Igniting B2B Insights: Conference Learnings

Why Good B2B Research Gets Ignored and How to Make It Drive Decisions

David Kalinowski, Clara Smyth

B2B research rarely fails because the data is wrong—it fails because it doesn't earn the influence needed to drive decisions. This session introduces a practical framework for building credibility and accelerating decision confidence.

Clara thinks of the researcher’s role as the

“Insights Operator”

Why does research fail?

• Too many voices
• Research happens at the wrong time
• Not an effort to engage the detractors and turn them to advocates
• Provider of insights vs. partner in decision

5 pillars of credibility

• Defensibility
• Integrity
• Reality
• Objectivity, but have a POV
• Confidence in decision

People will remember how you make them feel.

How can you make each exec look good?

A good report…

• Close to stakeholders
• User focused
• Collaboration
• Relationship.based
• Meeting stakeholders needs
• Feedback oriented

Remember, Claude can make the data slides easy, humans have to give the “so what”.

• Collecting “insights” is helpful, but do you have enough information to decide confidently?
• Give executives the implications based on market - are you late to market, first to market…FOMO, FOFU, cost of inaction
• Filter — Interpret —-Decide

Someone is going to help leaders make decisions. Make sure it's you.

Clara has a 6 part podcast:

Backroom to Boardroom podcast.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/back-office-to-boardroom/id1627817391

Reaching the Unreachable: Ethnographic Insight into Complex B2B Decision Networks

Dr. Aybil Göker

This session focuses on the methodological design of ethnographic research in the B2B commercial vehicle sector, uncovering overlooked factors that shape complex B2B purchasing decisions.

Working for Ford, this case study initially spoke to the decision makers (of fleet trucks for long haul shipping), but quickly realized that they needed to do a deep dive with the truck drivers themselves, who had informal “veto” power on the decision being made.

These truck drivers are hard to reach, suspicious of formal processes (e.g., a focus group) and slow to share.

Dr. Göker and team used a month-long ethnographic approach. They immersed themselves in locations like rest stops and employee lounges. The drivers were curious, slowly accepting the researcher's presence. The researchers observed social networks, listened for the way that the truckers spoke and interacted. As they began to interact, they began to tell stories. These stories uncovered insights that opposed the standard view. For example, conventional advertising focused on how much the truck drivers missed their families, but the reality was that many were fiercely independent individuals who valued the alone time that their job required. Their own words were used in the advertising campaigns that emerged from the research.

Reaching Time-Poor Decision Makers: How AI-Moderated Voice Interviews Increased Doctor Participation in B2B Pharma Research

Matteo Cera

Engaging physicians in B2B research is a persistent challenge. This session shares a real pharma case study that used AI-moderated, asynchronous voice interviews to explore doctors' unmet needs.

Matt shared examples of using AIMI

(AIMI=AI moderated interviews) in a B2B context. In addition to the examples, he shared results of comparisons between AIMI and CAWI / IDI on a variety of measures.

In B2B contexts, users are multi-tasking, distracted, etc. Having an engaging UI can support research. AIMI:

• Hybrid between CAWI and IDI
• Allows voice response
• Multi lingual automatically
• Feasibility goes up with engagement (less drop off than a traditional survey)
• Can drop off and return, like a survey, while speaking like an IDI

The results of the comparisons:

• Richer vocabulary and semantic concepts vs survey.
• Human moderators outperform on sense of joy and connection by participants.
• But AI matched humans on willingness to disclose, awkwardness, joy and trust.

Cautions:

• Use AI interviews when timelines are tight, or the goal is disclosure, use human interviews when you want to focus on emotions and connection.
• Manage bias in the AI by building in guardrails for your prompting (e.g., return to the topic)
• Add industry knowledge through uploading of artifacts to support the AI moderation.

Who is Really Behind B2B Insights? The Case for Validation and Facilitation

Nik Werk,

Michelle Perez

Explores the use of validation and facilitation in quantitative research as a better alternative to unvalidated online surveys, demonstrated through a global case study with Verizon Connect.

