You can grow your business by narrowing your services and market scope with the a market research

Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James. Today we're going all the way to Oregon, Oregon City, and we're going to meet Sean, Sean Campbell, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Cascade Insights. And we're going to talk about all manner of things that you can do with market research and the age of narrow. Sean, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on.

More than welcome, Sean. And look, you've been running your own business for over 20 years, so I'm excited to hear what you do for clients, and then we're gonna talk about how you get your own business noticed. But let's first of all talk about this concept that you've got called the Age of Narrow. What do you mean by that and how does it impact a company or an entrepreneur that wants to get noticed?

Well, first off, I think for a lot of companies, the most important thing they can do is focus on how they position themselves. A number of companies initially focus on how they can produce good content, how they can reach out to customers. You know, it's a lot of the like, Activities that require muscle, but positioning requires you to use your head, and that's its primary goal: is to figure out you know where in this marketplace should I stick myself and how should I define myself? The problem is also when most organizations this kind of leads up to the age of narrow discussion is that their positioning is fairly broad, and by virtue of a small story, you know how I kind of thought about age of narrow to begin with. I was in a conversation with a client, a guy named Paul Logue, who's a vice president now at SAP, but he was a vice president at HP then. And I was a fairly young seller for, you know, my company. And I'm sitting in there in his office, and I'm telling him all the stuff that we do. And he's saying he likes that. And I say another thing. And he says he likes that capability. And after a minute, he puts his hand out and he says, I know you want to keep the aperture wide open. but I need to know what you really do. Which was an odd question for me to hear because I felt like, well, we do all these things. We do all these things well. Why would I need to narrow this? And somewhere in the back of my brain, that conversation ended up going well and we've done work with Paul and stuff like that. You know, nothing good comes out of a senior executive holding up their hand in front of you and saying something, right? I mean, that's usually not a good moment. And so, um, I realized there's something to learn here. And so that kind of little candle burned in the back of my brain for a while. And after a while, I realized there's a lot of truth to this idea of not just limiting the aperture, but taking one step further and actually telling the market what you don't do. And I know that every time I say this to somebody, there's some subset of the world, usually maybe somebody in the VC community, who's like, no, absolutely not. You know, you should tell the world everything you can do and all the possibilities of your offering and everything else. And I would say, well, here's the problem with it. And this is where the agent arrow comes in. We all want narrow stuff these days. I mean, I'm not a comment on narrow thinking, but we want narrow stuff. You know, we want to go watch a fairly narrow Netflix queue. You know, if you like historical British period dramas, you can watch that for the entire rest of your life. Like if you got turned on to Downton Abbey, you can watch Downton Abbey-like shows for the rest of your life on this earth. If you like Russian sci-fi, which I find very quirky and campy, to be honest, and kind of fun, you could watch that for the rest of your life. I don't know why Russian sci-fi is quirky and campy, but universally all Russian sci-fi movies are quirky and campy. And so you can do this in your personal life. And so that's one leg of the stool of the Age of Nero. The other leg is that when we go look at content, which is— this is an odd thing to say while we're doing a podcast— we kind of inherently don't trust it anymore, right? I mean, we worry about fake reviews. We go to media that we like because the other media is wrong. And that's true, whatever political spectrum you're on. And we have this feeling that marketing has always kind of lied to us. It's educated us, yes, but it's also kind of sort of sometimes left us feeling like we're not hearing the whole truth, right? And this goes all the way back to, you know, car salesmen and a million other things. And you could even say marketing has perhaps gotten a little bit more forthright. But what marketing has never really stepped over and done is said, this is what we don't do. And that's kind of the next final leg, which is that you need to be able to tell the market what you don't do. And if somebody's saying, well, I don't wanna do that, well, there are things you don't do. There's markets you don't serve, there's capabilities you don't have. And we're not talking about limiting yourself forever, but what we're talking about is saying, I wanna create a degree of trust with the market by telling them in advance, this is where our capabilities stop today. And what I can tell you empirically from research we've done, I can tell you empirically from just observations of our own clients, is they love it because they immediately come to you and say, I didn't have to go search for that negative perception on you. I didn't have to go search to find your limits. And when they go search, by the way, where do they go do that? They go talk to a competitor and say, have you heard of this firm? Implicitly asking in essence, you know, what are their limits? Or they go to third-party sites and they try to figure out what you don't do. And I just close it by saying, you know, it's incredibly powerful. You will get more positive client reaction. You will also get clients that are more in your lane. You will no longer have these kind of bad leads that show up because they're not really exactly the category you want, which then is a good ROI boost because you're only closing leads that really matter. Another final point or two would just be we all experience this. We sort our Amazon reviews by like worst to best, right? Because we're a little concerned about the quality of them. And the very final thing is It just makes you feel good because at the end of the day, why not be direct and truthful with the market if it's going to bring all the rest of these benefits, right? And I should say one last thing because I wanted to— it's not about, again, about limiting yourself forever. It's just about defining current state and saying, I have fences on my business, I know where they are, and I want to explain to the market that's where those fences exist today. And I can tell you also that when you move those fences out, people will honor the fact that you've done that partly because they trust where you put the fences the first time. And so there's just a lot of virtuous goodness that comes out of this. But I would say in closing, if you would like a homework exercise on this, go look at your own marketing or that of your competitors or that of almost any sector and see if they say anything about what they don't do. And my guess is you're going to find it's pretty limited and that leaves you an open lane to do something pretty differentiated and get noticed.

