How to Design Powerful B2B Surveys That Influence C-Suite Decisions with Becky Lawlor

[00:00:00] Becky: When you go to design your survey, you need to keep that in mind. I think a lot of people think survey design is like, "I'll just whip out a survey." But I would actually say your survey is your most crucial piece of this whole thing. If you don't get your survey right, your data won't be right, either because it won't be quality data or because you won't have written the questions in a way that allows you to draw out interesting stories or just to transform those into headlines.
[00:00:24] Mike: My name's Mike Lander, and you're listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club Podcast, where we bring you actionable insights about sales RFPs, negotiations, and difficult procurement discussions from sales leaders, brand leaders, and procurement leaders. Please subscribe to get updates when new episodes are released.
Becky, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club Podcast. Great to have you.
[00:00:51] Becky: Excited to be here, Mike.
[00:00:53] Mike: So we have obviously the pre-record, really interesting episode all about surveys and thought leadership and ultimately kind of content-based marketing, why it's so important. And luckily, you're an expert in the field.
So without further ado, who are you, what do you do, and what's your favorite song and why?
[00:01:10] Becky: Yeah. I am the founder of Redpoint Insights. It is a boutique marketing agency focused on thought leadership and content marketing with a kind of niche focus on doing original research, whether that be survey-based research or other first party data that you might have for that kind of original research report.
[00:01:30] Mike: Perfect. And your favorite song and why?
[00:01:32] Becky: My favorite song is Brother Louie, which is probably one that most people don't know, but it's- No ... back from the eight- Don't--
[00:01:38] Mike: Never heard of it. It's
[00:01:41] Becky: back in the '80s from my, uh, teens, and my friends and I just loved jamming out to it. And so whenever I wanna just be in kind of a fun, light mood or lift my spirits- Yeah
it's a great song for me to put on. It's really an energetic song, so.
[00:01:54] Mike: Brilliant. It always, songs, music, always reminders of people, good times, sometimes sad times, but it's normally, it's certainly an emotional response usually with music, and it's a good icebreaker. And it's obviously Becky Lawlor. So for those listening, this is Becky Lawlor, L-A-W-L-O-R.
So questions, Becky. Let's just start off with something simple. So what is survey-based thought leadership, and is it effective? Could you give some examples and some stats?
[00:02:19] Becky: Yeah. So when we're talking about survey-based thought leadership, it is what it sounds like. You're running some kind of survey or quantitative research where you're asking folks different questions to get insights that you can then report out in your content, whether that be kind of a cornerstone research report or however else you wanna package the data.
Typically, you do a cornerstone research report, but then you package it out in a bunch of different ways as well, whether that's your blog posts, infographics, webinars, even using the data in speaking engagements. There's hundreds of ways you can use the research, and so I think that's one of the things to say, like, is it worth it?
I would say, and I actually had one client say to me, "It's the gift that keeps on giving," because- It is ... there's so many ways you can use it.
[00:03:05] Mike: It's evergreen.
[00:03:06] Becky: Yes.
[00:03:06] Mike: It, it never... I mean, wow. So I'm a director of an architectural interior design company called Ensoul, which my listeners probably don't know about, but it's been going for, I don't know, we've been running it for six- for 10 years or so.
We wrote a blog post which was basically a very long form piece of thought leadership 10 years ago. It still ranks today, and it still gets us leads. It's, if you do it right, and it's proper thought leadership, and it's helpful, it can be incredibly powerful and last for years and years and years.
[00:03:39] Becky: Yeah, and I think that's one of the things is, you know, what exactly, as you said, if it's proper thought leadership.
And I think that that's even a term that may- needs a little defining because it's definitely a label sometimes on thought leadership that really isn't thought leadership.
[00:03:52] Mike: It's not thoughtful, and it's not leadership.
[00:03:54] Becky: And it needs to have insights that people can't find elsewhere, whether that is-
[00:03:58] Mike: Exactly
[00:03:59] Becky: because the person writing the piece has a really in-depth expertise that others, and they have their viewpoint from that expertise or their insights or whether you've gone out and gathered survey or interviews and you're bringing that kind of unique insight in from people who have deep expertise. Or this other way, which is where survey-based research falls in.
