Event: B2B customer insight

Leading insight for a major life & pensions provider for many years, you become painfully aware of the added difficulty in reaching strong insights on B2B customers. Although at first B2B insight can just appear less developed as a market, with a much smaller quality data provider market and still more of a focus on sales management and brand (almost where B2C was 5-10 years ago); on reflection this is not the case.

It is more challenging to develop as robust analysis (mainly due to data challenges driven by both less capture and matching challenges) and more challenging to interpret robust research (mainly due to multiple relationships and opaque decision making hierarchies/influences). However, on closer inspection, some of the challenges being attempted for B2B insight are both more challenging and able to create a bigger commercial impact if achieved.

So, I was pleased to see a tweet & blog post from Peter Lavers and the team at Customer Attuned on the lessons that B2B and B2C insight can learn from each other.

Earlier this year I attended an event run by them entitled “The Great Debate” (part of a series of such events), with this one being held at Greenwich. I was reticent to write too much on my thoughts from this; as it is a Chatham House rules meeting. However, Peter has usefully shared the key anonymised lessons learnt on his blog. The above link is well worth reading.

Any other thoughts from those who like me have had the challenge of both B2B and B2C insight? Did others also find the approach to NPS needed to be tweaked? Do reply with your comments.