At first blush, it might seem that conducting business-to-business qualitative research is the same as conducting consumer qualitative. After all, recruiting is recruiting, logistics are logistics, and respondents are respondents, right? Not so!
The world of business-to-business interviewing is unique, with particular issues that require a seasoned interviewer or moderator, strong recruiters, and lots of flexibility.
To begin with, you need a plan, says Peter Brandt, former director of small business marketing for NYNEX (one of the regional Bell operating companies, recently merged with Bell Atlantic). Now a marketing consultant, Brandt says that NYNEX decided it couldn’t continue to deal with its business customers on a large, medium and small basis. "We needed a more segmented market approach," he says. So NYNEX started with qualitative research to uncover common business customers’ needs and wants.
What did NYNEX find out about business customers? The same things that many other companies have found. Other than among the very largest businesses, which typically had assigned account representatives, business customers felt neglected on one hand and marketed to death on the other, mostly by direct mail and by telemarketing, both interruptions in their business day. Companies hawked their products to these businesses rather than offering business-focused solutions designed to help them compete more successfully.
NYNEX used what it heard in the customers’ firsthand accounts and developed a small-business market center focused on helping these businesses be more profitable. Ultimately, this meant more sales to NYNEX, but it started with the appreciation of the customer needs that were voiced in qualitative research. "To a person, the customers were astounded and delighted that for once we did more than just send them a bill," says Brandt.
Good qualitative research can help to flip subsequent quantitative research on its head, so that it has an outside-in, not inside-out, perspective.
Act on what they hear
Senior management buy-in is also very important to the business-to-business qualitative process, says Jim Lagowski, former marketing director of the non-manufacturing segment for Detroit Edison, which conducted numerous focus groups with its business customers. Senior management needs to support doing the interviews, because they need "to agree in their heart to act on what they hear the customer saying," Lagowski says.
And they have to be open to acting on both the good news and the bad. One danger of qualitative research is listening to customer comments that reflect good news and rejecting negative comments as rare exceptions. If you tend to hear the same bad news across a broad range of your qualitative research, something’s wrong. Further evaluation in follow-up quantitative research may be necessary.
Need a focus
Some consideration is necessary before you decide to target customers of every size. Given business customers’ diversity in terms of SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes, how you reach them and what you ask them once you have them on the phone can be costly and time consuming if you don’t have a focus. That’s where qualitative research fits in best.
Good qualitative research steers the overall research effort and helps the researcher formulate a tighter - and therefore less lengthy and expensive - quantitative survey. "The qualitative research up front is what allows you to narrow your perspective onto the critical issues," in the quantitative phase, says Wayne Piper, a telecommunications consultant.
Piper, who previously directed marketing of high-end business-to-business data technologies at Ameritech (another regional Bell company), says that years ago, "The business-to-business research involved finding one or two valuable business customers, installing a beta version of the technology at their location, and then doing post-conversion interviews."
Unfortunately, this approach did not replicate the real world. "No one honestly displayed those services in a contextual environment, where the customer actually had to install it, make it work with everything else in their business, and really, honestly, evaluate it holistically. That was the fault of the research," Piper says.
This kind of mentality, which affects businesses across a broad spectrum of industries, is based upon the premise of "Build it and they will buy," or "We know what our customers want." Go ask them what they want. You might be surprised by the answer.
Why qualitative?
Once a company overcomes the idea that it doesn’t need research to know what its business customers are thinking, the next hurdle is "Why qualitative?" To some, one-on-one interviews and focus groups are too "soft and fuzzy" to be actionable. This can be particularly true in organizations that are run by engineers, CFOs and other numbers-oriented individuals.
Jeffrey Lange, now a professor at Cleveland State University, was the market research coordinator at Centerior Energy (now FirstEnergy) in Ohio. Lange puts the value of qualitative business-to-business research in this context: "Qualitative research is very valuable in terms of being surprised in a structured way. When you do quantitative research, it’s like being an attorney in a courtroom: you don’t want to get any answers that you don’t already know. In qualitative research, you’re open to new ideas, new expressions, new answers and to open up new avenues of inquiry."
Bob Bohle, president of a St. Louis research firm, has conducted thousands of one-on-one interviews and focus groups with business customers since 1984. "Business-to-business qualitative research can be more important than it is for consumer research. I think there are more levels of criteria that people apply to the decision-making process in business."
The more complex the issues or decision-making process, Bohle suggests, the more qualitative research should be conducted first.
In-person interviews or focus groups?
What kind of qualitative should you do? "Look at the kind of research you are doing," Piper says. "Are you really after strategic, directional, blue sky research? If you have a focused concept, then a focus group is fine. One-on-ones evoke more thoughtful, deliberative answers about broad strategic issues."
"Focus groups give you scope, primarily because you have interaction between respondents, whereas one-on-ones give you a better handle on an individual’s beliefs vis-a-vis their particular industry," Bohle adds.
Conducting dyad or triad interviews - that is, with two or three interview participants - can be enlightening, Lagowski says. "Interviewing different people with different backgrounds, you learn more than with one person. When you have more than one interviewer or participant, I think the quality of the interview rises," he says. A multi-person interview can, in microcosm, represent that company’s decision-making process.
