Customer Research as a single project

Customer research can help you tackle these bottlenecks:

Acquiring the right customers. What positioning and messaging resonates with your target audience? Which channels and tactics work best? How are your customers buying and comparing different options?
Activating your existing customers. How are your customers using your product or service? What feature(s) do they get the most value from, and how could you deliver that value as soon as possible?
Making customers stick and preventing churn. Why are some of your customers churning while others are staying, and what could be done about it?
Increasing revenue. How could you upgrade your free users to paid customers, or increase the value your customers are getting from your product/service by upselling or cross-selling?

Who is customer research for?

Customer research is the secret sauce for marketers and founders for leveling up their customer acquisition, retention, and monetization game – regardless of the business model.

The only thing you'll need is a handful of good-fit* clients whom we can interview. Alternatively, if you don't have existing customers yet, we can help you by conducting customer validation interviews with your potential target audience.

*Customers who are using your product or service actively, are happy with it, and don’t burden the customer support too much. Good-fit clients are easy to sell to because they immediately understand the value you provide, and they have a relatively high CLV and relatively low CAC.

This is how the process goes 👇

Defining your ideal customer profile (week 1)

Advance B2B facilitates a 2-hour workshop to define your provisional Ideal Customer Profile, and choose the customer segment(s) you want to understand better. We'll then help you make a list of companies and people whom we should interview.

Booking and conducting interviews (weeks 2-4)

You'll be able to schedule interviews directly into Advance B2B team members’ calendars (we'll help you get internal buy-in, if needed, and pitch the idea to your customers). Advance B2B then conducts four 30-minute interviews per customer segment (in English or in Finnish).

Findings & recommendations
(weeks 5-6)

Advance B2B summarizes findings & recommendations and shares those with you either in a remote walkthrough (1,5 hours) or as a recorded video walkthrough (45-60 minutes) combined with a follow-up call for questions & feedback (30 minutes).

And this is what you'll get 🙌

A crystal-clear understanding of your best customers: The Ideal Customer Profile is a tool that helps your marketing, sales, product, and customer success functions align around your best and most profitable clients.
Summary of the interview findings: Structured summary of the findings and insights from the interviews that will help you create better sales pitches, choose content marketing topics, fine-tune your website copy, and refine your positioning & messaging (among other things).
Recommendations based on the interviews: A list of recommended actions that will help you address the bottlenecks in a systematic way.
A Customer Journey Map (upon separate request): A visualized summary of the insights that allows you to pinpoint the touchpoints & bottlenecks even better.

💡 For more examples, check out this blog post: 10 real-life examples of using customer research findings in marketing!

How does customer research differ from other alternatives?

🤔 Market research

Market research focuses on understanding the competitive landscape and potential within the market and is great for researching the potential markets, not so much for understanding the context-specific motivations behind a purchase/product use.

🤔 Brand research

Brand research is great for getting an overall picture of how your perceived strengths and weaknesses are reflected by the market, but because the sampling does not represent a specific target audience, it’s not ideal for trying to understanding your customers' behavior.

🤔 Quantitative data

Web analytics, product analytics, and ad performance tell you “what” happens and “how” it happens, but in retrospect and only for those users. Qualitative research gets at the “why” behind the behavior (e.g. why some users are churning easier than others).

🤔 Surveys

Surveys can get you valuable information, but they also require huge volumes to produce any valid data (which most B2B companies don’t have). Besides, the quality of data depends not just on the sampling but also how successful the phrasing is.

Should you do it yourself...

✅ Do it yourself – Pros:

No extra costs other than your own time and salary
No need to brief an external partner on your and your customers' situation
Talking to your clients is simply the best way to get to know them and establish deeper relationships.

🚫 Do it yourself – Cons:

Doing customer research can be very time-consuming. As an in-house marketer, you’re getting a ton of requests from different departments and non-urgent yet important things like this are easy to put off till… yeah, when?
If you don’t have the routine and necessary processes for customer research, you’ll risk not asking the right follow-up questions and spotting the most important trends from the data.
Customers can sometimes be a bit reserved when talking to someone inside your company, and you're likely to end up with polished comments.

...or outsource to Advance B2B?

✅ Outsource to Advance B2B – Pros:

We know what works and what doesn't. We have a tested method for conducting the interviews and making sense of the collected data. Analyzing huge amounts of qualitative interview transcripts is not something most marketers do every day - except for us at Advance B2B.
You benefit from our cumulative experience: We’ve done hundreds if not thousands of customer research interviews for different types of businesses over the years. So you’ll be also learning faster with us.
We’ll also help you get internal buy-in in your organization if needed. As an external partner, we don’t have to deal with company politics.
If you still prefer to do the interviews yourself, we totally get that – and we’re also more than happy to help you learn to do them the right way. Just contact us for a consultation call!

🚫 Outsource to Advance B2B – Cons:

It (obviously) costs you extra
It takes a little while for you to get the results after all the interviews are done, but no more than a few weeks.

Here’s what our customers have to say

The customer research that Advance B2B conducted for us validated our existing views on how customers see our business, and expanded our understanding of relevant concerns in the market. With the customer research to lean on, we’re able to speak to our customers using their own words and language, and create content that resonates directly with their needs and pain points."

Marketing Manager in a B2B subscription business

[Getting the customer research findings] is like Christmas in the Spring!”

Senior Sales Executive in a multinational Enterprise SaaS company

Okay, sounds good. But how much does it cost?

The project costs typically something between 10 000 € and 15 000 € + VAT. We're happy to discuss about your project in more detail!

Intrigued? 👀

Whether you're thinking "heck yeah, let's do it!" or just have a question in mind, you can leave your contact details, and we'll be in touch! If you're still not convinced, make sure to check out this handy blog post that explains our approach to customer research in detail.

Customer Research