How to do Market Research: A Step by Step Guide

welcome to the SBI podcast offering CEOs sales and marketing leaders ideas to make the number welcome SBI podcast listeners and video podcast viewers my name is Eric strap and here's my good buddy and colleague Dan Perry we are with SBI a sales and marketing consultancy dedicated to helping you make your number on this web show an audio podcast we were featured we will feature topics and tutorials that will help you make your number by tuning in you can leverage emerging best practices and receive how-to instruction on some of the most prevalent go to market problems in that exists in today's complex selling world Eric we get a lot of questions surround this as well two questions like did you ever wonder why some companies make their number every year and some struggle with consistent performance companies come to us every day and ask for help to get more consistency in making their number but most don't even know where to start and it starts with strategic alignment but let's first define strategic alignment strategic alignment begins with a clear understanding of the corporate strategy followed by grasp of the interdependencies among the various functional strategies to truly be strategically aligned you must link these internal strategies with external market conditions and Eric's is proven to be difficult and we found that 91% of companies are misaligned and the main reason is the realization that companies really have tactics masquerading a strategy this results in a lot of waste or as we define it as thrashing tons of work with little productivity gains yep so obviously if it was easy everybody would do it and that's why only 9 percent actually get there so on today's show we're going to discuss the importance of how to the importance of market research and how to conduct it in your organization let's start with simple definition right so market research provides a deep understanding of the markets accounts buyers and users that you or the organization sells to right it helps you differentiate your strategy from your competition prioritize your accounts align your strategy with buyer needs and address user problems with your products as a result you can bring your strategy into alignment with the external market yeah if you don't start with the market then you're really already out of out of alignment the process starts with market research the market will inform your corporate strategy in your corporate strategy will inform your functional strategies this visual purposely despit if one of those links is faulty or doesn't even exist then the chain breaks as does the alignment of your strategies yep so it's the first link on the chain right yeah so before he get into corporate and the remaining functional strategies so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with defining the questions that you need to be answered in your market research you need to start with that objective right so you have to answer this what are the inputs you need to develop your corporate product marketing sales and talent strategy remember strategy is the allocation of people time and money so if you start there you know what the objectives of your market research are yeah sounds good Eric so let's go into those of those four main points of market research and this is really on the on the how we conduct market research so there's four phases and you see on screen a graphic that shows these four phases the first phase is market segmentation and this is defined as the broad target market into subsets of buyers who have common needs priorities and solution options second Eric is account segmentation understand which accounts in your market are going to generate the most revenue over the shortest period of time buyer segmentation is a third phase of market research understand how buyers in your accounts make purchase decisions and then finally at the core right is user segmentation mostly skipped by companies now the user segmentation understand the market problems that exist for users in your accounts yeah then I love the purposeful distinction between buyer and user segmentation right because there's a big difference there too huge yeah so if I'm thinking about again the objectives and what I need to obtain from our market research I should start with the market itself right if I'm trying to segment the market I should be answering the following questions right so how big is our market and what is the growth rate seems fairly obvious right you're understanding what the out you know total potential is yeah you know I've noticed most companies typically have some sort of data on this yeah a lot of it can be obtained from third-party companies and secondary research like IDC Gartner so on and so forth we'll get to that here in a second but just knowing what the size of the sandbox is that you're gonna be playing and is obviously crucial so what industry trends are unfolding in our market right we talked before in a previous show about blackberry rim you know not necessarily understanding the market conditions and how those were changing right that was an industry trend on smartphones right so that's something that they should have been identified via market research yeah so what are the needs of the market and how are they changing similar to the trends right so what are the needs and it's a constant year to the ground we'll talk about a little bit about in later in the show about why you should do this iteratively and constantly over the over the period of time so what should our go-to-market strategy be for each product or solution the key word there is each right so we may actually have a different go to market strategy for different products why because they're likely to different user problems to different buyers or buyer decision teams if you will New York what is it go to market strategy that name gets thrown around all the time so let's define what go to market means yeah in a very simple term right it's just how we create demand and sell our solutions right so there are certain products that you might have a freemium type of model right you know so you know if you're a software product download a try for free and then buy a subscription later on if you're selling a big enterprise product or solution it's likely not going to work in a freemium basis so you're selling it in creating demand to a certain buyer set yeah so market research I mean it's critical you can't really develop a go to market without the market