Specialist B2B Research
The most powerful B2B propositions revolve around being able to succinctly answer this core question:
“Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”.
In order to be truly powerful, we believe that your proposition needs to satisfy three key criteria, namely:
- Relevance to the buyer: if you are not solving for genuine need then you are wasting your time and that of your buyer
- Distinctiveness from your competitors: you can only hope to be chosen ahead of the competition if you stand out from - rather than blend in with – what they are claiming
- Credibility: B2B buyers don’t purchase on a whim. If your proposition isn’t demonstrably credible it will never get past the buyer committee, no matter how big the claim
Relevance comes from understanding the end-client: what their most important challenges are, and where they place the most value in a solution.
Distinctiveness comes from understanding the competition: how they present themselves, and what they claim for themselves (and also where they are letting their existing clients down).
Credibility comes from truly understanding the product or service itself and being able to evidence exactly how it solves the client’s problem in a relevant and distinctive way.
At Graystone Strategy, we can design bespoke market research programmes that help you uncover core propositions that meet each of these relevant, distinctive, credible criteria – and help you understand where best to deploy them to maximum commercial effect.
We can use a blend of Qualitative, Quantitative and Desk research to uncover:
- Your own Ideal Customer Profile: what business types / personas / sectors have the strongest need for a relevant, distinctive, credible solution
- The five stages your ICP goes through when making a purchase in your market:
- Problem Awareness – what issues trigger their search?
- Information Search – where do they look for solutions?
- Alternative Evaluation – what key criteria do the buyers look for?
- Decision – which personas make the purchase decision?
- Post-purchase review – do they think they made the right choice?
We can then use this research to help recommend which relevant, distinctive, credible propositions to put in front of which buyer types, at which stages in above the purchase process, and through what media.
This in turn helps you maximise relevant leads at the top of your funnel and minimise the fall-out as prospects are guided down the funnel to purchase.
One particularly insightful output from this research framework is being able to identify which of your competitors have the least satisfied clients, and why. This gives your Sales Managers a powerful insight into which competitors’ clients can be poached most easily, and how.
(We can also research your own customer sentiment to help protect you against aggressive sales approaches from your competitors).
As a result:
- Sales improve – through tailoring better solutions to meet identified need
- Margins improve – through evidencing the commercial value of your solution, rather than resorting to discounting to close
- Marketing efficiency improves - through optimisation of proposition development and channel selection, and minimisation of marketing wastage
- Customer retention improves – through identification and negation of comparative service weakness
And so profit improves.
If you have a B2B marketing challenge where powerful market insights could give you an edge over your competition, please get in touch.
We project manage the entire research process from initial brief to final report.
We can conduct quantitative or qualitative or desk research - whatever discipline your project requires.
We can source quantitative respondents in almost any country, in almost any vertical, in almost any language.
Same for qualitative research respondents (other than that we usually conduct qualitative interviews in business English).
Quantitative sample sizes usually start at 100. The max sample size is only limited by the size of the attainable research universe.
We don't take on any brief without first confirming to you that the personas you wish to survey can be reached in the quantity required and the time allowed, so you can be certain we can deliver on your needs.