An in-depth survey by Gartner, Inc. found that 71% of B2C customers and 86% of B2B buyers expect brands to know and understand their personal situation before contacting them.

The success of your business to business marketing campaigns, and ultimately your B2B company goals, depends on high-quality market research. A B2B customer satisfaction survey should be, in general, distinct from a B2C survey.

How does B2B market research work?

In B2B market research, we gather information about what your potential customer wants and needs.

Research can cover a variety of subjects, such as customer perception of a B2B brand, business compatibility with a product or solution, B2B customer experience, and sales strategies.

The goal with client feedback is to understand how to motivate and connect to your target audience. The better you know how your audience thinks, feels, and responds, the more effective your strategies will be for targeting them.

Furthermore, there will be no inconsistency between what your prospects expect and what they receive – you’ll be able to anticipate trends and deal with issues before they arise.

Telephone surveys: three steps to success

Identify your research strategy

Despite its ability to reveal valuable information, market research is not an investigative exercise, but a strategic one. In order to move your strategy forward, you need to ask the right questions.

Therefore, the first step in developing a B2B survey is to define the goal of the exercise – then determine how to proceed.

You will be using either exploratory or specific research to form the foundation of your survey.

• Exploratory research doesn’t require specific responses, but rather a broad overview. In this case, qualitative data would be more useful, so open-ended interviews can be used to gain valuable insight.
• Specific research involves knowing the boundaries of your topic (the problem to be solved, a specific product to be tested). There is a good chance you will use quantitative data and take a more structured approach.

Select participants

B2B survey panels can be more difficult to build than consumer customer experience panels.

In general, there are likely to be fewer businesses than individuals within any given target audience, so it is more narrowly targeted, and participants’ time might be constrained depending on their role. Fortunately, the number of respondents in your sample may not need to be as large as one from a comparative B2C customer satisfaction survey in order to be statistically significant.

Use your internal data to survey your B2B clients and contacts, purchase contact lists from a reliable third party broker, or engage potential customers by putting relevant ads wherever prospective respondents may be.

Conduct your B2B telephone survey

B2B International estimates that online customer surveys of B2B audiences typically generate a response rate of between 2% and 5% – but telephone interviews generate 10% – 25%.

Based on the type of B2B research you are conducting, you can use qualitative and quantitative approaches. In telephone surveys, questions are asked with great flexibility, making them ideal for open-ended questions and detailed responses.

Before beginning the interview, use telemarketers to screen candidates and make sure you are talking to the right person. Interviewers can also conduct a pre-survey so they can spend more time on any areas of interest the respondent mentions.

Besides getting more detailed responses than would probably be received from an online survey, this also gives the respondent a chance to clarify anything they are unsure about.

Hire B2B marketing specialists

If you are struggling with your market research, it’s understandable, you’re putting yourself out there in an incredibly dense market. A lot of B2B businesses hire experts to conduct market research, like More Than Words.

By focusing on B2B customer feedback, we can help you to develop a better understanding of what your existing customers expect from you going forward.

When a B2B business has trouble grabbing the attention of its target market, outsourcing can dramatically increase the quantity and quality of its market research. You can also use a telephone market research service to conduct surveys among both broad and specific business audiences, meet customer needs and improve customer loyalty.