And, and one of the reasons that you might wanna use this is sometimes it is hard to get either your subject matter experts internally to give you the time to develop other types of thought leadership. That's one struggle my clients have had, and they found that doing this other type survey-based thought leadership works.
But it also, by investing in researching your industry and your market, you are showing when you're gathering unique insights again that show that you have something to say that other people don't know, you have data that nobody else has- Yeah, you have a
[00:04:48] Mike: point of view.
[00:04:49] Becky: Correct. You have a strong point of view based on the data you've gathered, and typically people are very interested in that because often it's from their peers.
They wanna know what their peers are doing, where their challenges lie. Benchmarking type of surveys is another great one. People wanna see how they benchmark against others, whether that's on, you know, could be how they're implementing something, could just be understanding, like what their, I mean, salary reports do well.
People wanna know, like, what, how do I compare? What am I making? There's a whole bunch of different types of angles you can go with, with, uh, survey-based research, but ultimately it does create a thought leadership piece because you are bringing something truly original to the marketplace.
[00:05:27] Mike: Exactly. I was taught this in the mid-'90s at KPMG when I was a consultant there, and it's held true to this day.
You know, 30 years later, I still believe, and my evidence would tell me that it's true. True thought leadership, when you've genuinely taken time to build something, cuts through. And we talk about later on, Becky, as well about building trust and particularly in the B2B space, how critical that is if you're engaging a prospect in a, a journey that might not convert for, you know, 12 to 24 months.
Building trust with a buyer is really hard these days, and thought leadership is one of those cornerstones that enables you to build trust. Just going off piece a little bit for a second, why is that? Why does this thought leadership become so important when you're building trust?
[00:06:14] Becky: I think it becomes so important because people actually make their buying decisions based on emotion.
I think we all, if you know anything about the sales decision , it's not all based on logic, and trust is a big factor. I mean, I think this is why even when you think about, like referrals being the strongest way to close a sale typically, that's because there's inherent trust in that relationship because they trust the person who referred them.
And so the same thing happens with when you invest and build your authority in your industry or your marketplace, which is really what research does, is it builds your authority. It also builds your brand awareness because you're able to get- It's one of the few things, again, that helps you get PR and press, and that is another way that you can build authority as well as just kind of get more awareness for your brand.
But journalists and trade publications are constantly looking for new stories. They don't want to repeat the same stuff that's already out there. And so again, having original data is something that is really appealing to journalists, especially if it is something surprising, you're busting a myth in your industry, just some way sets you apart.
So when you've created that trust by showing that you are willing to invest in the industry with research, then... And, and the other piece of it is a trust of just like the numbers sort of speak for themselves. It's not an opinion either. So you also have hard data, which is something people trust over an opinion.
So when you get into a buying committee and they're down to making the decision, the person who can show data to the CFO, to the C- CEO, CMO, whoever they have to make the case to, that shows, you know, that the data is showing why they should invest in this, the data's showing that others are investing in it, that they're gonna fall behind if they don't invest in it.
Whatever it is that your data presents, that also builds a kind of trust and it does help close sales and deals.
[00:08:07] Mike: Definitely. Becky, you had-- I remember you shared some research with me that you'd done which basically backed this up. Yeah. So there were some stats, weren't there, that you had about demonstrating that basically the thought leadership genuinely is valuable.
Yeah. So just whilst Becky's k- just kind of pulling that up, again, I wrote a piece. So I'm on LinkedIn, you know, I do a couple of posts a week. I've done the thing for years. I've never really cut through. And then last year, the back end of last year and the beginning of this year, I wrote a, what I think would be considered a thought leadership piece around the marketing agency world, and that had over three hundred requests for that piece of thought leadership.
It's a forty-seven page insights piece into what's-- how AI is going to disrupt the marketing agency landscape. So again, I can testify myself. If it's true thought leadership and it's genuinely thoughtful and it's taken time, then it will demonstrate your credibility within an industry. So what were some of the stats that you found, Becky?
[00:09:03] Becky: Yeah. So in our research, one of the stats was that ninety-seven percent of B2B buyers state that original research has at least some influence on their final vendor decision, and fifty-six percent of buyers explicitly call the influence of original research very significant to their purchase. We also found that for the C-suite, it's even more important.