Yeah, sure. And that's great, this idea of, you know, focusing and saying what you don't do. Just ask the question, because you have a research insights business, how can a company use, let's say, research and insights into deciding, you know, which furrow— we would say in England, which, you know, which furrow or which lane you should be in— and where the boundaries of that are? Because people don't want to leave business you know, on the table, as it were, right? So can market research and your insights help define what's the appropriate level of narrow?

Oh, yeah. I mean, you can conduct market segmentation studies, you can do studies with buyers and do, you know, buyer persona research to figure out where the lanes are, you can do competitive landscape research to figure out if there's kind of a gap between you and the competitive landscape that you should grow into. All of that comes from having really meaningful conversations with buyers and prospects and even competitor customers. So I think a lot of that is fairly discoverable. And I would say too, you know, while we'd like to get hired for research, you know, at the same time, a certain percentage of this can just be done yourself. I mean, instead of just meeting customer needs, have actual meaningful conversations with them about what they think the limits are of your offering, you know, what they think the competitive landscape looks like. I mean, a certain percentage of this can be done with kind of a robust internal function. That's thinking about how to do research. But yeah, you can definitely set the bounds of that. And it's a good point. You shouldn't set it probably without a certain amount of research because the combination of your need to feel like your business could reach all these potential areas might lead you to make the bounds of your business a little bit bigger than it should be when it comes to your marketing and your sales efforts. And I think there's a kind of a good reality check that you get from doing the research itself.

Yeah, and also as entrepreneurs, we're essentially optimists anyway, aren't we? So we think, oh, I could do that as well. And we've all struggled sometimes with the need for cash flow and taking a customer that may not be core but brings cash in the short term. But I love that idea of staying focused. Now, from a business perspective, someone's decided their lane and they've got research. Sean, how can a company then use research in order to get noticed? Because you've talked about People not trusting content, but research has a lot of credibility, doesn't it, in the eyes of, for example, the media? Does research-led content really help to restore the credibility of content being put out by a company?

Yeah, absolutely, especially if it's quantitative. Qualitative research is incredibly powerful, so like doing interviews or focus groups with a set of participants, and it leads to a lot of discovery. You see that in things like buyer persona research or buyer's journey research, But from a thought leadership standpoint, you know, if you want to put out a blog post and you want it to feel like it has an authoritative tone, doing quantitative research and building a series of content around that is incredibly powerful. There are a couple downsides to it. I mean, quantitative research has a little bit more of a floor you have to jump onto expense-wise because, you know, you're going to need to survey somewhere around It depends on the focus, but at least 100 participants, but typically something more like 200 to 300 or even 500 to get a third party to kind of pick up on it. Because what you want to be able to say is things like, hey, we surveyed 300 people in this particular sector about their preferences about Y, and, you know, 59% of them felt X. And then the other thing that's really important when you do a study like that is, and this is just kind of more art than science, you have to put your hands on the questions gently is probably the way I would put it. I've done a lot of reading of presidential biographies lately, and Thomas Jefferson had a quote. He said, grab life by the smooth handle. And I think it's the same thing when you're thinking about designing the question set. You obviously need to design the questions with the forethought of, I'd like the response to come back as something that other people would find interesting, right? So, you have to structure the question in such a way that it would generate interest from a third party. At the same time, if you grasp a hold of the questions too tightly, the whole study will lose its authenticity because it will be obvious that you basically were shifting the tone of the questioning so heavily. And, I think it's really a matter of you just have to keep the truth the truth. You can ask a question a variety of different ways. I mean, podcasts are an example of that.

Yeah.

