B2B Target Audience Research Methods Start With Non-Buyers

Most guides to target audience research methods were written for consumer brands, so they lean on surveys and demographic tools. A B2B company with a small pool of possible buyers gets little from either. The better evidence sits outside your analytics: in sales calls, lost deals, job posts and what buyers say in public.

The standard list has a second problem. Nearly every method on it samples people you already have: site visitors, the survey list, users who agree to an interview. Research built that way describes the customer base a company drifted into.

Today's customer list is the sum of earlier choices about who to chase. It can't show you the buyers who said no, and those are often the ones worth winning.

For a B2B company, the way to research your customers is to start with the people who aren't customers yet. The six methods below run in order. The first sets who you're studying, and the last puts what you found beside the customers you have.

Decide which buyers you're studying before you pick a method

Write down the buyers you want to understand before you choose a single method. Name the kind of company and the person in it whose decision you want to win.

Skip that step and research drifts to whoever is easiest to reach. That's usually current customers, because they answer email and take calls.

Choosing that market is a decision of its own, and the guide on how to choose a target market covers how to make it. Everything below assumes you've made the choice and now need evidence about the buyers in it.

Lost deals are the nearest evidence of who you aren't winning

The buyers who looked at you and went elsewhere tell you more about your missing audience than any current customer can. So do the deals that stalled because the buyer chose to do nothing. Ask both groups what they picked instead, and why.

W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, authors of Blue Ocean Strategy, sort noncustomers into tiers in an excerpt from their book on HubSpot's blog.

Their second tier is "buyers who have seen your industry's offerings as an option to fulfill their needs but have voted against them."

Setting up a full win-loss program is a separate subject. For audience research, a list of recent losses and the reasons those buyers gave is a workable place to begin.

Your competitors' customers explain their choice in public

Buyers who chose a competitor leave a record you can read without asking anyone. A competitor's case studies and the customer logos on its site show which kinds of company it wins, and what problem each one wanted fixed.

Reviews go further. On sites such as G2, where your market has them, buyers describe the purchase in their own words, including what tipped them toward the vendor they picked.

Target accounts leave a public trail your sales calls never hear

Some of the buyers you want have never spoken to anyone at your company, but a job post shows what a company is hiring for, which hints at what it's worried about.

Earnings calls, conference talks and LinkedIn posts by people in the role you sell to show how those people describe their problems. Read them for the words as much as the facts.

Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey shows why this trail matters. When B2B buyers are considering a purchase, they spend only 17% of that time meeting potential suppliers, and that figure covers every supplier combined. Gartner's page doesn't give the sample or year behind the figure, so treat it as a rough guide.

So most of a buyer's time on the purchase is spent away from any supplier. Much of what shapes the decision never reaches your sales calls, so you have to go and find it.

Qualitative research fits B2B because the buyers are few

B2B buyers are few, and fewer still answer surveys. A handful of good conversations with the right people can cover a real share of the market you named in the first step.

Most of the methods above are already qualitative: conversations with lost buyers, and reading what a competitor's customers and your target accounts say in public. In B2B they carry most of the weight, because a survey can't reach enough of the right buyers to count.

The voice-of-customer research guide covers how to run those conversations and listen for the words buyers use. What changes here is who sits across from you: lost buyers, a competitor's customers and people at target accounts, with a few current customers for contrast.

The gap between your research and your customer list is the finding

Put the buyers you researched beside the customers you already have. Note where they differ, in the problems they named and the reasons they gave for going elsewhere or doing nothing.

Where the two groups match, your current customers are a fair guide to the market you chose.

JCDecaux, the outdoor advertising company, shows what a difference like that can reveal, as Kim and Mauborgne tell it. Before it introduced what it called street furniture in 1964, outdoor advertising meant billboards and transport ads. The industry was unpopular and small, and many advertisers stayed away. Those advertisers had weighed the offer and turned it down.

The story comes from the authors' own book, which makes the case for their framework, and it says what JCDecaux found but not how it went looking.

What JCDecaux found was a shared reason for staying away. In the authors' words, it "realized that the lack of stationary downtown locations was the key reason the industry remained unpopular and small."

Cities could offer spots such as bus stops, where people wait a few minutes. JCDecaux gave them street furniture "free to municipalities," upkeep included, and covered the cost by selling the advertising panels built into it.

The cities were partners that supplied the locations. The buyers JCDecaux served were advertisers, and its answer came from the ones missing from the industry's customer list: the advertisers who had stayed away.

A survey with a big sample still samples the wrong people

A few conversations? That's an anecdote. The objection has weight. Surveys and analytics scale, and a large sample is easier to trust and easier to defend when someone asks how you know.

Surveys do earn a place once you know what to ask. But the numbers from your own site and survey list describe only the people already coming to you, however many of them there are.

The Gartner figure and the JCDecaux story above point at the same blind spot: the evidence that matters sits with buyers your own list doesn't hold.

The six methods mostly take time, and the hardest step is the first one: deciding whose decisions you want to win. If it would help to talk through what this means for your brand, get in touch.

Once lost buyers and current customers start giving the same reasons, you know what to ask, and that's when a survey earns its place.