A household-name technology brand needed to know how its market buys, and could not ask its own customers. Around thirty interviews later, twenty-seven of the thirty said the same thing. Read the case study.
See if You QualifyMarket Partners is a San Francisco consultancy that works with some of the largest technology and healthcare companies in the world on how their customers buy. Martyn wrote the book on it, literally: How Customers Buy and Why They Don’t.
The engagement was for a household-name technology company selling servers and equipment of that kind, and the brief had an unusual constraint built into it. The client could have introduced Market Partners to its own customers. That was exactly what Martyn did not want.
“They could have put us in contact with their customers and we could talk to them all day long, but we wanted to talk to the market.”
That meant reaching businesses across industries who had no relationship with the client, and persuading them to give up twenty to thirty minutes to be interviewed about how they buy equipment. The problem was that a sales and marketing expert company had no capability to do any of it.
“Here we are a marketing and sales expert company, but we don’t have those resources. We don’t go out and do cold calls, we don’t go out and do research across LinkedIn and other databases to find people.”
Three jobs, none of which they could staff: find the people likely to be buying that equipment, approach them, and get a firm commitment to a half-hour interview. Even with a gift card or a charity donation on offer, asking a stranger for thirty minutes is not a casual ask. And they had their own deadlines, so it had to happen fast.
It did not work at first, and that is the part worth telling.
“As often is the case, it didn’t go smoothly. We weren’t necessarily finding the right people, but we were able to adjust, learn from what we were doing and adjust very quickly.”
The targeting was wrong. What happened next is what Martyn returns to when asked why they chose us and why they stayed.
“You flexed and changed rather than trying to defend what you were doing in the first place. You flexed and changed so we could really get gold together.”
Campaigns ran on cold email, offering a gift card or a donation to charity in exchange for the interview. Once the targeting was corrected the meetings landed, and the answers started converging.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| In-house outbound capability | None: no cold calling, no database research | Run as a managed programme |
| Reach | Limited to the client’s own customer list | The open market, across industries |
| Interviews booked | — | ~30 in four to five weeks |
| Convergence across the market | Unknown | 27 of 30 gave the same answer |
“Because you listened and understood what we needed. We weren’t coming with a standard campaign. You understood that. You took the time to understand what we were looking for, bring your expertise to the equation and help us refine that.”
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