Why B2B Research Has Become Too Slow And How to Fix It
In today’s fast-moving B2B world, most corporate teams are surrounded by questions that can’t easily be answered. Yet those answers are often incredibly valuable to know and understand. Not only is getting answers tricky, figuring out the right way(s) to get to those answers is one of the hardest parts!
Among other things, marketers want to know how prospects really go about buying solutions and which channels, tactics and technologies will give them the most leverage going forward. Sales wants to understand who’s involved, what they care about, and how do they buy. Product wants to know which features matter most to their users and which to build. Executives want to know what their customers (and target markets) really want now and what they'll need in the future.
These are fundamental questions and the kind that guide messaging, strategy, and innovation. Yet getting reliable answers often feels like navigating a maze. There are millions of other things being asked too, but these are a few trends we've noticed. Despite advances in data analytics, AI, and automation, B2B research remains one of the slowest and most opaque processes inside large organizations.
The Modern Research Bottleneck
Ask anyone who’s been tasked with answering key questions in B2B and they’ll tell you it takes too long, costs too much, requires a lot of work, and/or rarely produces clarity fast enough to act on it.
Procurement approvals, vendor coordination, project design, sample sourcing, and data cleaning, can stretch a simple study into a months-long project. By the time results arrive, the market has often already shifted or the question is outdated.
It’s not always that the questions are too complex, it’s that the system designed to answer them hasn’t evolved and it's hard to figure out the best way to get a question answered thoroughly.
Here are some of the main ways companies gather insight today with pros and cons of each:
1. Direct Primary Research