Michelle's background was originally as a chemical engineer, designing printers. She was asked to lead customer experience efforts in 2012. Shifted from process to experience. New way to think about data and to have influence on executives. She now works for Verizon Connect - they sell fleet management hardware/software solutions, with a customer based that goes from SME to Enterprise..

The most important factor of B2B research is reaching the right decision maker. Do we know that they are who they say they are?

The concern is that with too many partner relationships, you have no idea who is taking your surveys. The anonymity of panels actually makes it impossible to verify. There is little PII. We reject bad data, but don't know if the good data is real or accurate to the decision maker.

40-50% of B2B sample is rejected during post hoc review of the data. Because of this, and because of the need to validate the audience,

There is a CATI boom. How does Werk validate?

• When appointment setting, they have to call back from a business line.
• Even though a CATI survey, it is video facilitated (visual verification).

This ties back to executive credibility and confidence in the research.

Drawbacks?

• Slower speed,
• Higher cost,
• Completion happens later, e.g., 50% in the last week.
• Managing expectations…it's still quantitative, not professional moderators.

Verizon Connect case study:

They were trying to identify their best market position, relative to competitors. This was going to drive multi-million dollar decisions. They believed that “bad data is worse than no data.”

This was a competitive benchmarking survey. It was an international study, which achieved 800 responses. Now in year 3.

Turning the Tanker: A Real-Time Playbook for Audience-First B2B Transformation in a Fortune 15 Organization

Brianna Sylver, Allison Gormley

Shares how one of the world's largest healthcare services organizations is shifting from transactional marketing to a proactive, persona-driven strategy, mapping the B2B decision-making ecosystem.

Often, research focus on…

Right methodology

Right sample

Right deliverable

That's 20%...what's the other 80%?

At Cigna, Allison was challenged to become an audience-first marketer. This means moving away from mass marketing to personalization marketing. This requires change management. Need to get buy-in and support of the people who need to use the information.

Did 106 IDIs with benefits buyers. Created personas, journey atlas, ecosystem maps.

Note that deliverables can’t take action. If that is all that is delivered, it is info-tainment.

To action, requires ownership in the work. She shared examples of ways that they got internal ownership by the key teams within the organization. This includes an immersion phase, lots of Q&A, and storytelling sessions.

What B2B sales pros really think about AI and what it means for Researchers

Kelly Kutas, Sarah Kim, Aneesh Dhawan

Findings from a study with ~400 B2B sales professionals on where AI is creating real value, the barriers to maximizing its potential, and what sellers want from AI in the future.

CCI is an internal agency within BCG, that provides knowledge and insights to support project teams working with specific clients.

For one project, they wanted to gain a better understanding of the use of AI within the sales process - AI in sales is being mandated and adopted, but they wanted to know what is actually happening on the ground.

In the past … would have done a 7 week mixed methods study. In 2026, truly mixed methods in a single go using video surveys; capturing what and why at the same time.

These video surveys included 10 pre-set prompts, each answered with a selfie style video.

The analysis of 400 respondents x 10 responses would not have been possible without AI support.

In order to socialize the research in bite sized format, they created a 5 minute video that shared the key findings from the study. The video clearly highlighted the key findings, and augmented this using audio (not video to preserve anonymity) of real participants.

The Integrity Advantage: Ethics That Win in B2B

Howard Fienberg

An exploration of ethics in B2B research and how integrity provides a competitive advantage.

Howard shared some legislative updates and reminders about the use of AI in research, referencing the IA Code.

Update on incentives: The $600 threshold for 1099 now moved to $2000; with inflation increases annually.

Transparency is the key for ethical use of AI

1. Disclose if an AI that could be perceived as human is being used. In many states, this is the law. E.g., an avatar or chat bot. Laws are leaning towards continual disclosure.
2. Do not add to training data without explicit consent. Anonymity is criticaL
3. Disclose and understand all uses of AI for analysis, the purpose and technique.
4. No tool should used without human judgement.

Finding the Needle in the B2B Haystack: Strategies for Sourcing Challenging B2B Audiences

Amy Rey

Guidance for reaching hard-to-get B2B respondents, including strategies for finding challenging audiences and ensuring they are high-quality, validated respondents.

