Customer Needs Research

Our Impact

How Can Customer Needs Research Help?

B2B buyers want experiences that reflect their needs, with 71% of B2B buyers and influencers agreeing that business suppliers should spend more time seeking to understand them and how to solve day-to-day problems they face at work (Source: 2024 Superpowers Index).

Explore What Drives Supplier Choice

Explore the rational and emotional drivers of purchase decisions and evaluate their relative importance.

Measure How Well Needs Are Being Met

Understand current strengths and areas for improvement in the customer experience and identify key unmet needs.

Identify Actions to Drive Satisfaction

Identify opportunities to better meet current and future customer needs to drive greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Our Difference

Why Partner with B2B International for Customer Needs Research?

A Project as Unique as Your Business

Custom-built B2B research programs around your business needs and specially curated teams with expertise in your sector.

Trusted B2B Data Quality

We have unrivalled access to our clients’ target audiences and have the strictest quality controls for the most trusted data.

Action-Orientated & Outcome-Focused

Our proprietary, action-orientated techniques, metrics, and frameworks drive greater meaning from the data and help to embed the findings within your organization.

Get In Touch

Speak to One of Our Customer Needs Research Experts

Want to discuss how customer needs research could benefit your business? Get in touch to schedule an introductory call with one of our team.

Our Approach

Eliciting “Beneath the Surface” Customer Insights

Laddering is a qualitative research method designed to uncover the underlying values, beliefs, and motivations behind customer choices. By asking a series of “why” questions - such as “Why did you choose this?” and “Why is that good or bad?” - we move beyond surface-level responses.

The final step explores the importance and impact of these choices, helping to identify the core values that influence behavior.

This technique provides a richer understanding of decision-making, enabling you to design solutions that truly resonate with your audience.

Our Approach

Accessing Subconscious Needs & Motivations

Projective techniques help uncover hidden attitudes, needs, and perceptions - especially when participants struggle to articulate their thoughts directly.

Tools like sentence completion and word association allow us to access subconscious drivers of behavior, offering insights that traditional questioning may miss. This approach is particularly valuable in emotionally complex or low-awareness decision contexts.

Our Approach

Establish the Drivers of Satisfaction

Drivers analysis, or derived importance, identifies which needs, factors or attributes most influence overall satisfaction.

By correlating satisfaction with specific attributes with overall satisfaction or NPS, it reveals hidden priorities - guiding businesses to invest in areas that truly impact customer satisfaction, rather than just those with low performance scores.

Our Approach

Develop Unique & Meaningful Propositions

To identify your unique value in the market, we use the Three Circles Framework - analyzing customer needs, your offerings, and competitor offerings to pinpoint your brand’s USP.

Complementing this, the Value Proposition Canvas ensures your products and services align with what customers truly value. It maps how your solutions relieve pain points and create gains, ensuring a strong fit with customer jobs-to-be-done.

Our Approach

Identify Enablers and Blockers to Switching

The Push-Pull Framework helps visualize the emotional and rational factors that influence switching decisions. It categorizes both the barriers and drivers to change, showing what motivates customers to move away from current solutions - and what holds them back. This insight enables you to design strategies that overcome resistance and encourage confident decision-making.

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Business Challenge

Ligentia is an international supply chain solutions provider focused on data driven supply chains. With innovation and evolution being core to Ligentia’s growth, the business is acutely aware that primary research among customers and prospects is key in supporting strategic development.

Ligentia needed to validate key themes with a customer and market view as part of a planned refresh of the brand and build out of the product portfolio and marketing collateral to support the next chapter of global growth, to ensure that all developments were based on real market requirements and needs.

Ligentia required research to better understand market requirements and needs. Not only did this research need to investigate the impact of trends such as COVID-19, but it was also necessary to predict future challenges and how customers are looking to change their operations in response to these so that Ligentia could continue to develop market-leading solutions and services.

What We Did

A qualitative research program was designed to include both customers and prospects where key needs and technology usage – now and in the future - were investigated. This was conducted through online video interviews with key decision-makers and influencers for end-to-end supply chain solutions and technology across the globe, in key industries including retail, consumer goods and healthcare. This use of video interviews allowed for us to share stimuli with the respondent to gain their opinion on displayed images.

As well as presenting key metrics of customer satisfaction and emerging needs across the supply chain journey, persona groups were identified to help place customer organizations along a scale of technological development. These persona groups clearly showed how different organizations use technology to manage their supply chain, what data is currently utilized by each group and where they ideally want to get to.

This revealed the opportunity for Ligentia to guide each group along this path of technological adoption and enable each customer to reach the next level of data utilization and automation.

View Case Study

Business Challenge

Fellowes provides workplace solutions which range from shredders, binders, laminators and staplers through to workspace health solutions, storage solutions and air-cleaning/purification solutions. The focus for this research was on the shredder market.

While this is a mature market, there are a number of competitive threats and so Fellowes recognized that to keep a competitive edge and to continue to provide consumer valued solutions it needed to keep a close eye on market needs, changes, trends, and challenges.

The overall aim of the research was to better understand the needs and challenges of paper shredder users in a post-pandemic landscape and observe the impact of a changing work dynamic on shredder usage.

What We Did

We designed a quantitative research study, comprising an online survey with 605 paper shredder users across France, Germany & UK. Our target audience was individuals who are using paper shredders as part of their day-to-day work. The survey included companies across Finance, Healthcare & Public Sectors, of all sizes and of varying levels of business maturity, enabling us to report on a representative view of the market.

The survey showed many opportunities for Fellowes and revealed some of the key challenges that paper shredder users face when thinking about purchasing a shredder and when using a shredder in their day-to-day role.

To present our findings to Fellowes, we created a visually engaging research report. This summarized all findings, personas and our consultative recommendations for their organization. Fellowes were well equipped to compose marketing and product development strategies based on the evidence gathered during the research study.

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