They were one point six times more likely than other stakeholders in the buying committee to cite original research as the single biggest factor in their final vendor decision. So all of this to say is if you don't sort of have some kind of hard data Validating why they should purchase your solution.
It is much hi- harder for, and I think especially when you think about, like, going back to kind of trust, but also thinking about the buying committee. The buying committee is often no longer one or two people. It is a group of people. It's gotten bigger and more complex, which means you have more people you have to persuade to invest in whatever it is you're trying to convince the rest of the buying committee to invest in.
So again, if you are putting hard data in the hands of the buying committee, you're more likely to close that sale. We also found that for High value and complex deals that 76% of buyers rate originals research as essential. So again, thinking about if you're selling something that's 50K or above, again, you probably want to have some kind of hard evidence about why they should be investing in your service or solution.
[00:10:26] Mike: And I always say to when I talk to marketing agencies, professional services firms about when they're responding to RFPs. When you write the proposal against the questions that have been asked, the buyer kind of expects you to be able to answer all the questions. That's kind of a bit of a given, really.
The proposal document is designed to basically get you down to a shortlist of three from a long list of five or seven. What can often swing the decision to put you in the shortlist is the thought leadership that you attach to your proposal. If you attached a proper piece of thought leadership that was primary research and secondary, and is genuinely thoughtful about where the industry's going, well, it's gonna influence the decision-making to put you into the final shortlist.
It's a differentiator. It makes you stand out, and your evidence that the research that you collected absolutely backs that up. So now that we know, hopefully categorically, undeniably, thought leadership, survey-based often with primary data, is valuable to buyers. There's a reason to do it. There's an economic reason to do it.
So now talk about how do you do it effectively. So what's the process end-to-end, including kinda survey design, conducting research effectively? How do you choose emails or panels? How do you get the story right, and how do you vet vendors to ensure they understand content-driven research if you're using third parties?
[00:11:42] Becky: Yeah. So I think it's really important when your goal is to use this research as content versus-- I mean, there's a lot of types of research you can do. You can do market research, you can do pricing research, you can even just do kind of customer research. But when your ultimate goal is to push this out as content for your ICP to use for press, for just general content marketing and thought leadership, the very first thing you need to do is really be thinking about, well, if you're gonna use a vendor from the vendor perspective, can they-- do they have experience in the research side, and do they understand content marketing?
Because if you just go to a research firm, they do know how to write a survey for statistical validity and, you know, to avoid bias and all of those things. But what they may not be skilled at is thinking about- You really need a story, you need a narrative, you need a point of view, you need headlines, you need messages to come out of this, and they may not be thinking in those terms, and so they may not structure the survey in a way that gives you essentially interesting point of view, narrative, and data from that perspective.
You will have data, but can you turn it into a story? Which is, as we all know, what draws people in. You have to have the hook, you have to have an emotional- You gotta
[00:12:55] Mike: have a story ... story for
[00:12:56] Becky: people- You have to have a
[00:12:57] Mike: story
[00:12:58] Becky: backed up
[00:12:58] Mike: with evidence ...
[00:12:59] Becky: and I do see this, like, you know, the other piece of this is really thinking through, even if you have sort of a point of view, I see often, again, whether you do this in-house or with a vendor, that people get excited about just, "Oh, I wanna know this.
I'd like to know this. Some- Joe over here in product marketing wants this, and Sally, you know, over here wants to know this." And people kind of lose sight of like, yes, that data would be interesting, but how does it drive the narrative? What is our point of view? What is the narrative we want to say? What are our hypothesis that we would like to prove?
What myths do we believe that could be busted? Like we, our personal experience, what we see out there tells us that while people think this, we are seeing that that's not really true, and we could actually bust that myth. Those are the kinds of things that are gonna garner eyeballs on your content when you're finished.
So you need to be very careful that you design a research angle and a survey that has a narrative thread in it. Because I've seen all too often people just end up with data points again, and so they might call it their, you know, tech trends report, and it's just really a bunch of kind of like, here's this data point, here's this data point- Bunch of stats
and there's just a bunch of stats No one cares And nobody cares about that. They might find one stat interesting, but it's not really driving them, and it's actually not building trust in that case. You're not building authority because- Exactly ... you're not really showing them that you have a point of view and that it's a valid point of view.