research right yeah if you don't know what your how your buyers buy or what user problems you're identifying and that's obviously yeah so I challenge everybody our audience have you done market research before you figure out your go to market and I bet some of you haven't yeah go to market like literally a go to market strategy could be not to have a sales force on that's down that freemium model why would you have a sales force you don't need them right it's a marketing strategy it's a product strategy and so how do my competitors go to market seems fairly straightforward right we talk about how do they win do they win on product they went on price do they went on customer intimacy we don't know what we don't want to do is be the same right we don't want to be me too so knowing how they go to market is crucial as part of the market research what are our competitive strengths and weaknesses fairly obvious right what are opportunities threats in the market again fairly obvious understanding what it is that how we can go and win and for our solution what are the lifecycle stages of adoption of our buyers and users so talk to me about that I lifecycle stages of adoption what does that mean yep so when I think about it from a product context right you think of Geoffrey Moore's crossing the chasm you have early adopters you have people that have actually had late adoption where's your products that within that right you know is it a brand new solution that nobody knows about and you're actually having to have an evangelical marketing and sales process or is it something that could be go you know turn and burn off the shelves from like an inside sales model right so knowing and understanding where you're plotting on that is absolutely crucial it's a big word for you evangelical that's everyone's my best amount exactly all right so Eric let's move on to accounts within the market when doing that your objective should be to answer the following questions what's our ideal customer profile and you know what defines this ideal customer and end prospect and we answer that in a segment as well as I mentioned earlier that that's a critical question and can have ramifications throughout your entire strategy that argue if you don't have this clearly defined and what I mean to find it's not just a hey I know it it's just sitting here up here and tribal knowledge right is it actually written down is it documented and is there math behind it right so where's the science how do you know it's ideal if you haven't actually done the exercise of what we call account segmentation and prioritization sort of take that further right the next question I would ask is how does each customer prospect score relative to the ideal customer profile this would mean then you actually have it written down an equation behind that and then somewhere you house that data like a CRM tool right that can be used at for day-to-day operations it's totally good right so that's a score next one that we have here is what's the potential spend for each audio prospect or customer so potential spend is huge - right that goes into not only we score - IDIC people what's the spend - the ICP yeah it's totally great so if you know if you think about it in simplest terms right if I have an account that looks and smells and tastes like a very very good customer and the prospect is similar right shouldn't we expect to get something comparable from that type of prospect the answer is likely yes but again there's math and science that goes beneath that yeah so that that's all in the episode that we have about ideal customer profile you should check this out because we answer all these questions in here to move along what's the cost to acquire each customer and then what's the lifetime value of each customer again you want a lower cost to acquire a higher lifetime value makes sense what's the ratio between those two and we do answer that question in another episode that's important then market resource answers these questions for you or gives you the information and the data to answer these questions and finally what's the propensity to buy for each prospect and customers what's the likelihood of them buying with us versus some buying some something else yep so every night so as you can see this is heavily Qantas and not easy to do but just 100% mandatory when conducting market research and we've seen companies not do this they take a break they kind of really actually don't even do it fully to the extent it should be done and then they get bad data and what is bad data Lee Taric that output yeah absolutely thanks Dan so we're gonna take a quick commercial break but stick around because on when we come back we're gonna show you what the best methods are to gather insights for each one of these phases that we just talked about each day you receive hundreds of emails tons of text messages countless telephone calls and sit in too many meetings how do you find ideas to make the number with all this noise the SBI blog filters all this nonsense for you and presents only first-rate ideas to make the number simplify your life subscribe to one blog and read the best content go to salesbenchmarkindex.com and subscribe today welcome back I'm Eric Estrella and this is my buddy Dan Perry we're with SPI today we're trying to help you make your 2016 number by demonstrating how to develop a market research methodology before the break we discussed the four phases that need answering in this segment we will show you how and what methods you should conduct to gather that intelligence yep so Eric the first step in the process is to identify someone who's accountable to the process remember if it's everybody's responsibility or accountability then no one owns it and in addition you can't rely solely on secondary research from research firms such as forest or Gardner or not ICI fantastic sources of data provide a lot of insight on the market but you cannot hang your entire market research process on those single data points you need to be more specific to your customers prospects etc and this is what we call primary research now accountability I want to come back to that right yep you've gotta have someone in your company who owns the market research who in a company Eric would you give an example or best practice that would do this yeah I think larger companies have what you would call chief strategy officer that typically owns something like this smaller companies you might have your CMO VP of Marketing own market research so it's you know time