B2B MARKET RESEARCH

Most B2B strategy is built on what the company believes. Ours is built on what buyers said.

B2B market research for companies with complex sales: buyer surveys, voice of customer and win/loss interviews, competitive intelligence and benchmark studies. Run by the same team that has to make the findings work.

FROM OUR 2025 STUDY OF 211 B2B MARKETING AND SALES LEADERS
Priority A62%Priority B48%Priority C41%Priority D33%Priority E27%

The expensive part of marketing is being wrong about the buyer.

Every positioning statement, every campaign, every sales talk track rests on a set of assumptions about who the buyer is, what they care about, and why they choose one vendor over another. In most B2B companies those assumptions were formed years ago by whoever was in the room, and nobody has checked them since.

That is how a manufacturer ends up leading with quality and delivery when buyers have started shortlisting on engineering support. It is how a software company spends two quarters on a message that tested well internally and never got past the second call.

Research fixes the assumptions before the money gets spent. It tells you which claims buyers believe, which ones they have heard from every vendor, where the sales cycle actually stalls, and what a competitor is saying that you are not.

Here is what makes ours different from a research house. We are not handing the findings to someone else. The same team runs the positioning, the content, the campaigns and the sales enablement that the research feeds. If the findings are vague or wrong, we are the ones who have to build positioning and campaigns on top of them.

WHAT THE TEAM ASSUMED VS WHAT BUYERS SAID
What the team assumed
What buyers said
Buyers choose us on price
Price ranked fourth. Responsiveness ranked first.
Our differentiator is quality
Every competitor on the shortlist claims quality. Buyers stopped hearing it.
The deal stalls at procurement
The deal stalls when the champion can't explain us to their boss.
Offerings

Three ways we can work together.

Each one stands on its own. For larger positioning or go-to-market engagements, they are usually the first phase.

BUYER SHORTLISTING VENDORS
Price54%Quality31%Lead Time22%Support9%

B2B Buyer Study

A quantitative survey of a defined B2B buyer audience. It measures what buyers prioritize, how they purchase, what they believe about the category and where the decision gets made. It can also test positioning, messages, value propositions and taglines against each other so you launch with the one that won, not the one that got the most votes in the conference room.

You receive: research design, survey instrument, a defined respondent audience, fielding, data analysis, findings and recommendations, an executive presentation, and a client-branded research report when it makes sense to publish.
Scope a buyer study →
INTERVIEW QUOTE AND THEMES
"They were the only ones who actually answered
the engineering questions on the first call."
ResponsivenessEngineering supportLead time

Customer Research Program

Six to twelve structured interviews across customers, prospects and the internal people who sell to them. The point is to hear, in their words, why they chose you, what they value, what nearly stopped the deal and how they describe the problem you solve. The value is in the analysis: what was consistent across the interviews and what it means for the business.

You receive: research plan, participant criteria, interview guide, the interviews themselves, coded analysis, customer language and themes, purchase drivers and barriers, findings and recommendations, and a final research report.
Scope a customer program →
ASSESSMENT SCORE GAUGE
Peer range: 45-60

Buyer Benchmark

A research-based assessment that lets your buyers score their own organization against peers or against a defined standard. It starts as a study and becomes a program: the benchmark report, the self-assessment, the landing page and the follow-up all attract and engage prospects long after the research is done. It pairs naturally with a Buyer Study, which supplies the data set.

You receive: benchmark methodology, assessment questions, scoring model, benchmark report, a landing page or assessment experience, and follow-up content and nurture strategy.
Scope a benchmark →
What's Included

Capabilities

B2B buyer surveys and quantitative buyer research
Message, value proposition and tagline testing
Voice of customer research and customer interviews
Win/loss analysis
Competitive intelligence and competitive analysis
Brand perception and positioning research
Buyer persona and buyer journey research
Benchmark studies and proprietary research programs
Client-branded research reports for content, PR and demand generation
Our Process

How it works.

Frame.