Location, location, location
Regarding the location of an in-person interview, the more senior the individual, the more you should lean toward interviewing them in their office, Piper says. "If you’re after middle management, no problem bringing them to a facility."
"The customer premises is probably least desirable from the researcher’s point of view and most desirable from the interviewee’s point of view," adds NYNEX’s Peter Brandt.
Some of the pros and cons of conducting in-person interviews on the participant’s premises are:
Pros
- The participant is more comfortable on his or her own turf.
- They may take more time with the interviewer, perhaps even bringing others into the conversation if needed.
- They can show the interviewer their facility and business process, which may help to illustrate a point.
Cons
- The interview may be interrupted or even terminated if more pressing business occurs; last-minute cancellations are also more frequent since time may not have been carved out of the participant’s schedule.
- It may be harder to audiotape the interview (making note-taking potentially more obtrusive in the interview).
- The research subject may not be focused on the interview topic with other distractions at hand.
- More interviewers may be needed, since interviews may be dispersed over a wide territory.
In a facility, the researcher gains the upper hand of being the host, and professional audiotaping is much easier. The participant is in a research environment, which may help them to focus on the topic at hand more easily. And an uninterrupted time block can be established. It also tends to give the researcher greater credibility, particularly important if the research sponsor is not identified.
In all cases, though, the research execution needs to center on the research objectives. What type of interview and location will likely produce the best result for the client, within the budget and time allotted?
To pay or not to pay?
The issue of whether and what to pay a participant in a business-to-business qualitative study can be a thorny one. Today, an honorarium of some sort is usually required for focus groups and increasingly for one-on-one interviews.
You pay an incentive for several reasons:
- it helps to increase willingness to cooperate, and therefore helps to reduce overall recruiting costs;
- it helps to decrease the likelihood of last-minute cancellations or no-shows, which can affect both the project budget and timeline; and
- it compensates business people for their time (How much is 90 minutes of your own time worth?).
Business incentives today can range from $75 to several hundred dollars for specialized occupations, such as physicians or CEOs. The proper incentive is also related to the amount of recruiting sample available. Generally speaking, the smaller the recruiting list, the higher the incentive.
While some may consider the use of incentives to be "buying answers," Lagowski calls them "a necessary evil," and points out that this makes it even more incumbent upon the interviewer to evidence total neutrality. If the interviewer or moderator reacts defensively to negative comments, this can make the research participant feel like the incentive is a payoff for giving the "right" answers. The payment of incentives is never based upon the nature of the responses, and the interviewer or moderator needs to make that point clear to participants.
Although most research participants accept the honorarium in compensation for their time, in a few cases they request that the incentive be donated to a charity or given back to the client.
The interview guide and interviewer preparation
Once the participant is recruited for the focus group or in-person interview, the interview guide needs to be developed, and the interviewers armed with all the necessary background possible. "If you can articulate what you need to know before you get into the session itself, then spend the up-front time agonizing on the interviewer’s guide, then it’s not soft and fuzzy. It’s very actionable information," says Brandt.
"It’s very important that you use an experienced interviewer," Piper adds, "one who can deal with almost any kind of situation you can walk into, because you will walk into those situations. You may have to modify things on the fly."
There are some characteristics that a good moderator or interviewer should have, Bohle says. "One is open-mindedness. What is critical is that both the language and the body language that is used is neutral, non-threatening."
To illustrate his point, Bohle relates the story of a hostile interview he once conducted with the board of a local electric cooperative. Walking in, the board’s engineer said, "I don’t know why [the client] even bothered to waste their money on your services. They’re not interested in our answers."
At first, Bohle thought the scheduled 60-minute interview would be terminated immediately. Two and a half hours later, he knew why the board had been hostile, and believes that his neutrality helped to facilitate the incredibly long and in-depth interview. The board actually viewed the researcher’s willingness to take it on the chin as an indication of the company’s commitment to listen, and although somewhat skeptical, gave in-depth responses to all of the interview questions.
Finding the needle in a haystack
Once you decide to conduct research, what do you do next? Your company may not have lists that identify decision-makers among your small and medium commercial customers, and your large business customers may not have the time you need to conduct an interview.
This is where you need to have solid, mature recruiters, preferably ones with some previous experience in the business world. They may have to wade through gatekeepers, voice mail or automated phone systems to find the right respondent.
It helps if the recruiters are given some qualitative information of their own: What is the purpose of the study? What type of person are you looking to interview? These pieces of information are critically important for business-to-business recruiters, since every company has varying job titles, and, as Bohle suggests, the decision-making process is different from company to company. Armed with more than just a recruiting screener, a mature, experienced recruiter will get your man, or your woman.
Integral part
Properly conducted, business-to-business qualitative research can be an integral part of the customer relationship. Having respect for the respondents’ time and expressing gratitude for their participation, combined with an honest and open airing of issues and perspectives, can actually enhance customers’ opinions of the sponsoring company, even when their pre-interview attitudes may have been negative.
So the watchwords of qualitative business-to-business interviewing are: develop a cohesive, long-range research game plan (qualitative and quantitative), with a proper understanding of the use and value of the qualitative research, and execute it with business-savvy recruiters and interviewers. Then sit back and listen!