You're just showing them that you could gather some data.
[00:14:21] Mike: And I think also, Becky, that when I've done them, I did another one a couple of years ago with a statistician, and we'll come on to the role of statisticians in this as well. But we built a... I built a hypothesis. So mine was around do trust builders in negotiations get better economic outcomes?
So we started with a hypothesis and then built a bunch of questions with the same scale so that you had like 100 questions, same scale, so you could cross compare. I learnt loads with a statistician about how to design a survey, but I started with the outcome that I wanted to test. What's the hypothesis I want to test?
If the data ended up disproving the hypothesis, well, I've learnt something. Either way you win, but you gotta start off with something, which is what am I aiming for?
[00:15:01] Becky: Yeah, and I think it's also important to think about what are your... I usually start with clients, what are your actual goals with this? Is it PR?
Is it lead gen? Is it just to have something out there that builds your authority? Like where do you wanna go with this? Because if it's PR, then I wanna know what publications do you really wanna get in. Then I wanna look at those and see like what are they writing about? What do they care about? So we create an angle that would- interest them?
Or if it's for lead gen, what do they care about so we're creating an angle for them? And to often you can have more than one goal, and you can still find a good angle. But yeah, so the first step is to really spend time on your research strategy, figure out what your point of view is, your hypothesis, and I'd like to have two or three, typically like what I call is two or three red threads in there that you can pull because you don't always know, and sometimes you really do wanna test something you really have no idea about, but you'd like to test it, and you're not sure if it doesn't come out or it might just fall flat.
You still wanna protect sort of your research investment here. So you wanna make sure that you have a couple of narratives that you think are interesting that tie together, but if one doesn't really end up being all that interesting, you still have a story to tell. And then when you go to design your survey, you need to keep that in mind.
I think a lot of people think survey design is like, "Oh, I'll just whip out a survey," but I would actually say your survey is your most crucial piece of this whole thing. If you don't get your survey right, your data won't be right, either because it won't be quality data or because you won't have written the questions in a way that allows you to draw out interesting stories or just to transform those into headlines.
So you need to kind of bring all of those skill sets together into your survey design. How do I make sure that I'm writing a quality survey from the data collection standpoint and avoiding bias and all of those kinds of things, but also, how do I write a survey that I gather the type of data and written in a way that the questions, when I flip the question to make a headline, it makes a good headline?
So that's all of those things need to be considered. And I've seen survey questions where people are just asking on a scale of one to five. That is not great for content marketing, I'll just tell you right now, because you don't want to flip to a headline like, "70% of people said on a scale of one to five, a five about X."
You wanna get more granular than that and have real things and real details. So I guess the other piece is, in this process, is who are you gonna survey? How are you gonna find them? And that comes down to you typically have a couple options. You have an email list. This generally is the cheapest way usually because you can just send your survey out to your email list.
However, there are some things to think about there. You have to have a pretty big email list often to do this successfully. The average response rate is typically 1 to 2% from an email list. If you have a very engaged list or your survey topic is really intriguing or there's a reason folks would be super motivated to fill it out, you might get 5 or 10%.
I mean, I have seen every once in a while somebody get like 50% response, but that is way outside the box and I wouldn't plan on that.
[00:17:52] Mike: Exactly.
[00:17:53] Becky: So-
[00:17:53] Mike: So even some basic numbers, Becky, just even some basic arithmetic. If you get, let's say, a 1% response rate, say, from a target audience and you need, say, 100 responses to get something vaguely statistically significant That's 10,000 qualified emails in the target market that has a point or that whose responses are valuable to your piece of research.
That's a lot
[00:18:20] Becky: Yeah. So you really do have to have a big list to make this work, so that's the first consideration there. There can be some other challenges with email lists because again, you also were talking about your target audience, so is your email list cleanable? Is everybody on the list in your target audience?
If they're not, do you not know and then are you gonna disqualify them? You know, if they're your customer base, sometimes it doesn't feel great if somebody goes in to take the survey and then you kick them out 'cause they don't qualify So you have to kind of think through the, you know, the quality of your list, how you are-- your segmentation capabilities with your list, what you know about your list as well.