somewhat irrelevant we don't really care as long as it actually gets done and somebody is responsible and accountable responsible for conducting it accountable ensuring that it makes it actually gets happy yeah so I am you know it's interesting those you can't cheat so you can't just do secondary research right you've in Gardner and IDC you got to do the primary research and what I found is that those organizations stay cheap they don't actually in a very regular basis do the primary research and then what happens in-depth like black blackberry yeah completely out of alignment right if you're not doing yourself then you know no so perfect segue damn thank you so what else should you be doing right so you should be doing customer prospect employee and competitive research right so I said a lot there we're gonna show you how to do that here in a second right so what programs should you have place to ensure alignment in the market right these may simple be seem simple but according to SBI's research only 9% of companies have achieved full alignment internally and to the market right most companies are not fully aligned and that that alignment gap is typically within what to the market as well got it so let's take each one of those since you mentioned right customer prospect employing competitive its customer research so most companies have some type of customer satisfaction of data intelligence executive mapping under your key accounts will also help you get gather good good you know customer research sharing of product roadmaps and OEM relationships sales interactions or maybe a dialogue day in the life of with a sales professional so what what's that what's a day in the life of yeah that's really riding spending time in the field with a sales professional from warning to late afternoon or evening and why is that important selling time is just as important sometimes as non selling time and so obviously when we see a customer at selling time we get great market data market research from that but we also during non selling time learn the idiosyncrasies of the sales rep what does this mean is that what are they doing every single day what are they learning in the market how are they prospecting what's working and networking it's an example of great market research and customer research as well - yeah so in the context of what it is a retirement which is customer and prospect research we can see how those guys are interacting right how the customers and prospects are responding to the things that our sales organization is doing the messaging the products so on and so forth so those insights are invaluable they are invaluable another way to do this is buyer and user persona interviews now our persona is a representation of a buyer right and these interviews will address in a more we'll go through these in a second right but the list can go on so let's not lose sight of the goal here right user buyer an account segmentation obtaining insights that will allow us to segment each within the markets we play in is paramount tip so that's you covered customer segmentation so I'm gonna get into a little bit more detail on the prospect research okay right so what's one of the first methods win-loss interviews it's a great source of data why because you really find out more about your alignment to the market there then even then you will anywhere else right if you think about it right so what you're trying not to do is have a conversation on features and benefits of your product that's really about identifying where the alignment result resides so are we solving the prospects customers or prospects problems right if we if we lost a deal that's a pretty good indication that we we fell down somewhere right so it's identifying what that looks like so you should be asking questions about the buyer you know in the in these different stages of his or her buying process and then map those to your marketing and sales processes did we not truly understand stand the buyers of the solution or better yet the impact in the entire buying decision team right the reason of recent research has come out to say buying decision teams are about five point four people now that's pretty high yeah and we learned from this research as well too that consensus building is critical so that you know it's a different topic right but you learn from this prospect research on how your sales people can change the way their quote-unquote selling to the buying process by really understanding the prospect right so in that post-mortem win-loss interview is critical especially on the losses right yeah so second method you'd be thinking about would would be social listening so are you hanging out so to speak on social media where your customers and prospects are hanging out right what are they saying what industry forms do they belong to are they in leaked in groups you know these are the things that the marketing team or somebody that's accountable for market research should or could be doing right now cuz its user user problems remember one of our recent customers did some social listening and they found out that Instagram is becoming more prevalent in their business where they're now posting pictures and attracting people to to their business through you know active demand that's an example that they'd never used just six months ago so why would I care us that so what would I change as a result of finding that out yeah so what what you want to change is the way your sales people prospect and by incorporating maybe Instagram if it's relevant into your social reach programs you can increase the number of active leads that come into you because Instagram is a is definitely a source that you pull in leads so it's active demand it's an awareness type of type of technique and then I'll increase the number of coldly qualified leads as well too yeah so if I think about an alignment standpoint on marketing right if I look at my marketing budget and I say all right hey Instagram is hot for us right now yet I have zero dollars in my social media marketing budget what do I need to do right allocation of people time and money I need to get I need to get dollars into that bucket right and then now you actually have proof that that is a valuable way to spend those dollars why you've got to continue to do this market research you can't lay office things oh look yeah so Dan we talked about customer prospect research and you you mentioned dial us right so sales interactions your sales reps are gonna are going on let's call it