenue, informing the development of in-demand services, and so on.

These detailed case studies, from Adience, for niche B2B industries,show the impact of market research on clients’ growth objectives:

Driving growth by building buyer personas based on research

• Objective: The client wanted to gather market insights to inform product and web development to get a better understanding of the audience they were building for. 
• Methodology: We conducted 30 in-depth interviews with the target audience of developers and founders.
• Findings: The target audience differed in two main ways: 1) why they’d joined the Web3 industry; and 2) why they chose our client over alternatives. Combining these insights, we identified six personas with different messaging and product needs.
• Outcomes: They prioritized three personas, then developed web pages and propositions for each. Most of the client’s business growth has come directly from using these personas.

Informing the launch of a new subscription service with research

• Objective: The client was losing market share to competitors who were offering a monthly subscription program for some services. They wanted insights to help them develop subscription programs targeting heavy users and small businesses, to protect and gain market share.
• Methodology: We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with the target audience to explore attitudes in-depth, which we then used to develop some specific subscription concepts. Then we ran a survey for over 1,500 businesses to validate the initial results and test the new concepts.
• Findings: Our work highlighted that there was a growing demand for subscription programs in this category and a gap in the market for an annual plan with certain characteristics.
• Outcomes: The client developed the recommended programs, providing a new significant revenue stream.

For more information about Adience, learn about us here.

Reasons to hire a B2B market research firm

That’s the potential power of B2B market research. But of course, you don’t necessarily need a specialist B2B market research firm to get the insights you need – some companies handle it in-house.

Nevertheless, there are several advantages to hiring a B2B market research firm.

Here are three key ones:

• Designing the questionnaire or topic guide: Asking the right questions is crucial to get the answers you need. But without the right experience, it’s easy to fall into several traps that won’t lead to useful insights. These include: asking leading questions, biasing the research, missing key prompts, failing to screen participants properly, causing respondent fatigue, and so on.
• Managing the fieldwork: Qualitative research in particular is very time-intensive and moreover, there’s a risk of wasting fieldwork opportunities without an experienced, independent moderator who knows how to get the right insights.
• Sourcing genuine B2B decision-makers: Then there are the challenges associated with finding the right B2B respondents in the first place, which we’ll come to shortly. And knowing how to incentivize B2B decision-makers to take part in research is not straightforward either – compensation can be high, but so-called ‘soft’ incentives often work well too.
• Analyzing and sharing the results: Experienced researchers specializing in different B2B industries know how to draw accurate conclusions and actionable recommendations from vast amounts of data. They should also know how to present the research findings to senior stakeholders in a way that’s easy to understand and useful, then help them with the next steps of acting on the information.

We recently attended the MRS B2B conference – our overall takeaway was that the future outlook is very bright for B2B research. But there are several long-term trends that are key to keeping B2B market research firms effective and relevant for their clients.

In particular – sourcing genuine, senior, B2B research participants is crucial to get insights that help businesses grow. The problem with B2B research panels is only very few tend to have real decision-makers on them.

The best B2B market research firms use social platforms like LinkedIn and more personal interviewing techniques such as CATI to secure the right respondents.

Best practices: choosing a B2B market research firm

#1 Evaluate their expertise in your B2B sector

To get answers you can trust, your research partner needs to understand your business and how things work in its sector.

Otherwise, there’s a risk their researchers will make too many generalizations, resulting in some vague or non-specific answers at the presentation stage.

For example, if the researchers aren’t familiar enough with your industry, then the questions they put in the topic guide or questionnaire may be too broad.

Therefore, take care to choose a market research agency with expertise in your sector and specialized knowledge so that their team understands the topics. This is particularly important for complex and niche markets.

#2 Review their references and track record

There should be references listed on their website from satisfied clients and perhaps some case studies of work for clients in your sector.

If not, ask for these. They may not be allowed to write about them publicly on their website but when asked, the market research agency should be able to provide some.

Also, check that the firm is in an independent directory for verified market research firms such as the MRS or ESOMAR.

#3 Analyze their use of research methodologies

If a market research agency does both quantitative and qualitative research then they should have the means to answer your business questions with surveys, online focus groups, interviews, and so on.

Other useful methodologies include secondary research and also social media listening.

However, there are different types of quantitative and qualitative research techniques you may need. Check that the market research agency has the means in place to get the results you need.

For example, your objectives may need statistical or trade-off analysis to get accurate answers if direct questioning is unlikely to provide the answers you need.

#4 Assess their communication and collaboration styles

At many market research agencies, once the project starts, that’s when their communication can drop off. Some try to spend as few hours on the project as possible, to make their work more efficient and profitable based on their timesheet data.

The risk is that they’ll leave you out of the loop on important details until the results are ready – but if the results don’t meet your needs, it may be too late to do much about it by then.

If you haven’t worked with the market research agency before, of course, it’s hard to know in advance how well they’ll communicate during the project. However, at the proposal stage, you could insist on some or all of the following, depending on your preferences:

• Kick-off workshop
• Stakeholder interviews
• Weekly update calls or emails
• Interim analysis updates
• Review calls at key milestones

See how they respond and be wary if they push back.

In terms of collaborating, if your end goal involves something creative, you may want to be involved in the market research agency’s analysis process. Ask upfront if they’re happy to include you and consider other options if they say no.

#5 Ask about their research tools, techniques, and technology

To get the most accurate results, market research firms should use tools and technology to extract important, hidden insights.

For example, we use several smart tools on our projects including ‘in the moment’ data capture, data science, A/B testing, projective techniques, and more.

Research agencies should tell you about the tools and technology they’re planning to use as part of their proposal – and why. But be wary of any market research agency focusing more on the tools and technology they’re planning to use rather than the results or outcomes they’ll achieve.

Watch out for res-tech providers that use expensive technology just for the sake of it, or consultants charging high rates when they’re planning to use AI to automate the work.

#6 Check their pricing to access genuine B2B decision-makers

Cost will likely play a part in your decision when choosing a B2B market research firm. Just make sure that any attempts to save money don’t affect the quality of the data you need.

If a market research company says they can get C-suite decision-makers at large businesses to take part in a study for $10 each, watch out. We know of companies doing this and it’s completely unrealistic – we’ve seen the data this approach produces and the respondents aren’t real B2B decision-makers.

Also, aside from recruitment costs, some firms will have set fees that they charge for standardized projects. They’re less likely to offer flexibility to suit your budget if it’s limited.

In contrast, all our projects are bespoke and tailored. We can customize the work to meet different budgets and we also offer flexible pricing options e.g. on a modular basis.

For more of our market research agency hiring guidelines, read our full article on the subject.