And then there is the part where, like I said, it, it can be the cheapest, but often you still need to incentivize people to take a survey, even if it's your email list, because that's just human nature. I've seen this, we've tested it, we've tried. I, I mean, I've thought, "Oh, these people would be motivated to take it for this reason."
And we've tested like no incentive versus just like a ten dollar Starbucks gift card, and way more responses with even a ten dollar gift card. We've also tested like, you know, kind of a cheaper, easier like keep your budget intact way is just like, you know, a lottery type of incentive. Like, "Four people will get a hundred dollar Amazon gift card.
Take this survey." It is incentive. It works better than nothing, but it actually does not work as well typically as everybody getting just a ten dollar gift card. People would rather know they're gonna get something versus the lottery format. So you do have to think about that as well if you're gonna incentivize it.
And the other thing, once you start to incentivize, you have to think about fraud and how you're gonna manage that in terms of people trying to retake the same survey with all their email addresses. Um, and-- or-- and one thing I'd never-- I'd recommend is putting it like, especially if it's incentivized, just dropping it on LinkedIn or on some social media platform because you'll get bots, you'll get people from all over, and you'll find that it's really hard to keep it clean and manage the incoming fraud.
So the other option, though, if you decide not to go with your email list or you just don't have an email list that would work, is to use a panel vendor, and there are B2B panel vendors out there for every type of B2B professional and niche. Yes, it does cost money per response, but the benefit there is you can very cleanly identify how many you want in your sample size, and they will confirm that they can deliver that many.
So right out the gate, you kind of have confidence, like, we want a sample of five hundred, we're gonna be able to get five hundred. They've committed to us that they have a large enough sample size to do that. They handle the incentives with their list. They, you know, and a reputable one is verifying these people on LinkedIn.
They're doing their own kind of back-end checks to really make sure that these humans are who they are. And then you're also writing your survey You have usually some qualifier questions where you write them in a way that it's not obvious what you're looking for, but you can screen out people that don't fit the exact like, you know, role this-- that you want, company size that you want them from, industries, whatever it is that you want.
So you can kind of have a lot more control over the sample size and you know upfront how many you're gonna get, how many responses, and you do know the cost right up You know, all of that is laid out up front so you know what to budget for it, so
[00:21:30] Mike: So before we go on to the kind of, uh, is it affordable question at the end, the back end of all this, so you've basically you've designed your survey, you've got a hypothesis, you've designed your survey, you've worked with someone sensible around what the right questions are.
You've then talked to a third party to work out can you get the right number of responses from the right target audience. You've got the responses back. Now you need to analyze it and produce the report. Any tips around that in particular?
[00:21:55] Becky: Yeah. I think it's important if you don't have kind of data analysis skills yourself, which I know a lot of marketing teams don't, and I know that this can be a big pain point when you're running it in-house and doing, trying to do it yourself, is that you, you know, even if you go on Upwork or something or just work with a vendor, you wanna have a data analyst kind of help you with that data probably.
The other thing that I think is important, which I've heard from a lot of my clients who were kind of doing this, like, on their own or kind of piecemealing pieces of this process, is getting it in a format that it's really shareable across the organization is really helpful. So getting a, like, a PowerPoint deck together that really cleanly kind of shows the data, has headers, key takeaways in a way that is easily absorbable allows you to use that data across the organization much more effectively, so again, just amps up your ROI from it.
The executives can then easily take key points and put it into their presentation decks when they're going to events or whatever. But the other thing to think about is you also wanna do a lot of what I call cross-tabbing or data segmentation because that's often where some of the most interesting, what I call hidden stories lie.
So you wanna not just-- it's not just, "Here's my survey questions, and here's the responses," you know. Because every survey program that you use will spit out a PDF with that information. But you wanna go dig deeper. You wanna look at, like, demographic stuff, like was there differences across different industries?
Sometimes it can be really interesting if you surveyed, like, the C-suite and you surveyed individual contributors. Is there kind of, like, a perception gap between those? Does the C-suite think that the individual contributor's got all the tools they need, and this is what's happening on the ground, and it's all going smoothly, and the individual contributor's just saying, "No, we're, like, stuck.
It's taking us hours. This is a huge problem"? That can be a really interesting story, just kind of that gap there. But you also even wanna look at or think about building models like maturity models. Like, is there different levels of maturity, and what happens when you are, like, a leader versus a laggard?