ten calls per week right so how you obtaining insights from customers and prospects there there's potentially thousands of interactions which you couldn't then incorporate into your market research process right again buyer user persona interviews are one of the best ways to stay aligned dan can you explain to us what a persona is yeah I can I mentioned it's a little bit earlier but straightforward is a representation of the buyers and users you interact with within the accounts in your market by developing a persona you'll be able to better understand your buyers objectives obstacles challenges strategic initiatives key performance indicators etc right you will also develop what we call a buyer process map this is the de journey that your buyer goes through when making buying decisions can you give us a little bit more detail there yeah of course these are the stages the buyer goes through now these stages typically have exit criteria or sometimes called verifiable outcomes so what is his exit criteria it's something that the buyer demonstrates to let you know that he or she is ready for the next stage in the process in addition to that it would include what are called micro questions so what are those they are the questions that your buyer is asking themselves throughout and in every stage of the buying journey it's almost Eric like there's asking questions in their head all right so what would be examples of those right I'm sure our audience would like to know what it is let's say your buyers a CIO chief information officer right and in the buyer is buying technology and is what we call in the stimulated stage which in an early stage of a buying journey what types of questions would they be asking you well since they aren't stimulated usually some type of trigger event has happened so they're probably asking them questions like how do I prevent another data breach what are the best practices for security protocol how will this affect me and should I care those are questions that in in the CIOs head is asking them it selves that's great buyer insight because then you can really use that know how to use it number different ways right you can actually use it through understanding how to market to the buyer so if you start answering the questions that CIO is asking himself through content whether that's marketing and/or your salespeople you know early stage buying that I'll be able to then to what position your services or solution in a much more formidable way and be able to influence early stage buying and solution perfect yeah yeah if I think about it right so a lot of companies come up against do-nothing versus losing to their competitors a lot right so if you're in those early stages and you understand what the buyer is thinking and you're actually you know developing the fact that okay I need to solve their problem and I'm excuse me they need to say I need to solve my problem right and I can't do it by doing it myself and you're halfway through the battle well look at the product write the product roadmap could include answers to those questions as well - and can the products solve that those those are solved answer those questions right and if they can do that then you can really go all the way through marketing sales and then eventually your talent strategy if you think about corporate strategy alignment cool alright so Dan for audience by creating buyer personas and buyer process Maps you're answering the following questions which are which are critical to conducting market research right who are buyers right who makes a decision when buying our solution what do our buyers care about right we kind of talked about the objectives obstacles challenges what keeps them up at night how they're measured you know they care about how they're measured right it's an outward in view on the market right how do our buyers how do our buyers make purchase decisions so you you outlined a BPM for us a buyer process map that's how they make their decisions right and what do our buyers value when engaging with our team again this is now saying okay well how can I be different right how do I know them better than they know themselves and lastly what must our team be best in class in to succeed in our industry right so again we understand them better than they know them then they understand themselves I think that last sentence is the key yeah yep gotta understand them better they understand themselves so you talked a little bit about user personas and you talked about product right so tell me how product and user personas you know so well one how are user personas different than buyer personas and then how does the product integrate with these user personas yeah so user personas are very similar but the obvious distinction is that the buyer persona is typically part of the buying decision team that makes a purchase decision for your product or solution the user is the individual that will directly benefit or actually use the product or solution common sense right essentially your product solution solves the market problems that the user persona experiences every day and the key delineation by creating the user persona you are answering the following questions just like the buyers who are our users what are the users trying to get done Saul what's problems trying to solve what prevents our users from completing their job what alternative solutions exists for users to address their needs what do our users value when engaging with our team what must our products be best-in-class to succeed in our industry right so the lonely if I just connect this to right so a user has the market problem right and our product should be you know solving that market problem because if one doesn't exist those users don't exist and we don't really even have the product now you asked about product right he just mentioned this so that's where I think that the product team really can value more than he did buyer persona user personas so I guarantee this and most of our audience probably don't have the product team creating user personas today right which they really should be doing you know so that's certainly a best practice absolutely okay it's time for another short commercial break but don't go anywhere because on the other side of this break we're gonna talk about incorporating competitive intelligence and employee feedback into your market research so don't go away you are watching SBI TV this is a monthly Web TV show featuring guests just like you executives trying to grow their revenues