Hear from the right people

Editor’s note: Nick Calo is president of Calo Research Services, Cincinnati.

Stand next to the elevator after some business-to-business groups and you might hear someone’s clients making the most insightful comments of the night.

“I don’t think those people ever understood what this concept was all about.”

“That one ‘expert’ in the group would make a comment, then the rest couldn’t wait to agree with him.”

“With $200 incentives, I can’t believe we couldn’t get more people to show up.”

“I bet they would have reacted differently if they knew who was behind the glass.”

Business-to-business focus groups present some unique challenges that can cause the viewers to be more quotable than the participants: technically complex subjects, status differences among participants, a need for product knowledge, shrinking target audiences, participants unresponsive to cash incentives, and the impact of study sponsorship. The following provides guidelines for responding to these challenges and ensuring that the most intriguing comments come from the respondents’ side of the glass.

Find ways for the moderator and client to share the stage

There’s an unwritten rule in consumer focus groups that the participants are never to see or speak with the clients. Clients enter facilities through separate entrances and they watch groups hidden behind one-way mirrors. This is based on the unspoken fear that if the participants ever met the clients, they would never again buy a product from the company; and, the spoken fear that if clients were to interact with the participants, the clients would assume the role of sales rep and influence the group’s results.

Business-to-business moderators must be willing to break this rule and occasionally permit a client representative to participate in the session. This need exists most clearly when the subject matter is technical. For example, in a focus group among biochemists discussing a new DNA testing procedure, a moderator, no matter how much he or she has prepared for the session, will not be able to handle technical questions on the DNA testing procedure as well as a biochemist who’s worked in product development. In such a case, the product developer with the necessary technical credentials should convey the product concept to the group and address any technical questions. The moderator can then excuse the product developer, or have that person remain in the room for technical expertise, for the remainder of the session. The moderator, with knowledge of group dynamics, and the product developer, with superior technical expertise, can produce a far better group than either of these two individuals could alone.

Identify and neutralize high-status participants

Anyone who has conducted or observed consumer focus groups knows that some consumers claim expertise that tends to be more illusionary than real. Conduct enough groups about grocery products and you are sure to hear at least one testimonial about someone’s brother-in-law who has irrefutable evidence that all private label products are identical to the national brands they are hoping to knock off. Fortunately, other group members generally recognize the limited knowledge that these pseudo-experts possess, minimizing the damage they can cause.

In the business-to-business setting, however, real experts might appear in your sessions and real status differences will be apparent. If you conduct sessions among commercial real estate agents, participating agents will know who has the history of landing the big deals. In a session among heads of CPA firms, awareness of whose practice is growing and whose is not will be widespread.

What can be done about these status and expertise differences in business-to-business sessions? They can be minimized somewhat by recruiting along variables that will produce more homogenous groups. But they’ll never be totally eliminated as long as business-to-business participants are capable of identifying the very real status differences that are likely to occur whenever a group of business professionals is assembled.

The strategy that must be employed by business-to-business moderators involves a two-step process. First, the real experts - those that are likely to have high status in the group - need to be identified. A simple review of the participant list prior to the session can aid this process. For example, in sessions among university library directors at a national convention, if one of the participants is the library director at Harvard, the fact that a perceived status difference will exist should be obvious. In many cases, however, the status differences are not likely to be so obvious. If you are in a city doing sessions among residential architects, a review of the recruiting list will not tell you who is seen to be at the fore of design innovations. In such a case, the moderator should seek the assistance of someone in the viewing room who has local market knowledge (e.g., a regional marketing director or area sales manager) to determine if anyone in the session is likely to be seen as an expert by the other participants.

If experts cannot be identified before the session begins, close observation of the participants during the group should provide clues as to status differences that exist. Sometimes, these clues are not so subtle. Once, when conducting research on a particular educational topic, I asked the group who they felt would be the ideal author of a guide to teaching the subject. Without hesitation, one of the group members named another participant in the session! Clearly, I did not have trouble identifying the perceived expert in that instance.

Once identified, the second step in the process is to make sure that the real experts contribute to the session but do not control it. If at all possible, the experts should not be allowed to speak first on a subject. And, if they do try to speak first, they should be asked to hold their comments until others have expressed their views. It’s been my experience that one such request by the moderator will cause real experts to recognize that they have the ability to sway the group and they will willingly hold their comments until others have spoken. Only in the most desperate situations would we recommend that the expert be dismissed from the session. Not only would that eliminate a potentially valuable participant from the session, but it says to the other participants, “Say something that sounds intelligent and you too can be tossed!”

