Want to Build B2B Products that Customers Actually Pay for — Fast?

In B2B markets, a sales transaction will never occur unless you are solving a real problem.  Stop guessing what you believe target market prospects need as it just delays market penetration and wastes valuable development capital. Master these 7 battle-tested methods for uncovering real enterprise pain points.

I’ve used every single one of these to drive individual product revenue as much as $350M in new ARR, and have applied these techniques across AI, SaaS, cybersecurity, telecommunications, healthtech and Real-World Data (RWD). Traditional “build it and pray” approaches fail at an astronomical rate of 83%. The methods below? Up to 5× higher success rates.

Let’s dive in… #B2BMarketing #ProductMarketing #CustomerDiscovery #Growth

1.        Deep Customer Interviews (The 90% Rule)

·        Many market research companies such as GuidePoint, AlphaSights, Ivy Exec and GLG have built large networks of professional experts and can quickly recruit target respondents at a reasonable cost.  But once you have lined up respondents you need a solid strategy including a clearly defined thesis, focuses, and prepared questions.  Stop asking “Do you like this feature?” Start asking: “Walk me through the last time this process completely frustrated you.”  “What impacts does it cause your organization when the process fails?” “What happens right before you scream at your screen?”  Ask open ended questions that delve into the cause and effect of the process or outcome the company is trying to achieve.  This will uncover the pain points that need to be addressed and allow you to craft a product positioning that can be tested in follow-up interviews.

·        At M2Gen (now Zephyr AI), 12–15 interviews with oncology informatics leaders uncovered that the #1 struggle wasn’t data volume — it was trust in provenance + permissioning across 20 cancer centers. That single insight repositioned us from “big data” to “federated, permissioned RWD” yielding 13 new pharma logos and +$80M ARR.  It also opened new opportunities in clinical trials and observational studies by enabling controlled Pharma access to the ORIEN Network creating multi-sided value across the entire RWD ecosystem.

Data: 8–15 interviews per segment reveals 90–95% of all themes (NSF I-Corps + Planbeyond research).

2.        Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) – My Absolute Favorite. Forget personas. Focus on the job the customer hires your product to do.

·        Example from Inspirata (Now FujiFilm): Pathologists weren’t hiring us for “digital pathology” or to “automate their chaos”. They were hiring us to align patient disease types and tumor complexity with the optimal pathologist across all labs in the health system to “reduce diagnostic turnaround time by improving workflows and better leverage our expensive but limited resources.”  The “Jobs-to-be-Done” were to enable new case triage and expediting assignments in a FDA compliant environment.

·        Reframing around that JTBD flipped us from a seller of digital pathology softare to enterprise oncology insights platform. → $80M+ new ARR in 18 months.

Data: Strategyn’s 20-year study: JTBD-based innovation succeeds 86% of the time vs 17% for traditional methods.

3.        Opportunity Scoring Surveys (Importance vs Satisfaction) Opportunity Scoring is a follow-on effort to Deep Customer Interviews but is also an effective practice to use post sales meetings.  After interviews, quantify what you have discovered by importance scoring where meeting participants score their perception of the prospect findings. The scores can be graphed in a classic 2×2: X-axis: Satisfaction (how happy are they today?) Y-axis: Importance (how critical is this outcome?)  You create a visual that helps in crafting changes to the existing value proposition, product roadmap and market messaging.  The highest scored needs will be in the top-right quadrant = biggest opportunity.

·        We ran this at DrFirst across payers, health systems, and pharmacies. Discovered “medication primary adherence” was massively important but terribly unsatisfied and first-fill data was difficult to obtain.  We launched an AI-driven adherence solution that reached over 4M patients in the first year and 7 new pharma clients in Year 1.

4.        Social Listening & G2/Reddit/X Mining Unsolicited feedback is gold because they’re not trying to be nice and findings can yield authentic insights if context is accurate.  Social listening is a less focused discovery method than the prior three, but there are steps you can take that convert scanning for random observations into more targeted and contextual insights.  Generate posts, blogs and earned media articles that frame a subject and your thesis of the needs and impacts caused by the issue and promote the posts on social media, email or even digital ads to draw interest and responses.  The feedback obtained is raw and often shorthand, but responses are directly related to the defined subject matter and can inform you about both prospective sentiment and accuracy.

·        At Network.bio, we saw the same phrase pop up 100+ times on Reddit and private Slack communities: “I have 500K biospecimens but no clean way to query across sites without breaking HIPAA.”  That became our entire federated data platform roadmap. Six academic medical centers signed in Year 1 → pipeline of 1.2M+ specimens.

5.        Ethnography / “Follow Me Home” (Watch the Struggle Live) Intuit made this famous, but it works in B2B and regulated markets too — I’ve done it for 15 years and it’s still my secret weapon.  While Ethnography can be used to build and shape requirements for greenfield product, it requires a functional environment for the participant to interact with or they will loose interest and drop participation, endangering future market goodwill.  So Ethnography is optimal for existing digital solutions by illuminating UX, CX, frequency of actions, user preferences, ect.   New AI tools such as Replit, @TheySaid and others can be used to create AI-enabled test environments to shape future product requirements that reduce the tax on software development groups and deliver precise market-driven requirements.  Most product teams guess what the customer does. I go watch them bleed in real time.

·        This is ethnographic observation (aka Intuit’s famous “Follow Me Home” on steroids) adapted for B2B healthcare, pharma, and payer environments.  It is the single highest-ROI discovery method I’ve ever used — because people lie in interviews, but they can’t lie when you’re staring at their screen at 2 a.m. during bid season.