We start with the decision the research has to support, not with a methodology. That defines the audience, the questions and what a useful answer looks like. If the decision is unclear, the research will be too, so we spend the first conversation on it.

Field.

Surveys, interviews, competitive analysis or a combination, depending on the question. Surveys are fielded to a defined audience, through our research partners where the audience calls for it. Interviews are run by our strategists, recorded, transcribed and coded.

Apply.

Findings are delivered as decisions for marketing, sales and strategy, with the evidence behind each one. Then they get used. The same team carries the findings into positioning, content, campaigns or sales enablement, so nothing gets lost between the readout and the work.

Integration

How the pieces fit together.

Competitive research establishes what buyers are already hearing from the market. Customer interviews explain what your customers value and how they decide. A buyer study tests whether those findings hold across a larger population. Positioning and messaging turn the findings into a market position. A benchmark turns the research into a program that keeps attracting buyers.

You can buy any one of these on its own. For a positioning or go-to-market engagement, we usually run two or three of them in sequence as the first phase, and the combination depends on the question you are trying to answer.

RESEARCH INTEGRATION FLOW
Competitive research
Customer interviews
Buyer study
Positioning and messaging
Benchmark program
Demand generation
First-Party Data

We run this research on ourselves.

Our published reports use the same methods we run for clients: defined audiences, fielded surveys, first-party data and findings you can act on.

Original Research · July 2026

The Great Declick

We studied 18 B2B accounts using first-party Google Search Console data, comparing Q2 2025 to Q2 2026. Informational click-through rates fell 38% year over year with ranking position held constant. 82% of page-one informational queries now produce near-zero clicks. Branded search was essentially flat. The data has direct implications for how B2B teams measure and invest in organic search.

SEOAI SearchB2B
Read the report
Original Research · August 2026

The State of B2B Manufacturing

A first-party study of how manufacturers are winning and losing pipeline. Covers organic search visibility, paid media efficiency, and the buyer journey signals most correlated with closed-won revenue across industrial B2B verticals.

ManufacturingB2BDemand Generation
Read the report
Common Questions

Frequently asked questions.

B2B market research studies the people who buy on behalf of a company: their priorities, their process, the committee around them and the alternatives they consider. The audiences are smaller and harder to reach than consumer audiences, the decisions involve more people and take longer, and the questions have to account for that. A survey built for consumers will miss most of what matters in a B2B purchase.
Interviews when you need to understand why: why customers chose you, what they value, where the deal nearly died, how they describe the problem. Surveys when you need to know how widely something holds: which priorities rank highest across the market, which message wins, how you are perceived relative to competitors. Many engagements use both, with interviews shaping the survey.
Enough to answer the question with confidence, which depends on the audience and the decision. We size the study to the decision during scoping rather than starting from a default number.
For interviews, we recruit from your customers, prospects and internal teams, and from our own outreach where the audience needs to be independent. For surveys, we work with research partners to field to a defined audience when the sample needs to be broader than your own lists. The audience definition is agreed before fielding starts.
A customer research program typically runs six to eight weeks from kickoff to final report. A buyer study runs eight to twelve weeks depending on audience and fielding. Competitive research can be delivered in two to four weeks. A benchmark program is longer because it includes the assessment and landing page build. We confirm the timeline during scoping.
Yes, and it often should. A buyer study or benchmark can be developed into a client-branded research report that supports content, PR, sales conversations and demand generation. We build the study with publication in mind when that is the goal, so the questions produce findings worth sharing.
We use existing market data and secondary research to support positioning, account planning and go-to-market decisions. Full primary market sizing is a different kind of study and is scoped separately if it is needed.
That is the most common way it is used. Competitive research, customer interviews and a buyer study, in some combination, give the positioning work something to stand on. See our B2B Branding services for how the two connect.

Know what buyers think before you spend money on what they'll see.

Tell us the decision you are trying to make. We will tell you which research answers it, how long it takes and what it costs.