Give participants the information needed for decision-making

A common moderating technique in consumer groups is for the moderator to not directly answer a group member’s question about a product feature or function. Instead, the moderator responds to a feature/function question with another question. For example, the participant’s question, “Is this product safe for the environment?” might be met with, “Is environmental safety something that you think about when purchasing a product such as this?” The question on environmental safety is never answered by the moderator.

While this strategy of withholding feature/function information can occasionally be used in the business-to-business setting, it works less well than it does in consumer groups. This is because business purchasers are more accustomed to reviewing product specifications when evaluating products. While it is doubtful that many business purchase decisions are made on “specsmanship” alone, many participants in business-to-business groups will approach a product concept with an attitude of, “Tell me the specs and I will tell you if I like it or not.”

Withholding a key product specification will cause such participants to push back from the table and refuse to evaluate the concept. And, their refusal to evaluate the concept without knowing key specifications might be justified. For example, if a carpenter who installs crown moldings in residences asks about a power nailer concept, “Will that tool drive a two-inch nail into oak?,” he needs to know the answer to that question to evaluate the tool. It is not acceptable for the moderator to respond with the question, “Would you want it to do that?” We know that the participant would like it to do that; otherwise, he would have never asked the question. The appropriate moderator response to that question can only be “yes” or “no,” and it would be unreasonable to expect the carpenter to evaluate the tool until receiving an answer.

Treat the focus group as the likely end to the research process

Focus group moderators who conduct consumer research sessions are accustomed to recommending that qualitative research results be validated through larger-sample, more rigorously conducted quantitative research. Ideally, the same would be true in the business-to-business focus group setting. But, for multiple reasons (e.g., timing, budget, the small size of the population being sampled), business researchers have to view the quantitative follow-up as a study that is often recommended, but rarely executed. Acknowledging the myth of the quantitative follow-up demands some changes in the moderator’s orientation to the group. Rather than an attitude of, “Let’s generate some hypotheses for further exploration,” the moderator needs to have an approach of, “Let’s answer as many questions as possible, because this is probably the only research that my client will do on the topic.”

Find a non-monetary incentive to seal the deal

When a senior business executive or successful professional considers participation in a focus group, it might be one of the few times that the expression “It ain’t about the money” is actually true. Money cannot be the main attraction when a professional who bills $250 per hour takes three hours out of the day to earn a $200 honorarium. So what can draw that professional to the group? The opportunity for some form of non-monetary gain. Convince the group prospect that he will benefit in some way - learn of a new product before his competitors do, interact with other leaders in the field - and you have a better chance of landing him than by waving an honorarium in front of him. Offering a reasonable honorarium is important: it conveys to potential participants that their time is valued. But the honorarium is not a sufficient tool for drawing most high-earning executives and professionals to a group session.

Exercise caution when running those “blind” sessions

Many business marketers are unwilling to disclose study sponsorship to group participants, basing their reluctance on confidentiality and bias issues. Of these two factors, the confidentiality concern would seem to be more tenable: it’s probable that in some cases, a company could be harmed by tipping its hand in the marketplace.

The concern with biasing the participants seems to be less well-founded. Brand name can influence attitudes toward the concept being tested, but characterizing that effect as a biasing influence treats being sensitive to the realities of the marketplace as something to be avoided. In the marketplace, brand names influence attitudes toward products every day, particularly in services marketing, where there is no tangible product for the business buyer to examine. If that brand name influence is positive, marketers call it “brand equity” and spend millions of dollars nourishing and defending it. If it’s negative, they refer to it as a “bias,” as something to be avoided. But failing to disclose the brand in the focus group setting treats the concept of brand equity as irrelevant, and opens the researcher to the possibility of creating his or her very own New Coke nightmare. So, if you are uncertain about disclosing your brand name in a business-to-business focus group, think of this statement made by a perceptive marketing executive that quickly settled a debate on whether or not his groups on IT services should be run as blind sessions: “We’ll do blind testing of our services when we start selling them unbranded.”

Enhance the quality

As you conduct focus groups in the business-to-business sector, think about the issues identified in this article and how they might enhance the quality of the sessions that you run. It is unlikely that all of these guidelines can be applied to a single business-to-business qualitative study. But selectively applying the guidelines raised in this article - utilizing the knowledge of a client-presenter, identifying and controlling high-status participants, giving group members the information needed for decision-making, treating the focus group as the likely end to the research process, using non-monetary incentives to encourage attendance, and considering how the disclosure of study sponsorship will affect the accuracy of the information you receive - will improve your odds of conducting successful business-to-business focus groups.