How to discover the personal and emotional drivers for a B2B audience

“The best thing about doing this is that I got to have coffee with my Dad in the barn every morning until he passed. Now I have that cup of coffee with my son and will as long as he stays involved.”

This statement paints a clear and vibrant picture of a small business owner’s emotional drivers. It surfaced in a series of qualitative in-depth interviews and encapsulates an emotional theme that ran through the interviews. It speaks to one of this audience’s core values and influences even their most rational decisions. B2B marketers hunger for these types of insights as they look for ways to bring a human element to their messaging and positioning.

The resonance of the theme and its usefulness for developing customer personas and journeys stems from the methodology that uncovered it – qualitative in-depth interviews. B2B marketers and their agency partners often face resistance from internal stakeholders who doubt the value of insights that aren’t expressed as a statistical projection of the market. But in-depth interviews provide the time and format that enable an individual to make the journey from superficial reactions to overly rational answers, and finally to what it means to them personally. As a full disclosure, it’s not always as clear or powerful as connecting with a father who has passed on but relative to surveys, big data and social listening – it gets you closer to the human side of the B2B buyer.

This is not a criticism of surveys, VOC programs, and other more quantitative methodologies. We routinely use those approaches because they provide robust insights needed for branding, market sizing, pricing, and bundling strategies. But when you want to understand the human side of a B2B buyer, qualitative in-depth interviews are one of the best tools in the research tool box.

But having a tool in your tool box isn’t enough. You need to use the tool correctly. The most common mistake B2B marketers make when using qualitative in-depth interviews is to treat it like a survey and create a list of 50 specific questions. You also cannot simply ask, “How does xyz make you feel? How does it connect to you as a person?”.

So, what should you ask?

Qualitative research structured on the following guidelines are more likely to yield insights about the personal and emotional drivers in business decisions.

Limit the number of topics and questions: Three to four topic areas with a few broad questions within each is a good place to start. This gives the interviewer flexibility and time to probe, follow-up on unexpected insights that arise, and gives the respondent time to linger over their answers.

Focus on their needs and challenges: B2B marketers, or their stakeholders, often want to focus the questions on their product and service – “How do you abc? What challenges do you encounter when doing this specific task?” This doesn’t mean you cannot ask specific questions; just be careful not to turn your conversation into a survey.

Change the question frame: Ask questions that make them take an outside view of themselves: How they think their colleagues view them, what they hope their colleagues will say about them after they retire.

Use projective exercises: Picture sorts, word associations, and other exercises help respondents articulate emotional or personal dynamics that shape their business decisions. And remember, the insight is not which picture they select, but why they selected the picture they did.

Let them talk: Some of the best insights come at the end of a section when the respondent says, “One more thing.” It might be the last thing they say, but often the best articulation of what they’d been circling around in their previous responses. If you force-march the respondent to get through a long list of questions, these insights don’t have a chance to surface.

These guidelines can be scary for those unfamiliar with qualitative research. For some B2B marketers and stakeholders it can be easier to justify the investment in research (time and dollars) if they see a long list of discrete questions they will get answers to. And in truth, not every human-focused in-depth interview provides grand insights. But you must be willing to take the duds to get the gems.

This highlights the importance of gaining consensus on the overall objective of the research and what its outputs and uses will be. In some cases, the best approach will be to explore specific needs and challenges around a list of product attributes. But if you want to want to understand the human side of a B2B audience, let them talk.