However, unlike B2C marketing, the B2B marketing research often lacks a standardized structure. This absence of a clear structure often leads to fragmented insights, inefficiency and missed opportunity under the company needs to refine their marketing efforts, strengthen client relationships, and drive long-term growth. Unlike B2C marketing, which has well defined principles based on consumer psychology and purchasing behavior, B2B Marketing is inherently fragmented. Markets vary widely across industries and have long been viewed primarily as a pursuit of salesmanship. Traditionally, salesmanship focuses on personal selling which require skills, techniques and strategies used to persuade potential buyers to purchase a product or services.Currently, the successful companies are complementing the salesmanship with relationship marketing to build what we refer as account management. Account management emphasizes on building trust, providing on going value and maintaining strong connection with clients. By integrating traditional salesmanship with relationship marketing companies can move beyond short term revenue goals and create sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships that drive growth and customer retention. However, the question remains : How should we establish a framework for account management. We, at Prompt Research has developed a powerful framework for account management and its research program. We address the long-standing challenge of structuring client relationships in B2B market. This framework is built on data-driven insights, industry best practices and a deep understanding of customer lifecycle management.Using this framework, we provide business with clear, actionable roadmap for managing and growing their key accounts. Prompt Research’s Account Management Framework is structured around six core pillars: Know-how, Network, Interaction, Value, Experience, and System. These elements, which have acronym KNIVES work together to create a structured yet flexible approach to managing client relationships effectively. <ol><li data-list="ordered">Know-how – A successful account management strategy starts with expertise. This includes market intelligence, industry knowledge, and an understanding of client needs and pain points. Companies must equip their teams with the right skills and insights to anticipate customer demands and offer tailored solutions.</li><li data-list="ordered">Network – Strong account management relies on building and maintaining professional connections. This pillar focuses on leveraging internal and external networks to create strategic alliances, expand opportunities, and strengthen relationships with key decision-makers.</li><li data-list="ordered">Interaction – Consistent and meaningful engagement with clients is essential. This pillar emphasizes structured communication, active listening, and personalized interactions to nurture trust and maintain relevance in a competitive landscape.</li><li data-list="ordered">Value – Account management should go beyond transactions and focus on delivering continuous value. This means aligning solutions with client goals, offering innovative insights, and proactively addressing challenges to strengthen long-term partnerships.</li><li data-list="ordered">Experience – Customer experience plays a crucial role in retention and loyalty. This pillar ensures that companies create seamless, positive experiences across all touchpoints, from onboarding to ongoing support, ensuring clients feel valued and understood.</li><li data-list="ordered">System – A framework is only as strong as its execution. This pillar involves establishing structured processes, technology-driven solutions, and performance measurement tools to ensure consistency, scalability, and efficiency in managing accounts.</li></ol> This KNIVES framework serves as a structured approach to account management, much like 4Ps in B2C Marketing. Thus, the research programs can focus on each element as well as an umbrella for the strategy development. Contact us, at Prompt Research for further inquiries, Regards, Ardi Wirdamulia