Amy’s work often requires her to find the “needle in a haystack” recruitment target. Niche, low incidence, hard to reach. At a high level:

1. Abandon quant for qual
2. Create appealing engagements
1. Incentives
2. White glove experiences
3. Use referrals

Some approaches to finding these niche audiences:

1. Existing resources
1. Lists in other parts of the org
2. Branded research
3. Can the senior leadership support recruitment
4. Sales teams
5. Social/website/portal
2. Specialty recruiters
1. Ivy, Newton, GLG, alpha sights, third bridge, zintro,marklenz etc,
2. High value but high cost
3. Industry sources (e.g., trade mags, industry events)
1. Leverage, not sell the list…on your behalf.
2. Attending a trade show and recruit a focus group right at the event
4. Networking
1. Old school approach of building a list…low response rate
2. Social media

Scaling B2B Personas & Journeys with AI While Anchoring in UX Fundamentals

Mary Hatch, Sarah Hopkins

Introduces a Hybrid AI methodology for developing personas and user journeys, using AI to map ecosystems and synthesize niche audience data while validating outputs through UX principles.

The team was motivated to use a hybrid AI/Human approach because they didn’t have the bench strength to have a user researcher available on every project.

Personas are for marketing and product alignment. B2B life cycles and personas are multi faceted and complex. Getting detailed takes time. Marketing and product personas are different.

What does success look like?

1. Data foundation
2. AI generated proto personas
3. Validation…V1 personas

From Segmentation to Conversation: Harvard Biz Publishing Unified Audiences & Brought Persona Agents to Life

Anthony Bennett, Michelle Bonterre

Explores how Harvard Business Publishing unified siloed audience insights through mixed-methods research and transformed complex data into interactive AI tools.

Segmentation describes markets. AI helps sense, predict, and act. But, it can make things noisier and less trustworthy if not done well.

AI enabled segmentation makes it predictive, multi model and tied to activation.

HBP struggled because their customers are an ecosystem. not a clean market. Complexity is also added because they have 3 business units, with different messaging to each.

The goal of the segmentation was to get to a single foundational truth, across all divisions. Looking for synergies.

Five rules for segments. They should be:

1. Actionable
2. Meaningful
3. MECE
4. Stable
5. Vivid

HBP uses “personas in the wild” For example the team started thinking about actual customers by their persona. E.g. John Smith is a ‘Jasper’.

Part of making it living was the use of persona agents. Now that Claude can read cross tab as well as qual data, you can build extremely robust agents.

Use AI as a force multiplier, not as a ghost writer.

One Voice, One Team: Turning Sales Feedback into Commercial Growth

Hilary Ross-Rojas

Discusses an innovative customer feedback program aimed at measuring customer sentiment on the sales process, anchoring different stakeholders around a shared understanding.

Danish firm that does mainly ocean shipping. Single person team covering North America, but works in a network model with the EU and global teams.

They knew they had a gap between customer feedback and sales needs. Missed true customer feedback on sales led interactions. Transactional surveys cover a minority of interactions.

Opportunity to close this gap. They developed a survey that is sent to customers whenever a sales team opportunity was closed.

To be a success the program needed buy-in from sales. They started with their smaller customers. Ensured that a good chunk of the survey would be new and actionable information about their sales leads.

1. Sales interest in lT relationship
2. Proactivity and ease of contact
3. Sales expertise
4. Understanding of business needs
5. Overall communication
6. AND impact of sales and price

Challenge to overcome…the CRM was not linking to the individual for each lead. This was an issue for 20% of the records. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good - press forward and course correct as needed.

2026 Trends for the Contrarian Marketer from LinkedIn's B2B Institute

Danielle Hydro, Derek Yueh

A fresh, evidence-based perspective on what truly drives growth, addressing which trends will matter most for B2B marketers looking to stand out in 2026 and beyond.

Apologies to the team! Due to traffic I had to leave part-way through this presentation.

Reach out to Danielle or Derek for more details, and check out the B2B Institute: https://business.linkedin.com/advertise/resources/b2b-institute