Developing a marketing plan without first conducting qualitative research is like wayfinding through a deep forest without a compass or map. Eventually, you may get to where you want to go, but by the time you do, you’ll be worn-down, exhausted, and unable to retrace your steps for any still-lost team members.
Qualitative research gives us open access to people’s interior experiences and observations. For business and marketing leaders, this is invaluable information for understanding obstacles and opportunities for growth. The qualitative research allows you to integrate different perspectives into a cohesive picture of your brand, which you can later validate statistically with quantitative research.
The first step when conducting qualitative research for your business is to administer individual interviews with both internal and external stakeholders. This allows you to see where their views and perspectives align and differ.
Internal stakeholders typically include your leadership team, your board, and a sampling of frontline employees who engage with your customers directly, including customer service, sales, and marketing. External stakeholders typically include current customers, lost customers, and prospective customers.
As with all qualitative research, your big picture objective is to identify the boundaries of hypotheses and perspectives that you will later vet against a statistically valid audience—predominantly in your customer and prospective customer surveys.
These interviews are a versatile and potent qualitative research method that offer a clear picture of what your internal and external stakeholders believe and why. Broadly speaking, these interviews seek to understand the company’s perceived strengths, differentiators, competitive landscape, motivations of targeted customers, opportunities and obstacles for growth, and any limiting beliefs.
Internal Stakeholder Interview Objectives
Clear research objectives help focus the interview and ensure that you gather relevant information. They guide the entire research process and help you stay on track. Clear objectives outline what you want your research to accomplish. For example:
- Who your competition is and how you stack up against them—in your differentiators, products and services, and sales and marketing strategies.
- Who your ideal customer is—from demographics to psycho- graphics. What drives them, inspires them, and motivates them to buy?
- Why customers choose you versus your competitors. What would make them choose you more? What is your market share?
- Where your operations, sales, and marketing teams are in alignment and where they aren’t. Where does sales and marketing messaging vary? Where does sales and marketing messaging differ from the reality of what you deliver?
- What your brand identity is. How do customers perceive your brand?
- Where there are openings in the market you’re not fully realizing. These could be new verticals or targeted customers or alternate positioning/differentiation opportunities.
The best practice is to develop custom interview guides for each person you’ll be interviewing. At a minimum, you’ll want distinct questions for the C-Suite, marketing, sales, customer service, and operations. Plan for hour-long interviews with generally 10 to 15 questions per interview.
External Stakeholder Interview Objectives
Your external stakeholder interview objectives are generally to learn your customers’ and lost customers’ views on:
- Who they believe you compete with and why they chose you over your competitors.
- What share of wallet they are investing with you as compared to your competitors.
- What they believe your real differentiators to be and how those differences stack up against the competition.
- What you could do to earn more of their business.
- What would drive them to purchase more from a competitor.
- What problems or pain they have that you could be solving.
- Why they no longer do business with you, including any reasons they were hesitant to share with your team, and what you could do to earn their business back.
Your external stakeholder interview objectives are also to learn your prospective customers’ views on:
- Who they believe you compete with and why they chose your competitors over you.
- What they believe your real differentiators to be and how those differences stack up against the competition.
- What you could do to take their business from your competitor, including what they’re spending currently with your competitor.
- What problems or pain their current supplier is not delivering on.
- What your competitors do well on the sales and marketing front.
The best practice is to develop custom interview guides for your current, lost, and prospective customer interviews. Plan for hour-long interviews with generally 10 to 15 questions per interview.
Once armed with insights from your internal and external stakeholders, you’ll begin to get clarity into how you can craft a marketing strategy with predictable outcomes. After vetting your findings with quantitative methods, you’ll have two key resources needed to march right through the aforementioned forest in record time, not once questioning when or if you’ll make it to the other side.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
Qualitative research is one of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 BattlesTM Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing RevolutionTM is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame.
