It’s largely anecdotal and unscientific, but I’ve observed a welcome change in the dialog around qualitative research. For a while there, it seemed like versions of the same old “focus groups are dead” argument were popping up with annoying regularity. And you could always count on some hackneyed reference to Steve Jobs hating focus groups being included in the blog post or article or op-ed.
But lately I’ve noticed more and more voices, at conferences, in articles and casual conversations, singling out qualitative in all its forms – from good-old focus groups to mobile ethnography – as a difference-maker, the method that generated the customer insight that convinced the CEO or awakened the engineers to the flaws in their design.
In a recent article posted on researcher Gallup’s Web site (“For B2B companies, customer surveys aren’t enough,” http://bit.ly/1TpHVnb), the firm’s Craig Kamins promotes key account reviews for B2B firms and emphasizes the value of their qualitative nature. “Quantitative measures uncover only so much about the relationships between a business-to-business company and its customers. To understand how its customers really feel, a company must also embark on a qualitative journey, which means having actual conversations with customers,” he writes.
He offers an anecdote in which Gallup interviewed the CEO of a major food distribution company on behalf of one of its clients and found out that the company was planning to let go of the client vendor. “A customer survey most likely would have shown that the food distributor was satisfied with the vendor,” he writes. “However, that survey alone might not have revealed how close the vendor was to being let go. Fortunately, Gallup connected its client with the food distributor to rectify the situation. But without that face-to-face conversation, the client most likely would never have known the status of its account – until it was too late.”
That’s an extreme example, I grant you, but illustrative nevertheless of the value of dialog.
Elsewhere in this month’s issue we have two articles that look at the role of inertia in the B2B customer’s pur-chasing habits and a qualitative approach such as the key account review seems like a great way to uncover and then investigate the causes of inertia or any other similar problem related to the sales and vendor selection process.
When considering potential account review interviewees, Gallup recommends including a range of accounts that fall into one of three categories: high-performing relationships, characterized by high growth, a strong relationship and strong product penetration; stagnant relationships, characterized by low growth, a good relation-ship and weak or stagnant product penetration; and struggling relationships, characterized by declining growth, an adversarial relationship and shrinking product penetration.
Once the conversations are complete, the key, of course, is doing something with what you learn. For its part, Gallup briefs senior leadership and individual account teams on the findings. “Leaders typically take action on the more systemic findings,” Kamins writes. “However, some problems or opportunities raised at the account level can be addressed only at the executive level ... Stakeholders also might talk about unique business opportunities for the B2B company that they might not have relayed to customer leadership through the normal sales or business development channels. Some of these opportunities might be in the early stages of development or go beyond the company’s areas of expertise. Nevertheless, even a cursory discussion of the opportunity might provide the company with a chance to take its relationship with the customer to a higher level.”