A host can ask a question in an interesting way or in a not interesting way. The truth that comes out of the answer is still the same, but it's how you ask the question. And so, there's a bit of an art to that, but absolutely. And, one quick tip, there's an email. It's not the only way you could promote a study like this, but there's an email subscriber list called HARO, Help a Reporter Out, that is always looking for some data-driven story to go drop your insights in, right? And so there's just a ton of value in doing that kind of thought leadership if it's quantitative.

Okay, so the quantitative— Sean, can you mention any tools that you could recommend? Obviously your own company Cascade Insights is at another level, but for a company that's kind of maybe dipping their toe in, or maybe they want to survey their own customer base, could you give any ideas of some tools that people can use?

Yeah, there's a ton of quantitative survey tools that exist out there, you know, from higher-end ones like Qualtrics and things like that. But yeah, I mean, if you looked for quantitative survey tools, there's a million of them. There's also like fairly straightforward ones like Typeform, and, you know, there's Momentive, and, you know, all these different things. And it all really depends on how often you're going to run a survey and how complex you want the survey logic to be. But you can actually do a survey with fairly minimal investment upfront from a tool standpoint. The real cost to a survey is the cost it gets to get the participants to participate, the incentives you use, which aren't inordinate on a per-participant basis, but when you multiply them by 300, it gets kind of expensive. And then the cost to actually just get the participants initially, which may be defrayed by you surveying your own customers, you know, if you have a large enough customer base. And the other thing I'd say on that is that Many people are surprised when it comes to quantitative research in general about standard response rates. Like even an audience that loves you and you're giving an incentive to is gonna end up with like single-digit response rates as a percentage of the total population you sent to. So for example, if you need that, you know, N of 500 survey where you have 500 respondents, you're looking at a, you know, 5,000+ audience. that you need to send to, to get that 500 respondents. And most people are shocked by that, but not just the academic literature, but the day-to-day experiences of anybody who does this kind of work is that's just the way it is. And there's ways around it. You can leave your survey open for longer. You can provide a larger incentive. You can hand-deliver it, in quotes, the ask to respond to the survey as opposed to just a simple email. There's a million ways to try to increase it, but you're still going to have to gather a large number of potential participants for your survey before you actually get to the number of respondents. And that's what tends to make things cost a lot as they do this. But they're super powerful from a thought leadership standpoint. 100%.

Yeah, wonderful. So if you have that one question, and you've got your, like, minimum viable research size, any guidance on a sort of a minimum number of questions? And should they be open and closed? I don't want to get too tactical here.

But if someone's thinking, oh, you know, I could do Yeah, kind of a rough benchmark around here for the business-to-business audiences we survey, you know, and your mileage will vary based on the audience you're going after. If it was more consumer, we tend to say it's around low 20 in terms of the number of questions you can ask. After that, you tend to have a bit of fall-off in like people completing the survey. So now you're paying someone to get partway through the survey and they're bailing. And then they're— if they're your current customers, you're just frustrating them. The other thing to think about that low 20s question set is you're going to lose 5 to 7 of those questions for demographics because you always want to crosscut a study like this by, you know, of the people who responded, how many were CEOs? Of the people who responded, how many used a competing solution, right? So you end up with this crosscut that's going to suck up a certain number of those questions. So a good way to think about it is you have 10 10 to 15 kind of meaty questions that you can ask. And then yes, depending on your goals, there's all different ways you can ask the questions and question types for sure. But basically, you know, if you were to sit with a whiteboard and say, how do I want to design a study like this? A good question budget to give yourself is to start with 10 questions that might be compelling and then see and extrapolate, hey, if we ask the market this, what might that look like as a number? Right, how many percentage of X? And the closer you can get to dramatic numbers with the question, you know, again, the question is still a straightforward question looking for a truth, but depending on what questions you ask, you can end up with some fairly dramatic kind of response percentages on either side of the scale, and that can drive some, some interest.

And then, Sean, listening to you, I can really see why someone actually would benefit from just coming to an expert like you and just getting it done properly, because it could take a lot of time As well, I know, to create a bad survey. But let's just move on, Sean, to you as an entrepreneur. As you know, I always like to ask the question of my guests, what do you as an entrepreneur do to get noticed? What works for you?