Research on B to B Marketing. The powerful KNIVES framework

While AI offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance data analysis, customer insights, and decision-making, it also presents significant challenges. Businesses must navigate ethical concerns surrounding data privacy, workforce displacement, and biased algorithms. As we know, AI is transforming marketing research by streamlining processes from data collection to analysis and presentation. In data collection, AI automates surveys, chatbots, and web scraping, allowing businesses to gather vast amounts of structured and unstructured data efficiently. It also analyzes social media conversations, customer reviews, and IoT-generated behavioral data in real-time, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy. Once the data is collected, AI-driven analytics tools identify patterns, segment customers, and forecast trends using machine learning models. Sentiment analysis and anomaly detection further enhance the ability to understand consumer preferences and market shifts. Finally, AI simplifies the presentation of research findings through automated reports, interactive dashboards, and natural language-generated summaries. AI-powered business intelligence tools allow decision-makers to access insights quickly, transforming raw data into actionable strategies. Sounds great, right? But where does that leave us as researchers? In theory, human expertise remains essential in interpreting insights and applying strategic thinking. The question is how many jobs are still left for humans in marketing research? For example, with AI, we can eliminate the need for an entire desk research team, leaving just one person to manage the AI. The same goes for entry-level research roles (research executives). With AI enabling more efficient analysis and reporting, we can reduce the department by half and prioritize the research planning. On one hand, we can concentrate on the consultation aspect of marketing research, providing clients with deeper insights. On the other hand, reducing human resources raises ethical concerns such as job displacement, where skilled professionals may struggle to find alternative employment as AI takes over traditional research roles. Additionally, workplace inequality could emerge, as companies may prioritize AI-savvy employees while sidelining those with traditional research expertise. Lastly, the loss of human intuition and critical thinking in research could lead to a reliance on AI-generated insights that lack context, creativity, and emotional intelligence, which are essential for understanding complex consumer behaviors. As an industry, marketing researchers possess two key areas of expertise: gathering customer opinions and translating those insights to help clients make better decisions. The previous paragraph focused on the latter. But with AI now readily available, what does this mean for the process of collecting customer opinions? Traditionally, we relied on respondent recruiters to find the right participants and employed interviewers for structured interviews, as well as moderators for unstructured interviews or focus group discussions (FGDs), to collect the required information. Until now, we believe that selecting suitable respondents requires essential human qualities, such as building rapport and establishing trust with potential participants. Thus, the roles of recruiters and interviewers remain secure. But AI-powered chatbots are said to be capable of asking open-ended questions, adjusting based on responses, and even analyzing emotions through sentiment analysis. What will happen to the moderator jobs? Most researchers recognize that respondents are not always articulate and may struggle to clearly express their thoughts when describing their behavior. AI can handle this more effectively than respondents. This leads us to question whether we truly need respondents' opinions. What if we asked AI instead? Would there be any difference in terms of our recommendation to clients? I’m not necessarily in a position to answer those questions definitively. As a businessperson, I seek more effective and efficient processes. However, as a researcher, I also want to preserve as many jobs as possible. I believe, finding the right balance between AI and human involvement will be a key challenge in the decade ahead. Regards, Dr. Ardi Wirdamulia

AI in marketing research: How it affects our job

This year, we, Prompt Research, celebrate our 25th anniversary. It has been quite a journey for us as company and we extend our gratitude to you all who played part in growing the company.In these two and half decades we have put our name as one of prominent marketing research companies in Indonesia. We earn respect from the industry as one of the founders of PERPI (Association of Indonesian Marketing Research Companies). We are also recognized as talents pool for the industry. Many of people who used to work at Prompt Research currently have their own agencies or held important roles in their organization. We like to believe that our environment plays significant roles in motivating these people to progress.When we started our company, the leaders of our industry still structured their services based on what they can do such as quantitative vs qualitative research. We are among the first who recognized how this kind of structure hinder our industry to fulfill our raison d’etre: Provide consumer insights to help our clients making marketing decision. From early on, we structured our company based on account management where each research director is responsible for his or her account. This structure allows us to learn more on our clients’ business and in process provides bigger impact in their marketing decision.This kind of progressive and innovative mind help us to secure many blue chip companies in Indonesia as our clients. The list includes Unilever, Toyota Astra Motor, Djarum Group, Tempo Scan Group, just to mention a few. The relentless effort to unravel high quality consumer insights also brought us to win award from Mix Magazine as Best of Marketing Research Agency in Indonesia in 2011.Of course, as any other companies, we faced many challenges. The pandemic in 2020-2021 for instance, had put us many years back in terms of revenue and capital. However, the same pandemic also served as pivotal time to step up our game in utilization of digital technology in our research. We lose some, we win some.Now, as our clients are facing fiercer and fiercer competitive market landscape, we will continue to help them the best we can. Please do not hesitate to call us for all your queries and questions. Regards, Dr. Ardi Wirdamulia

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