Interview research remains one of the most important – and often underutilized – ways for B2B companies and organizations to generate irreplaceable insights to guide critical decisions. A deep understanding of what customers, buyers, users, members, competitors, suppliers, influencers, and other decision-makers think can drive strategy, refine tactics, and improve overall performance. Even in the age of Big Data, qualitative interview research should remain an integral part of any research program.
Over the past decade quantitative data has become much more readily available for business decision mak-ing, especially in marketing. Our increased capacity to measure, track, and survey our operations and custom-ers has boosted our ability to gain transparency on our businesses. But its rise in popularity and prevalence masks one disadvantage; a corresponding decline in use and appreciation of qualitative research.
This represents a concern. As we move beyond the age of information and into the what Forrester Research calls the age of the customer, the value of qualitative research is actually growing in importance. Qualitative research has the ability to guide, illuminate, augment and explain quantitative data.
Our clients, across all industries and sectors, find that qualitative interview research provides a level of rich-ness and depth that can yield an unparalleled under-standing of their target markets. In a B2B context in par-ticular, where buying decisions are typically complex, qualitative research can provide invaluable insights into decision-making that can’t be captured in a simple sur-vey – not just the ‘what’ of buying behaviour, but the ‘why.’ And, sometimes, quantitative data simply isn’t accessible in a meaningful way in a given industry or specialization, while qualitative data is much easier to obtain.
INTERVIEW RESEARCH
THIS WHITE PAPER IS BASED ON THE THOUSANDS OF QUALITATIVE INTER-VIEWS WE HAVE CONDUCTED OVER MORE THAN A DECADE ON BEHALF OF SMALL, MID-SIZE, AND FORTUNE 500 B2B COMPANIES, AS WELL AS PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS. IT WILL BE OF INTEREST TO ANYONE WHO SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND HOW THEY CAN ENHANCE THEIR STRAT-EGY, SALES, MARKETING, CUSTOMER SERVICE, OPERATIONS AND OVER-ALL BUSINESS OR ORGANIZATIONAL SUCCESS BY USING INTERVIEWS AS A RESEARCH TOOL.
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WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF INTERVIEW RESEARCH?
Interview research can be used very effectively for a number of different purposes:
Market landscape1. – to uncover the subtleties of relationships and trends in the industry.
Competitive intelligence2. – to understand the range of positions in the market, and how effec-tive they are.
Go-to-market-approa3. ch – to evaluate potential go-to-market strategies and their reception in the marketplace.
Buyer behaviour4. – to clarify why and how buy-ers make the decisions they do, and what influ-ences them.
Client satisfaction5. – can be used either to illu-minate or to prepare for quantitative research or for a more strategic review of client satisfaction.
Member needs assessment6. – to probe the
affinity that members have with the organization as well as to gauge their satisfaction and identify emerging needs. Can also be used to prepare for quantitative research.
Segmentation 7. – to obtain a nuanced, client-
centric perspective.
Feasibility study8. – to assess market interest in a particular product or service.
Qualitative interview research provides a level of nuance and richness and can provide an-swers to questions that secondary research or even a survey can’t. Interviews take you inside the minds of prospects and customers, to un-derstand how and why they make the decisions they do. Interviews give you the opportunity for a dialogue that allows a much greater opportunity to probe deeper into interesting facets of cus-tomer behaviour and perception.
For example, finding out how often someone purchases a given item is very different from un-derstanding how they purchased it or how en-trenched or loyal to that product they may be. Survey data may indicate that customers are very satisfied with a service and a company may believe that its customers are loyal as a result. However, interviews may reveal that, despite expressed satisfaction, customers would leave to a competitor because of small and unrealized needs that the company did not anticipate or un-derstand.
In our experience, the results of quantitative research tend to tell a familiar story, often vali-dating internal hypotheses and accepted wis-dom – while still offering value in the precision of the responses. However, qualitative research among customers and potential customers are filled with anecdotes and colour, delivering much deeper insights to behaviour and opportunities, and enabling more informed and higher quality decisions by leadership.