Well, I tie it back to research briefly for a second. I think the first thing you have to do as an entrepreneur, once you've defined your position in the market, is you have to do a degree of buyer's journey research. And that doesn't have to be formal again, but you do need to absolutely know what channels your buyers actually exist in, because simply mirroring the activity of other verticals or industries or sectors is just a way to blow money at the end of the day. I mean, you may find that Facebook— your buyers tell you, I'm never looking for a provider like you on Facebook. You may find that they're all over Instagram because maybe you make high-end custom wood tables like this family we know, right? And they do a great job on Instagram because it's a very visual medium for them. That's the first thing you have to figure out what channels make sense. And I would say that the problem there isn't so much that people understand the logical nature of that ask, it's that they let their ego get in the way. So the average entrepreneur goes and gives a bunch of conference talks because they say, I really enjoy doing that. And the crowd really likes my talk. And I would say, 3 months later, how many people in the room, or people that were influenced by people in the room have actually called you and you'd find, well, Maybe not as many as I think. I think you also have to be really smart about looking at content that you're producing that maybe is generating a lot of clicks, but it's not generating a lot of leads. And again, your average small or medium-sized business sometimes has a hard time separating the ego gratification of something being successful from a volume standpoint with its actual applicability to leads. A short example of that is we put together this thing a number of years ago called the Ultimate Conference List. Right? The name itself wasn't so compelling, but it was all the tech conferences you could imagine. We actually did a pretty good job, and the tech sector likes their conferences. This is all pre-COVID, and it got just crazy amounts of traffic. We were like the first link in Google for anything that said tech conference. We're like, woo, we did it! Problem is, when we looked at Google Analytics, the number of leads that were coming off the ultimate tech conference page— zero. Not one, not two, zero. So the problem there was And here's the other thing, I would go talk to our buyers, and they would say, I love your tech conference list. So even the qualitative nature of it was like, they loved it. But it wasn't creating a pathway to tie it to the earlier part of the conversation to our narrowness, right? It wasn't tying them into what we thought were unique. It was just a valuable resource. And so I think there's a lot of discipline that goes into that. For example, to tie this in, one of the things we do to get noticed besides really being clear about our position and lining ourselves up that way, which helps us with all kinds of things like the structure of our pay-per-click campaigns and SEO and all kinds of stuff. Being narrow in that way is even podcasts. While I love the interaction, and I have always said for years I'm completely incapable of learning something and not want to teach it to somebody else because my hobbies have always involved some form of teaching, right? I mean, I'm always putting people on the fishing boat that I've got to go teach them to fish or a million other things like that. The pragmatic reason is it's a great backlink and it doesn't take a lot upfront to go do. And I mean, I guess it takes time to develop the expertise to be invited on a show. There's that, of course. But the actual act of doing it actually is less than the amount of time to do like a big conference pres and go through a conference committee and all that kind of stuff. And this is from a guy who liked doing that. So anyway, at the end of the day, I think you have to have this balance of where are your buyers and can I really track In a very pragmatic way, is that turning into business for my company and not be seduced by really just mirroring the behavior of other firms that may have a big emphasis on a channel. And to wrap that point up, we don't invest a lot in social media, for example. And I hate to say what I'm gonna say next, but I'll say it anyway, because we, you know, I think the marketers on our team sometimes listen to these shows that I've got. Obviously, pretty much every new marketer that joins Cascade tells me at one point or another, we should invest in social media. And I say, Sometimes I let them experiment again, and it always comes out the same. We don't get any leads from social media. And the reason we know we don't get a lot of leads from social media is our buyers for years have told us, I don't look for a market research vendor on social media. It's not where I'm going to find a deep signal of competence. I might read your blog, I might listen to podcasts, I might listen to videos you've produced, I might do those things, but I'm simply not going to go scarf through Twitter looking for my next market research supplier. I'm just not going to go do that. And I think you need to be really focused and, you know, like I said, very pragmatic about where you invest. And if you do that, you're going to get a really good ROI and you're going to bring leads to your business, which is why you were doing it all to begin with.

Sean, thank you so much. And the age of narrowness that we talked about at the beginning ends with the need for focus, both in the messaging and in the channel. So you brought it all home. Thank you so much, Sean Campbell from Oregon. sharing with me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs the impact of research and what we can all do to leverage that and how to get noticed. Thank you so much for sharing today.

Thanks for having me on.

You're more than welcome. And of course, I will make sure that you get a backlink, and I will make sure that Sean's details are all included in the show notes. So thank you so much for listening to me, Jim James, here on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. And if you're ever in Oregon, look up Sean because it looks as though he's got a good sailing and fishing operation going as well. Thanks so much for joining me on the show.

Not— well, not sailing. I don't know how to do sailing, but I'll always take anybody fishing, so feel free to come along. Yeah, if you're ever in Oregon City. All right, thanks again.

That's an offer just for the Unnoticed Entrepreneurs. Thank you so much for joining us. Bye-bye.