Competitive Research

Three Tips for Effective Win/Loss

It seems that win/loss analysis is in the air these days. We’ve had a sharp uptick in incoming inquiries for projects analyzing why enterprise software deals are won or lost when there is a competitor in the mix.

The major factor in successful Win/Loss projects is the ability to identify stakeholders who were deeply involved in the process and are willing to talk about their experiences. Here are our top tips to get the right people:

Ensure anonymity – during an enterprise sales process, prospects can develop relationships with their account management team. They may be hesitant to discuss issues that happened during the sales process if they are worried that they’ll be putting someone they know in a bad light.
Expect more effort to secure losses – it’s easier to get people to talk about wins. Once a company has chosen a vendor to have a relationship with, they are more vested in that relationship and willing to put the time into making it work. If a customer has chosen another vendor, they will be less likely to talk to you. Plan for this when building target lists.
Keep it short – Senior IT executives value their time above all else. They are busy. It’s difficult to get an hour of their time, but asking for 15 or 30 minutes feels like much less of a commitment and they will be more likely to participate than if they feel it is a big and onerous conversation. Of course, once they’re on the phone, if they want to keep talking let them! But don’t start with the big ask.

The Top Three Questions about Competitive Research

by Diane Hagglund

One of the great uses of market research in general, and technology market research in particular, is getting G2 on what your competitors are doing.

Market research organizations usually have much greater access to your competitors’ customers, and the anonymity of a formal market research process allows participants to be much more open.

As technology market research experts, we get a lot of inquiries about competitive research projects. Here are answers to three of our most frequently asked questions:

1. Can you find my competitor’s customers?

Yes, with only one caveat – they actually have customers!!! Getting participants for any market research project is a bit of a numbers game. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t have the time or simply aren’t interested in participating. If your competition only has 20 customers in the entire world, we probably will struggle to find them all and get them to agree to participate in a project.

But with this one caveat, we have tried-and-true methods for finding users of any particular technology. In fact, at Dimensional Research we have actually had clients with such bad internal data and complex internal processes, that it’s been easier for us to find their customers!

2. Will my competitor’s customers talk to you?

Yes, absolutely. Not only do we motivate them with appropriate compensation but people like to be heard. And technology professionals know that strong competition drives innovation, so they want their vendors to have competition, and they want to have options.

3. How specific will competitor customers get with their info?

That of course depends on the participant and how open they are, but the majority of participants will tell you everything they know. It depends to some degree on the goals of the project. If your goals are to understand the motivation for purchase – such as a win/loss project or a lost-deal analysis – those are very straightforward questions and it’s straightforward to get clear answers from customers.

If your goal is to understand weaknesses in your competitor’s product, that can also be done, but you do need to be prepared that existing customers have often worked through weaknesses, have figured out workarounds, and no longer perceive those as problems. Having some sense of what the weaknesses might be so you can encourage the participants to recall their initial response to those problems will give better results.

Remember though that this is a good news/bad news situation. It’s just as easy for YOUR competitors to talk to your customers, so at Dimensional Research we strongly recommend that you get feedback from your own users in addition to your competitors’ customers!

Research Bias – How Different Participants Yield Different Insights

by Diane Hagglund

According to a recent survey from a specialist PlayStation 3 site, geeks make the best lovers.

Let me clarify right from the start that as someone with distinct geek-ish tendencies, who is married to a confirmed geek, I have no intentions of arguing with the study’s conclusions – just with its methodology.

The problem with the survey is that it was biased. Given the audience likely to peruse a PS3-specific site, it’s fair to assume the respondents skewed more toward the “geek” end of the spectrum.

When conducting research you must know who you’re talking to in order to interpret the conclusions correctly. If they had done the same survey with a running site, would they have found out that marathoners are the best lovers?

In technology market research, identifying your research target audience is especially important. Customers will give you different insights than prospects, employees, partners, or even the customers of direct competitors!

If you’re talking to your customers, you need to acknowledge that by definition they have the pain that you’re selling to, or they wouldn’t be using your product. So, you shouldn’t do a customer survey and then announce, “100% of the MARKET does this.” Of course, it’s completely fair to say, “100% of our CUSTOMERS do this.”

In comparison, if you’re talking to the general market who isn’t as fully educated on your solution, you’ll need to tailor your questions accordingly. If you ask questions that are too detailed and specific to your solution, you’ll get uninformed answers. The type of questions that are appropriate for customers who are familiar with your product, are not the same ones to use for the general market.

For example, if you’re asking about product features, you will get vastly different answers from existing customers who know your product, and from your competitor’s customers who know an alternative approach. Both of these will be different from the answers you’ll get from prospects who don’t have any product experiences.

As with everything in market research, it comes back to goals. Your very first step should be figuring out your business goals. Then, figure out what you need to know in order to achieve these goals. Next, figure out who has that knowledge, and who doesn’t. Only once you’ve answered all these questions, you can dive into the details of the market research project.

Using Market Research To Uncover False Beliefs

by Diane Hagglund

We just completed an extensive series of in-depth interviews with great IT participants from around the globe. These participants were smart and articulate. They knew their job, and were very good at it.

But as smart and capable as these participants were, we discovered during the interviews that many of them – at least half – held a completely false belief about my client’s product.

During the interviews with these participants, they kept repeating the same idea. The details are confidential to that client, of course, but the important point is that this audience really believed that their perception of the products was true. This wasn’t a minor technical detail – it was a major assumption about environments the products operated in. But the problem was IT WASN’T TRUE! This was verified by my client, by independent evaluations that we found while investigating the conflict, and by some of the other participants in the study.

So here you have a very well established fact about a product, but at least half of the customer population believes something else. In other words: even if something is not logical, and even if your customers and prospects are technology vendors who tend to be logical, they may still believe in something wrong. And it could negatively affect their buying decisions.

This type of dynamic is extremely important for vendors to understand. If there are things that your audience believes about your solution that are not true, you’d better know about it so you can take action.

You’ll notice that I’m referring to this as a “belief”. Beliefs are harder to respond to than competitive FUD or outright lies. These are things that your target market thinks are true because they’ve never really thought about it.

A formal market research methodology is the best way to uncover and to root out these false beliefs across your target market. You can’t rely on day-to-day conversations with customers, because if these issues do surface during such a conversation, you tend to correct them immediately with that specific customer and then forget about them since it didn’t make any sense to you to think that way.