Editor's note: Mark Towery is managing director of Geo Strategy Partners, an Atlanta research firm. He can be reached at mark@geostrategypartners.com.

There is an emerging school of thought purporting that the lines between B2B and B2C marketing are being blurred blissfully into a world without such antiquated barriers; a world known to futurists as H2H (“human-to-human”). As digital technology allows advanced personalized marketing to individuals and creates influence parity of celebrities and average citizens, the argument is seductive.

I, however, beg to differ.

It is my suspicion that this pseudo-proclamation of sameness of corporations and consumers is being promoted by B2C agencies as a way to compensate for lack of B2B street cred as they attempt to tap into digital opportunities in the business-to-business arena.

Speaking directly from the trenches of industrial market research, I suggest that the differences between B2C and B2B are as stark as the differences in a ballroom and a bayou. B2B market researchers, at least, must have a basic understanding of the business context and incorporate company- and industry-specific distinctions into their approach and process.

B2C market research often involves collecting and analyzing large amounts of data about customers’ attitudes and behaviors as they relate to relatively straightforward products. B2C may require sophisticated research or data analytics techniques but does not necessarily need to address the business context. You need to know your data and it helps to be a bit of psychologist.

B2B, and particularly its industrial segments, requires an entirely different approach to market research because of the importance of both performing and interpreting research in the business context. Sophisticated research techniques, while valuable, are less important than understanding technical product applications or complex business models. As a B2B market research professional you need to get the data right but you need also to be a strategist and approach each research project as a business case analysis.

To spell it out, the essence of B2B and industrial market research is the requirement to ...

... access a limited number

... of very busy and important experts in their field

... who often reside off the grid

... and may be located anywhere in the world

... with no reason to want to talk to you

... whom you must convince to talk with you

... and divulge semi-confidential details about their organization’s activities

... from which you must be able to ascertain and explain complex decision-making

... involving multiple individuals and departments if not organizations

... and you must have sufficient knowledge of their business environment to be able to moderate that technical or complex conversation

... and ultimately interpret what they told you in the right strategic framework and business context.

What are the keys to successful B2B/industrial market research? Well, I can think of at least five.

1. Accessing the right people (it’s NOT who you know)
The more industrial the project’s focus, the less likely you are to find a panel or even a directory of qualified targets. The experts possessing the knowledge and insights you seek must be found through creative and arduous investigation. And there may be only a few of them worldwide, so you have only a few opportunities to connect. If and when you do connect, you have to convince each to share his/her time. No amount of pre-existing relationships will aid this process; it takes old-fashioned gumption, creativity and tenacity.

I bristle when clients ask if we have a panel or pre-existing relationships in an industry. We may have completed a dozen projects in a single industry segment and have hundreds of warm contacts but still not be able to use the same respondents for Project Number 13. Every project is a custom business case. The key is knowing how to identify decision-makers and access them with or without prior relationships.

The right respondent could be a tier-two automotive engineer who is the final authority on the mold block material used for injection-molded parts; or a maintenance supervisor who selects control valves for his pulp and paper plant; or an electrical contractor who works exclusively in oil and gas refineries. Accessing the right people is not about who you know; the key is in-depth knowledge of innumerable industries and knowledge of which trigger will induce a qualified respondent to participate in the process of market exploration.

Consider the following scenario: you want to tap into the voice of the oil rig worker regarding personal protection equipment. Guess what? An oil rig worker is either on a rig, in a deer stand or in a bass boat. They don’t have an office; their cell phone is not listed; they are off the grid. No focus group facility can recruit them for you. No list company can save you. So, you find an oil rig job recruiter and place an ad. You learn from a drilling contractor about training courses being held in a hotel in Lafayette, La. You catch a flight and walk the halls of the conference center asking roughnecks and roustabouts to join you in a room for $200 and free beer. Soon you have a focus group.

The next day you drive down I-10 looking for oil derricks. After a few miscues pulling up to cell phone towers, you find an onshore rig in a cow pasture. You show up with food and interview oil workers in their trailer as they eat étouffée. The next day, you fly to Aberdeen, Scotland, and intercept offshore rig workers at heliports when they come in from offshore rigs in the North Sea. Piece of cake – or, maybe, bite of crawfish.