There are many ways to acquire qualitative data: one-on-one interviews, focus groups, observational analysis, shadowing, and others. The most common-ly used in market research are interviews and focus groups. We find that one-on-one interviews are the most effective method for most situations. While fo-cus groups can sometimes be done successfully in a B2B setting, and may be practical when a group is already gathered together (such as at a conference), there are a number of challenges which directly affect their value, including:
Competition:• Where interviewees see each other as competitors, there can be concerns about dis-closing information. Participants may also send out intentionally confusing signals, or may partici-pate more for the purpose of trying to learn some-thing from their competitors, calling results into question. This occurs less frequently in a more private situation like a one-on-one interview.
Logistics:• In B2B research and for professional associations it can be quite challenging to secure even one-on-one interviews. Bringing together in-terviewees to a central location for a discussion is near-impossible in many fields, and extremely challenging and prohibitively expensive in others.
Heterogeneity:• It is unusual to find a set of pure peers in B2B or professional association settings. For example, even among health care profession-als there is a clear hierarchy between physicians, nurses and technicians. Even among physicians, there are significant differences among different specialties, and between specialists and general practitioners. These differences in professional roles can cause reticence and differential levels of participation by individuals in a focus group.
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INTERVIEWS VS. FOCUS GROUPS
THE MOST EFFECTIVE METHOD TO ACQUIRE QUALITATIVE DATA IS THE ONE-ON-ONE INTERVIEW
INTERVIEWS VS. FOCUS GROUPS
WHEN SHOULD YOU DO INTERVIEW RESEARCH?
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2. It is not practical or affordable to do survey research, given the context or resources available
Expertise is still required to design surveys that • will elicit meaningful data. With the proliferation of free or low-cost online survey tools, it may seem that there are few barriers to administer-ing surveys, but access to the technology does not equal capability. A poorly-designed survey with imprecise or overlapping questions can muddy the waters. Since there is a tendency to gravitate towards quantitative data, regard-less of how misleading or unclear the data may be, this can be especially dangerous in terms of warping decision-making.
It is not always practical to obtain a quality list • for survey distribution, particularly an email list. The more scattered and diverse the target pop-ulation is, the harder it will be to get a survey to a representative sample.
Obtaining and evaluating a sample can be very • difficult. Even if you put out a survey with a significant incentive, the target market will not necessarily respond, despite best efforts. This is especially true if you are asking a particular target market to comment on a topic or service that isn’t core to their business. If the goal is to understand a small or fragmented market, sam-ple issues for quantitative data become even more challenging and make the data difficult to interpret.
Qualitative versus quantitative research is really a false choice. In a robust market re-search or member needs assessment pro-gram both methods are used regularly, and are designed to work together in a comple-mentary way. However, there are a number of situations where quantitative research is not optimal, and where qualitative research via interviews becomes an irreplaceable tool:
Quantitative secondary research is not 1. available
In many B2B industries, adequate secondary research that would enable us to quantify the market or report on customer or competitive trends is simply not available, at any price.. This is particularly true where industries are:
Highly specialized, niche, or small – data is • not collected or reported at the appropriate level of detail.
Operating in a fast-changing technological, • economic, or regulatory context — data quickly becomes obsolete.
Emerging, disruptive, or cross-disciplinary • — the category doesn’t exist yet, or the data may not be reported in a way that’s applicable.
Geographically focused (in Canada or • elsewhere) and struggling to apply US or global data to a specific market.
In these cases, interview research can un-cover trends and even give a sense of market size. Note that secondary research should be an important component of any research pro-gram, to take full advantage of sources that do exist, however limited, and to contextualize primary research findings.
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3. You are not ready to write a survey
If little is known about the issues or the target population, it may be impossible to write an ef-fective survey. Conducting interview research beforehand will vastly improve the survey’s rel-evance and accuracy. Interviews can help by:
Surfacing important topics to explore and • appropriate questions to ask.
Identifying terminology whic• h will resonate with respondents.
G• enerating potential answer options to pro-vide on the survey.
Cl• arifying categories of respondents in a tar-get population.
4. Survey research may not answer the question
While quantitative research has grown significantly more sophisticated in recent years, it still has limi-tations that qualitative research can address. An open question asked by a live person in the context of a conversation can elicit much richer information than a closed survey question ever will.
If you want to identify trends and future devel-• opments in your industry, qualitative research can be a much more effective – and faster – way of uncovering the emerging ideas that will affect your industry. People only rarely fill in “Other: please specify” on a survey. But, if asked an open question in an interview (such as “What are the trends you see in your indus-try?” or “What are your main challenges?”), they can provide a great deal of analysis which may point to the future, and which likely would not have been included in a survey.