each month you can peek behind the scenes and watch your peers discuss their strategies for how they make their numbers you are not going to want to miss this welcome back everyone I'm Eric Estrella it's my buddy Dan Perry right here we're with SBI today we're trying to help you make your 2016 number by demonstrating how to align your corporate and functional strategies to the market by conducting primary market research so before the break we walk through how you would conduct research within your customer and prospect base the other lens you would should be looking at are in the competitive lens and the employee lens all right Eric let's discuss employee feedback why the employees technically they are internal resources but often you will find men have been in many have been in your industry for a number of years many have likely worked for a competitor so you can obtain market insights and competitive intelligence of course ethically right by tapping into your employees knowledge they may have worked in markets you are trying to penetrate but don't discount employees that have worked in two other industries that could implement emerging best practices into your company so an example would be an employee that worked for a SAS technology software as a service that is suggestions on how to optimize a customer engagement in a services company or maybe vice-versa right the point is you will often find yourself conducting emerging best practices if you are doing something new or different so II there are multiple ways of obtaining feedback we talked about survey interviews team Huddle's die glows discussions focus groups the key takeaways that you look internally to your employees to obtain market feedback as well so let me give you a quick example so one of the best companies I've ever seen when obtaining market feedback asked three very simple questions what do you start and stop and keep doing as an organization right so you'll find that just by asking those very easy open-ended questions you'll get an inordinate of feedback that is relevant to your organization stay in alignment with the market yeah it's pretty impactful absolutely so last but not least is competitive intelligence right the reasons are obvious so what are their strategies how do they win do they went on product customer experience on price right so the list goes on so what are the methods to to actually do this right so conduct mystery shops so this will give you insight and competitors on how they market and sell no wait wait a minute no time out yep I get this FAQ of a mystery shop right and but how would you do this how do you pull this off because it seems complex that's why probably doesn't happen a lot yeah it could be as simple as just a forum phone on the website right how do they market to you you know what is their nurture path look like there are different things like that obviously we're not gonna do anything unethical but you can just get publicly public information from your competitors and just derive insights from it right yeah so in a sense one of the ways to do this is go on a website form fill yeah right and see what kind of response you get totally who calls you back right so think about that what content do they give you who calls you back how quick do they call you back you know do they suit you an email you can find a lot about information about your competitors just by getting very simple data points just like that it has a pretty tackle right yeah so we talked earlier about win-loss interviews them the importance of each right so understanding why a buyer you know may have chosen your competitive solution is critical right secondary market research firm such as Gartner IDC Forrester we talked a little bit about those early on they have a wealth of information about your competitors that's publicly held information that is not unethical to obtain right and then lastly is Intel from employees and partners again only have done ethically so let me ask you this question Dan so we kind of talked about a little bit earlier how often should we be conducting market research yeah we mention it consistently yeah right it's absolutely critical that you do this on a regular cadence and cadence really means a rhythm to it right so let me just think about this so market research is not an event right so it should just be the methodology that you should follow is constant a constant ear to the ground you know because that continuous feedback loop is going to be critical for you to understand this right think about your buyer and user personas how often you're doing those interviews right this should be monthly at least right because how would you know if your buyers are users or changing if you're not constantly engaging you know Aaron made me think about when we started this conversation right have someone own it that was accountable for it and if you do that then in their job description they have to go ahead and conduct market research on a regular basis so remember the goal alignment to the market that starts with the market research phase by conducting the different research methods you can effectively achieve user buyer account and market segmentation by customer research to ensure your strategy's aligned your customers prospect research to ensure your strategy line to your prospects employee research to ensure employ your employees are aligned to your strategy and the market that's critical and nevertheless competitive research right to ensure your strategy is different than your competitors yep so Dan unfortunately we are out of time on today's episode but we would like to thank you our viewers for tuning in if you enjoyed this show I suggest you subscribe to SBI TV at salesbenchmarkindex.com slash TV or you can find us on our SBI YouTube channel we have some outstanding content coming in future episodes that you will not want to miss so until then Dan and I wish you the best of luck as you try to make your number this has been the FBI podcast for more information on SBI services case studies the SBI team and how we work or to subscribe to our other offerings please visit us at salesbenchmarkindex.com

Channel: SBI Insider: Video Podcast

Views: 45,596

Rating: 4.8345642 out of 5

Keywords: market research, how to do market research, how to conduct market research, sales and marketing, sales, marketing, market segmentation, strategic alignment, sales benchmark index, SBI

Id: ueymbw6-48M

Length: 33min 7sec (1987 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 28 2016