2. Engaging experts in a meaningful conversation (money can’t buy you love)

Congratulations when you are able to find a hard-to-reach decision maker. Now you have to get them to talk to you. Perhaps surprisingly, we do not offer incentives in the majority of our B2B studies. In most cases, you simply cannot compensate a busy professional or expert for the time they are sharing with you. So, you have to trade on their goodwill and perhaps their belief in the karma of casting their grains of insights on the sandy beaches of industry knowledge to improve the products and services available to them in the future. But mostly, you have to connect with them and that means understanding their job, their company and their industry. Almost everyone is proud of what they do and happy to share their knowledge with someone who can understand it and appears empathetic.

Doing your homework not only aids recruitment, it allows you to hold an intelligent conversation with them about thermocompressors, or bioremediation, or control valves, or paper machines, or insurance services, or mold block material, or data-as-a-service, or welding helmets, or pressure vessels, or magnesium sand castings or flight navigation. There is no substitute for being knowledgeable about the topic du jour. Knowledge supports the innate ability to think on your feet and the acquired skill to probe appropriately and tease out unmet needs that may not be voiced when respondents interact with less-experienced interviewers.

To be clear, moderating a discussion about a complex business model or a technical or industrial application does not mean you have to be an expert in the subject matter. In fact, being an expert is usually a liability because you cannot view insights objectively. But it does mean your expertise cannot be limited to research methodologies. For better or worse, the only way to have amassed the vast breadth of knowledge necessary to conduct effective B2B/industrial research is to have several years of experience and accumulated wisdom; then do your project-specific homework. The obvious implication of this reality is that B2B researchers are generally senior consultants. As a result, they do not come cheap. You can’t slay an elephant with a popgun; it requires larger-caliber artillery.

3. Research and strategy are not separable (it’s all about the business objective)

Hand-in-hand with the ability to moderate a complex or technical interview is the ability to see how the little pieces form the big picture. Customer insights without competitive intelligence and industry analysis will only take you so far. The B2B/industrial market researcher must be able to analyze the entire competitive landscape and complete complex business case analyses. Market sizing, market attractiveness, channel strategies, strategic positioning and a go-to-market strategy that addresses the reality of competitive dynamics must all be part of the equation. If you are not a business strategist, you are probably not a real B2B market researcher.

In the world of B2B, clients may seek tactical insights but are more likely to seek a strategy to position their company for growth. Research for the sake of research has zero utility. It is ultimately all about the business outcome.

A market-sizing exercise illustrates the difficulty and complexity of getting B2B right. Market sizing is not a matter of counting widgets; it is about building a model that is populated by primary insights, secondary data and sound business judgment. Typically, market sizing requires both a top-down and a bottom-up approach – an examination of both supply and demand. From the top, we look at market trends and competitor output and conduct macro analysis. From the bottom, we (for example) may research the number of products per specific application, the number of applications per plant, the number of like-plants for a given industry and geography. The researcher may need to factor in new plant construction and expansion as well as MRO and retrofits. You must also conduct sensitivity tests of regulatory and environmental factors.

The B2B market researcher needs to understand more than how to determine derived importance, calculate a Net Promoter Score and elicit both articulated and unarticulated needs. The B2B market researcher must understand their client’s business model, the competitive forces of the industry, effective value chain strategies and be able to recommend the best overall strategic positioning of the company. Sometimes this means delivering a well-documented analysis indicating that the opportunity does not justify the investment required, or that it is time to sell the company. In short, you must conduct detailed and specific business case analysis and scenario modeling. In other words, you must go slightly beyond “Coke or Pepsi.”

4. Embracing ambiguity (learn to love the response “It depends”)

B2B market insights rarely come as singular conclusive findings. Most large-dollar B2B purchases are complex, with many factors to be considered by many different decision-makers. The relative influence of different decision-makers often varies from company to company. The rationale for decisions most offered by respondents is “It depends.” The B2B market researcher must navigate this complexity and ambiguity and, by understanding the business context and analyzing the same factor multiple ways, come to a conclusive recommendation.