What benefits do you see? What outcomes do you get as a leader versus those that are lagging? So, like, let's take AI 'cause it's the hot topic right now. Who is actually implementing and scaling AI versus who is just barely, like, experimenting with it? How does that change, you know, what they're able to do, they're competitiveness in certain areas?
All of that, you know, whether they see how far along they are on the scale of what they can do, like maybe with their data. Are they actually, if they have good data infrastructure, are they actually able to get ROI from their AI projects versus somebody who doesn't have good data infrastructure? When you have those kind of insights, it becomes really interesting to show, again, why somebody might make an investment.
If the people that have made the investment are way up here and have this competitive advantage, that is hard data about why somebody down here now might decide to invest when they wouldn't have. Going back to that, like, how does this help close deals? That's one of the ways, those kind of benchmarking and maturity models or even ROI frameworks, we looked at that, kind of like what are the cost impacts of doing something.
We do a lot of those kind of studies too, like how much time exactly are people, are engineers or IT folks spending on maintenance of something, and what is the cost of that versus if they could get it automated and things like that, and sometimes the numbers are pretty big and compelling.
[00:25:04] Mike: I think also something that's, I think, definitely in maturity models, I think those are great.
Coming from a consulting background, we always used to use those, like spider grams with, "Here's the benchmark, here's where you sit on eight dimensions." It opens the discussion. I think also having personas, archetypes. So again, if the research lends itself to developing archetypes, there are four key arc- For example, in negotiation, we found out there were four key archetypes.
Uh, there was a trust builder, there was a commander, and there were some others. That kind of thing, again, because people want to self-identify, is where do I fit in terms of the archetype? Where do I fit in terms of maturity? So is it affordable? So roughly, give us a scale. You can never give anything scientific on one of these podcasts because every situation is clearly unique, but give a range.
[00:25:49] Becky: Yeah. So I think you have, obviously, at the high end, you have your, I'll say, academic or just well-known, um, industry consultancies, and yeah, those folks are gonna charge often three figures, and it is expensive, and you have a big name on it. Way down, obviously, the very lowest cost would be kind of trying to do it yourself, you know, which I would say if you don't have the budget to work with somebody or you do have the in-house skill set to do it, you know, I think even if you don't have the in-house skill set and you have not much budget, I do think it's worth at least trying to do it, whether that's something...
Just start really small. Start with your, like, Typeform survey- You know, try to implement the best practices I just talked about as best you can and learn from the experience. So, and you know, if all you have is an email list and you just want to-- hopefully you can get 100 responses, which I would say in a B2B framing is the minimum you kind of need to be, have enough statistical validity.
So that would be the almost free end. But I think there's a large range in between. There are kind of outside of the big consultancies, there's kind of like a next level of consultancies that might be very industry s- focused, and I would say often it's 50 to 75K, in that range. And then you have kind of agencies that do it that could be anywhere from 30 to 50 now.
And then you have smaller boutique agencies or Freelancers or consultants, and I think, I mean, I have an offering that's as low as 10 to 15K to do this with a smaller survey and includes a report and a s- and a small sample size. So it really depends. You know, some of it depends on what your goals are.
Like, if your goal really is to, you know, you want the big consultancy name on it and you've got the budget, then maybe that's where you go. I will tell you, I did some... This is one of the things I was curious about and wanted to myth bust myself and my research was that I did do some research around whether or not, from a buyer's perspective, how important it was to have a third-party research name on your research that you put out.
And it was interesting because 50% said they could care less one way or the other, pretty much. Like, they don't care if it was the brand, or they don't care if it was a third party that published the research, or they published it jointly. But then what was interesting, out of the other 50%, about two-thirds of those said they actually felt that the brand would be more reputable in publishing it and they would trust the brand more than...
and than a third party. And I had a follow-up question in that survey about why. Why did you, you know, choose which box you chose? And what was interesting is most of them said, "Well-" We already know that they're paying the third party, so the third party's being paid to just do what the brand wants. And they said if a brand publishes it, their reputation is on the line.
They know the industry. Those were some of the most common reasons why they felt that the brand itself would be more trustworthy. So the reason I'm telling you this is because I also think it's important to realize that, one, if you really wanna build your authority, I think, this is my personal point of view on this, is that you should own your own research, brand it under your name, and put it out there and build your authority.
