Releasing a product without conducting B2B market research is like jumping head-first into a pool without making sure it’s filled with water. We know you know that market research is an essential process that helps you understand current market needs and fine-tune market positioning accordingly. It helps defend and improve a company’s market position, build solid relationships with customers and partners, and ultimately increase profit margins.

What B2B Market Research Can Do for Your Business

Customer insight: Speaking with customers to learn about their needs and pain points will let you know if you should keep working on your product and steer your development team towards specific features and capabilities.

Acquisition cost: Knowing how much it would cost to acquire a new user helps plan an accurate budget and define campaign goals to guarantee that each user remains relevant for the long run.

Customer LTV: Speaking of the long run, lifetime value is a critical parameter based on the span of your business relationships. Loyal users can reduce marketing costs, and your B2B market research will let you know what to expect.

Trends: Market research can help you spot current and upcoming shifts to stay in the lead. For example, if your B2B company approaches sales teams, consider that 70% of salespeople currently engage in virtual sales around 50% of the time.

New opportunities: In addition to trends, keep an eye out for options that have almost slipped under your radar. Add trends, examine other markets, and research to maximize the opportunity.

Adapting to changes: Everything is subject to change, and B2B market research helps you prepare and adjust accordingly. Without the direct connection with target audiences, you risk building something that would have been a hit a couple of years ago.

Frequently Asked Questions

B2B Market Research Methodologies Need to Step Up

B2B research methodologies have been slow to transform and keep up with the digital times. While Product Marketers and Market Researchers are all living and working online, their tools for conducting research are fragmented and still mostly manual.

What do we mean by that?

Fragmentation of tools: Research teams should not have to juggle countless platforms and tools to achieve their goals, risking compromised data and inability to collaborate with colleagues working on the same projects. Cohesive results demand a comprehensive solution that covers the entire process, from A to Z. For example, conducting a survey is a process that includes, locating relevant participants, building the survey, gathering feedback through qualitative and quantitative surveys and interviews over time, and more. Each step typically requires dedicated tools and moving this data from one tool to another overcomplicates the process, risking the quality of results. The fragmentation also demands manual grunt work that sucks up a lot of time in order to integrate the data and to analyze it.

Work from home challenges: Almost 70% of companies have adopted hybrid work models that include remote communication. Market research platforms should be adapting to this global change and offer new ways to tackle tasks without meeting in person. Customer interviews are a great example, and any market research platform businesses choose must offer easy, user-friendly solutions that fit remote interviews. Otherwise, companies might neglect to conduct follow-up interviews to collect necessary feedback following market changes and product updates.

Respondents’ reliability: As explained above. It’s 2022, you’d expect manual procedures to play a small role in B2B market research, but that’s not the case. Locating relevant survey respondents, gathering reliable feedback, offering quick follow-ups and feedback, and more are still mostly manual processes. Again, this is a huge time sinker and interviewers are often not secure with the knowledge that they are receiving feedback from a reliable source. Market research platforms should enable transparency and reliability on both ends and monitor interviewers’ and respondents’ actions.

Accelerated B2B growth: While it’s terrific to see B2B industries grow at a rapid pace, not all market research platforms can keep up with the volume of information. More data is generated, markets become more complex, and companies have greater goals to reach. Some platforms fail to offer adequate coverage for these needs. In addition, let’s not forget that B2B market research is an ongoing process in the business life-cycle. The research platform should be ready to grow together with customers as they advance, answering both early product requirements and mature ones.

Making B2B Market Research Easy the Vancery Way

We’ve created Vancery to become the B2B market research platform we never had but wish we did. Our goal is to make market research more manageable and accurate by addressing the above issues and offering much-needed advantages. Vancery’s end-to-end platform covers all B2B market research needs, including planning, gathering, and crunching the data.

Participant recruitment and validation: Knowing you can rely on a platform to find the most relevant survey respondents is invaluable. Vancery has over 100,000 industry professionals from all sectors of business to recruit for your research. We cover this part of the process to ensure the best possible results for the least amount of effort on your end. Every participant is carefully chosen and thoroughly validated by Vancery’s B2B market research experts. Want to speak to a specific respondent? No problem. We provide his/her professional link and contact information.

Automation: Many market research tasks can be automated to save time and trouble. Vancery offers built-in automation capabilities that quickly move relevant automation data from one step to the next.

All-in-one platform: We’ve mentioned how problematic fragmentation can be, and our goal is to replace the broken process with a comprehensive approach. Covering all the bases and giving companies a B2B market research solution that considers the big picture is at the center of everything we do. This includes creating a smooth transition between quantitative and qualitative research, combining both into a single workflow that makes perfect sense.

Vancery provides one platform with better tools for better research: Plan and conduct surveys, interviews (with or without video), and messaging. Gather all data, analyze and report it. This makes ongoing and periodic surveys, spotting changes in customer preferences, and keeping your product market research up to date on the latest trends and demands, a whole lot easier.

Collaborating with colleagues: B2B Market research becomes much more effective when tools enable collaboration between team members and across the organization. This helps share knowledge, keep everyone on the same page, and use relevant data in multiple ways. Collaboration features are essential because they ensure that the team is centered around the market and focused on customer needs.

We know that the quicker you gather, integrate, and analyze customer research insights, the faster you’re able to perfect and ship products and achieve product-market fit and business success. Finally, there’s a platform that suits current market research methodologies.

We hope that this article helps you ask the right questions, seek the right solutions, and find them all in one place, with Vancery.