This challenge is not for all. The more industrial the focus, the more one could erroneously believe it takes an engineer to conduct industrial market research. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the following scenario.

It is early morning and a hot-air balloon hovers over the 16th hole of a suburban golf course. The sky is clear, cirrus clouds paint brush strokes on a brilliantly blue sky and frosty dew glazes the manicured green.

A golfer in purple double knit stares up as a man leans over from the basket and asks, “Can you tell me where I am?”

The golfer replies, “You are at latitude 33.7550 degrees north and longitude 84.3900 degrees west in a hot-air balloon, hovering approximately 28 feet above the ground.”

The man in the balloon replies, “You must be an engineer, because everything you said is factually accurate and totally useless.”

“And you must be a marketer,” the golfer says, “because you set out without a plan, you don’t know where you are, you have no idea where you are going or how to get there and suddenly it’s my fault.”

Engineers are literal and binary and do not function well in a state of ambiguity. The B2B path to purchase is often a very winding and muddy road. Real B2B market researchers must thrive in such ambiguity. They must also be excellent at synthesizing vast amounts of complex data, analyzing it and then communicating the essence of it in clear, simple terms. We have found from experimenting with interns that pre-med students and English majors perform surprisingly well at B2B research because of these very skills. Analytically-minded former business executives also seem to fit. Whatever the background, you must be able to think in parallel patterns, synthesize volumes of information, combine intuition and analysis and question absolutely everything until nothing is left standing but the obvious path forward.

5. Be nimble and flexible (expect failure and plan for recovery)

Be wary of the B2B researcher with a singular methodology. Forget about routine and repeatable studies. Every B2B/industrial market research project is an exploratory voyage of discovery as epic as the building of the pyramids or the race to the moon; and requiring, by the way, the same amount of heavy lifting.

B2B market research projects demand that you leverage a flexible tool kit of methodologies and may require you to invent one along the way. In fact, a global B2B/industrial market research project has many moving technical pieces and may require you to push your capabilities beyond your current technologies. To be effective, you must first embrace the idea that there is no road map. You have to find your way over, under or through obstacles and your most carefully chosen work plan may require revision.

The moon shot occurred with 64K of computer memory; the pyramids were built without compasses. Yet the lunar landing was a showcase of mathematical precision and the pyramids are in perfect alignment with true north. The key is to focus on the business objective and tailor the methodologies to the task at hand. Always remember: You never know where you will end up when you embark on the journey. Columbus was looking for Indonesia and only missed it by a hemisphere but in doing so he discovered an entire new world. Seek opportunities, not completed surveys.

6. Bonus: The ultimate key to B2B market research success (the right people with the right stuff)

If it is not yet apparent, I will spell it out: The secret to being successful in B2B and industrial market research is to employ the right people. Hire or engage consultants who are both strategists and researchers. If they have tangible business experience in an operating environment, it’s even better. Look for people with insatiable curiosity who constantly absorb knowledge from a wide range of sources.

If a consultant tells you she dreamed about a way to monetize a non-woven fabric application in operating rooms, you’ve found your candidate. If you catch them sneaking off to read Scientific American, The Economist or Engineering News-Record, they may go the distance.

Finally (and this is the secret ingredient), hire the most stubborn and cynical personalities you can find. At our firm, we administer personality profile tests to all new consultant candidates and we believe we have isolated “the chromosome.” The candidates that excel at projects performed at the intersection of hard and harder are off-the-scale cynical. If you ask them to accomplish A, B and C they will ask if this is from the Greek or Roman alphabet and ask whether the letter should be capitalized. They will question your hypotheses and perhaps suggest 1, 2 and 3 instead. They are not box-checkers. They don’t think inside or outside boxes – they don’t use boxes at all. In the world of research, possession of the cynical trait indicates to us that they will question everything, challenge all assumptions and not rest until the competitive landscape is laid bare and the path forward is obvious to all. At the end of the day, that is the mission of the B2B researcher: Make the competitive environment transparent so good strategic decisions can be made.

For the record, this advice comes to you from one human to another.