If you are exploring sensitiv• e issues, dynamic and adaptive interviews can be more effective in obtaining useful data than a survey which may just get abandoned or, worse, answered inaccurately.
If you want to understa• nd a complex landscape with a number of interlinked players, qualitative research can give you a sense of the relation-ships and power dynamics between them.
WHEN SHOULD YOU DO INTERVIEW RESEARCH?
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH CAN HELP IDENTIFY TRENDS AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN YOUR INDUSTRY
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HOW IS INTERVIEW RESEARCH CONDUCTED?A successful interview research program includes:
Clear research objectives.•
Well-thought-out method• ology, including provi-sions for confidentiality, medium of the inter-view, time, and so on.
Interviewees target• ed for types of companies, types of roles, and the ability to comment on specific subjects.
Incentives for interview• ees, based on an as-sessment of their motivations.
An interview guide desi• gned to meet the re-search objectives while enabling the interview-er to build rapport and trust with the intervie-wee.
The identificatio• n and preparation of interview-ers, including a thorough briefing on the context of the project and the research objectives, as well as practice runs and observation.
Securing and condu• cting the interviews.
Monitoring and cour• se correcting as required, to enable learning through the process and to ensure quality of results.
Performing systematic• and rigorous analysis of the results, mapping back to the research ob-jectives but also reporting unexpected findings.
ANYONE CAN HAVE A CONVER-SATION, BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN CONDUCT AN EFFECTIVE INTERVIEW. INTERVIEW RE-SEARCH FOLLOWS A SPECIFIC PROCESS AND IS BEST DONE BY SKILLED INTERVIEWERS WHO ARE ABLE TO DRAW OUT INFORMATION FROM INTER-VIEWEES AND UNDERSTAND ALL THE NUANCES OF THEIR COMMENTS.
SHOULD YOU USE A THIRD PARTY OR DO IT YOURSELF?
Objectivity:• To get the full value from a re-search process, a fresh set of eyes is often needed. An outsider can see patterns that in-siders might miss, and insiders may shy away from tricky findings that a competent and pro-fessional external research or firm should be comfortable addressing.
Capability: • Designing, conducting, and ana-lyzing the results of interviews are specialized research skills that most companies and orga-nizations do not possess. Interviewers must be able to fully grasp the business context and the research objectives, adjust to the styles of the interviewees, and adapt the interview ques-tions to the responses received. Most compa-nies and organizations do not have these skills in-house.
Network: • An external firm may have a larger and more diverse network than the company or organization itself, as well as relationships with experts in various industries, which it can bring to bear on securing interviews.
For more information on how to implement inter-view research successfully, see our companion White Paper titled “Conversations with purpose: Maximizing the value of interview research,” which provides steps for successfully conducting interview research, and suggestions for avoiding common pitfalls.
For some purposes, a company or organiza-tion can conduct interviews itself, and gain use-ful results. This is true particularly when there is a very specific information objective desired, there is little perceived risk in having the com-pany reach out directly, and where confidential-ity is not perceived to be important to the inter-viewees. Sometimes, as with client satisfaction check-ins, there can be a relationship-building aspect to the company doing this kind of re-search itself.
Sponsor• confidentiality: In order to ob-tain objective data on many topics (for in-stance, brand perceptions or competitive intelligence), it is critical for the sponsor of the research to be kept confidential, which is not possible if they are conducting the re-search themselves. This also avoids tipping the sponsor’s hand to competitors.
In• terviewee confidentiality: Only a third party can credibly state that confidentiality will be maintained. This encourages inter-viewees to be more forthcoming with genu-ine impressions and opinions, and therefore the interview results can be taken more seri-ously.
The ability to get closer to customers, users, and members, understanding their emerging needs and addressing challenges before they become intracta-ble, will be critical to business success in the coming decade.
Mastering the oceans of data that are now available in the business environment is part of this capability. However, those who ignore qualitative methods of obtaining actionable insights will risk making deci-sions without seeing the full picture. The one-on-one interview – actually going and talking with the people whose decisions directly affect your business – is a unique and invaluable technique to include in any research program, to improve the quality of decision-making that results.
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CONCLUSION
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