·        How I Run B2B “Follow Me Home” – The Exact Playbook

Step 1 – Get Permission the Smart Way Never say “Can we observe you?” → instant defense shield. Say: “We’re redesigning the next version and we’ll pay you $5K–$15K for two half-days of your time so we don’t build the wrong thing.” Every single time: they say yes. Money + ego = open door.

Step 2 – The Golden Rule: Shut Up and Watch

·        One PM/PMM (me) + one engineer/designer max

·        No laptops open, no recording without consent (most places allow audio + anonymized screen capture)

·        You are a fly on the wall for 4–8 hours

·        You ask exactly one question per hour, and only clarifying questions

·        Utilize tools like TheySaid to understand the “What” they did and the “Why” they did it.

Step 3 – Look for the “Say-Do Gap” What they told you in the interview vs. what they actually do is usually 100% opposite.

·        MedHOK (now MHK) – Medicare Advantage Compliance Nightmare Interview quote: “We have a pretty smooth bid submission process.” Reality (observed 4 p.m. in Tampa war room):

·        11 monitors, 42 Excel files open

·        Compliance officer copying/pasting the same CMS table 400+ times

·        Screaming at printer because macros broke again

·        Entire team of 9 living on Red Bull for 11 straight days

·        Outcome → Built customizable interface (versus hard coded) allowing customers to modify the work environment to their personal choice. RFP win rate: 25% → 95% in <12 months.

6.        Diagnostics –The Brainchild of Challenger, Inc. is a Winning Sequence I’ve Used for 20+ Years 

The fastest way to surface hidden pain in B2B? Stop selling. Hand the prospect a mirror that shows exactly how broken their current process is — with their own data.  Overcome multi-constituent sales impediments by expanding its use inside the company to gain multiple perspectives and biases.  Diagnostics also equip your sales team with “FREE Value” that they can provide to prospects that not only set them apart but also gives the prospect reason to take their call.

The best Diagnostics break down a specific client process into the Jobs-to-be-Done or primary steps that are inefficient.  You promote Diagnostic via targeted ads just like you would a product, promising a benchmark analysis versus the target’s market peers (overall average) which is not data they can easily obtain elsewhere.  When the salesperson calls to provide them with their benchmark analysis, it provides an opportunity to explore why specific responses deviate from the norm and where responses contradict one another.  It yields a high-value conversation that exposes real pain points in the process you are addressing.

·        To build initial statistical significance you can leverage the same vendors that facilitated your Deep Customer Interviews or pay existing customers for participation.  Typically, 35-40 interviews are required to build relevant peer benchmarks.  The larger your base of unique company responses you build the more relevant you can provide the prospect refined benchmark cohorts that the prospect is interested in.

You must train your sales teams on how to review the benchmark report with the prospect, or they will often just review question by question and deflate the real value of the Diagnostic.  Teach the to focus on the “Deviation form the Norm” and “Contradictory Responses” using flattery and authentic curiosity.  Even sit on calls with them to help train them on its use.  Prospects thank you for the audit. Sales cycles collapse. Win rates explode. Diagnostics are the enterprise version of the clinician’s stethoscope — you can’t treat what you haven’t diagnosed. Try it on your next 10 pipeline accounts and watch what happens.

How I’ve used Diagnostics to unlock eight-figure deals:

• Inspirata → Fujifilm Created the “Clinical Trial Matching and Accrual Diagnostic” for cancer centers. Exposed that most labs were losing 18–27 hours per week on manual slide utilizing graduate students to review the EMR and ancillary systems for potential trial prospects with a 2% average accrual rate. Turned cold prospects into 450+ inbound leads and 10 cancer center deals in <12 months.

• DrFirst Ran a “Medication Reconciliation Diagnostic” across health systems. Showed significant inter-departmental process challenges that were non-compliant due to persistent process variance.  Yielded 7-figure contract signed in 41 days and 19 new centers contracted on the AI solution in Year 1.

The Formula That Works Every Time

·        Pick the prospect’s most expensive or riskiest process.

·        Build a 5–15 question assessment + automated scoring engine (we use Typeform + Google Sheets or Marketo RTP but have also custom developed a scalable diagnostic framework).

·        Deliver a branded, data-rich 3–8-page PDF that says: “Here’s what good looks like… and here’s how far you are from it.”

·        End with a single recommended next step (almost never “buy our thing” on page 1).

7.        Customer Advisory Boards – Bring 10–12 existing and potential customer decision makers together twice a year. You can have a theme or agenda but do not predicate the discussions or you will miss significant insights.  If you just guide participation, the clients will raise what matters most, just be quiet and listen.  

·        Always record the conversation with participant approval so you can review the discussion and catch items you may have missed, as well as share more broadly across the organization.

·        Turn-over participants annually, keep the most insightful participants to break the ice of new participants.

So… what’s your go-to method for spotting unmet needs before the competition does? Drop it below — I read every comment. Best one gets a 30-min teardown of their current discovery process on me.

Let’s stop building features. Let’s start solving jobs that customers are desperate to hire for.

If your organization needs support in Go-To-Market commercialization please visit https://www.VeaAI.ai for more information on the services we can provide to help you build a powerful and successful revenue growth strategy.

For more information on Greg Tennant please visit https://www.gregorytennant.com.

#B2BMarketing #ProductMarketing #CustomerDiscovery #Growth #TechnologyCommercialization #ProblemIdentification #ProductLedGrowth #B2B #SaaS #HealthTech #DemandGen