That doesn't mean you can use a third party to help you conduct the research in the background, or you can partner and put their name on if you want. But I think it's really actually important to put your name on the research and show that you're doing it however you're doing it in the background, and to say that buyers are saying that they find that trustworthy.
As long as you're transparent in your methodology and you've done quality research, buyers are fine with it.
[00:29:11] Mike: I mean, another way to, for anyone listening, to reduce the cost of this in case it seems like, you know, 20, 30K, it can start to get expensive. Another great way is to partner with someone that has the same ICP but a complementary offering, but they have a large database.
If they've got a large pre-qualified database of your ICP, they often are desperate for thought leadership. So if you've got a hypothesis and you've got the kind of consulting credentials, and you're prepared to do a lot of the legwork, then they'll often partner with you to go, "Sure, we'll send it out to our 50,000, uh, database of, you know, pre-approved, opted-in people.
Run the survey, and then we can use that data in, again, an approved way, so it's ethical and compliant." And then you can use that in order to get your responses to do the analysis. There's lots of creative ways. I'd always recommend working with a third party. When I've done mine at that scale, I've always worked with someone like you, Becky, because I think you bring a different perspective and a more rigorous perspective.
[00:30:08] Becky: Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with you. I didn't wanna just say that that was the only way
[00:30:13] Mike: to- Yeah. And by the way, it's not sponsored, everyone. Becky's not paying me anything. Yeah. You know, this is just genuine thought is find someone who does this for a living because it would just be more rigorous.
You don't wanna like do it and basically mess it up and then go, "Ah." 'Cause you only get one shot to do the survey, and if you get the data back and go, "It doesn't work," then you've wasted a whole load of time.
[00:30:34] Becky: Yeah. And it is complex. There's a lot of parts to it, and you have to program a survey. You've gotta figure out what survey software you're gonna use.
Where are you gonna find your audience? If you're doing email, you've gotta coordinate the whole email list. Are you gonna... You know. Anyway, I'm not gonna get into all the technical details- No, no ... 'cause there are a lot of steps and a lot of processes. But it's, it's complex. Exactly. But I also don't wanna discourage anybody from trying at least on some level because I think it's such a powerful tool for sales and content marketing.
[00:31:01] Mike: It is. So Becky, it's been amazing. Thank you for shedding a light on surveys and research-based thought leadership. Top two or three takeaways. If someone's sat there in their car thinking- Yeah, I want to do this, but just remind me what the couple of starting points. What should they do? What the immediate things they should go away and start thinking about?
[00:31:18] Becky: Well, the immediate thing they should start thinking about is, so yeah, I want to do this. What budget do I have to work with? Which will help you determine, you know, what route should I go. I think the second thing is begin to start thinking about what point of view or what hypothesis do I have, what angles would I want to take.
And also do some competitive research. Understand what your competitors who are maybe are already using original research, what other industry publications and research is out there. And I will say this, if you happen to be in an industry where there's not a lot of research happening, it's a real opportunity for you.
It is. I did this with a client who was in manufacturing space, industrial manufacturing, and that's not an area that there was a lot of investment. And they, and also it was around sustainable packaging, but all the research done had been on the consumer side, not on a manufacturer challenge side. So when we did that, not only did it do really well and they got like 80 plus media mentions from it, but ultimately, like less than a year later, Gartner cited their research in one of their blogs because there wasn't that much research out there.
So think about how getting your research cited by Gartner builds your authority in the space. And so I think it's a real opportunity if you happen to be in a industry where they're not doing it, if you're in a nascent industry emerging again, or it can really help build your authority and your brand in ways that other types of content just can't.
[00:32:39] Mike: Definitely. Becky, it's been amazing. Thank you ever so much for joining me. Where can people find out more about you?
[00:32:44] Becky: I'm on LinkedIn and would love to connect with anybody who wants to connect with me. And then my website is just www.redpointinsights.com, and you can connect with me there as well.
[00:32:53] Mike: Becky, thanks ever so much.
[00:32:54] Becky: Thank you.
[00:32:56] Mike: Thanks for listening to Higgle, the B2B Sales Club Podcast series with your host, Mike Lander. Please subscribe so that you'll catch all the next
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