What Is B2B Secret Shopping and What Does It Reveal About Your Competitors?
A simple guide to secret shopping in the business-to-business sector. An account of what a secret shopper observes within a competitor’s sales process and how to run a shop that performs well.
To fill out the web form, the researchers waited. They did this with 2,241 US companies, each time posing as a buyer. Nearly one in four never replied. Those that did took an average of 42 hours. The study ran in Harvard Business Review in 2011 and remains one of the most quoted findings in sales. Even with all the AI wiz-bang, it’s about the same today.
It is also a secret shop; the authors learned what happened with lead response by taking on the role of the buyer and recording what was said.
B2B secret shopping involves a trained researcher pretending to be a genuine buyer and going through the company’s sales process. They observe how quickly the company replies, what questions it asks, how it conducts the demonstration, how much it charges, and what it says about its competitors. In B2B, the target is usually a competitor, and the objective is to learn how that competitor sells to customers like yours.
Secret shopping and mystery shopping are the same method, just known by two different names. The steps involved, the ethical considerations and the results are all identical.
This article argues that your rivals’ websites reveal what they want you to think. Notes from lost deals show the information buyers have chosen to provide. A special shop gives you access to the one room where the deal is made: the live sales conversation. Even after more than 20 years of operating such shops, we still consider it the quickest way to get facts a competitor keeps hidden from the internet.
Key Takeaways
- In a B2B secret shop, a trained researcher acts as a buyer and moves through the rival’s sales process.
- Secret shopping and mystery shopping are in fact the same method under two different names.
- Buyers spend little time with each supplier, so rivals save their best lines and real prices for those calls.
- A shop that covers our stages: response, discovery, price, and positioning.
- The results are valuable when they are evaluated and shared with your sales, pricing, and product teams within weeks.
Is secret shopping the same as mystery shopping?
Some companies and buyers use secret shopping, while others use mystery shopping. In both cases, a person plays the role of a customer to assess how a company treats its buyers.
The key split is between B2C and B2B.
In retail and hospitality, a secret shopper goes to a store or hotel. They look at the greeting, the wait, and the upsell question. The visit takes an hour.
In B2B, there is no shop floor. The shopper books a demo, joins the first calls, asks for a quote, and pushes back on price. They may stay in the process for weeks. They talk to sales reps, tech experts, and sometimes a sales director. Each is trained to test buyers and spot time-wasters.
The people who can carry out the task change as a result. A retail shopper who is using a checklist won’t be able to make it through a tech sales call. The seller asks two sharp questions, gets a weak answer, and then gives the shopper the brochure version of the pitch. For more on the broader method, see our guide on how B2B mystery shopping works.
How else are you supposed to find out this information?
Research into rival companies usually ends with what they decide to publish.
A pricing page shows the list price but not the discount offered to close in the last week of the quarter. A website shows features but not what the sales rep says when a buyer names you as the other option. A review site shows how happy customers feel a year in but not how the deal was won.
Internal sources have gaps. Sales reps report what they think happened in a lost deal. Lost buyers give the easy reason, and price is the easiest reason of all. One of the first things a new client tells us is that they lose on price. Sometimes that holds. More often, the shop points to something else: a slow first reply, a rival with a better answer to a hard question, or a line about the client’s product that nobody had heard.
That is where the problem lies. The facts that determine deal outcomes are in the private discussions between the seller and the buyer. You don’t take part in those conversations; your competitor does.
You can get access to the room through secret shopping.
What does the research say about the buyer’s side of the deal?
The following three points show why the sales conversation matters.
First, buyers spend little time with suppliers. Gartner’s research found B2B buyers spend about 17% of their buying time with suppliers. When comparing several suppliers, time with any one sales rep can fall to 5 or 6%. A competitor who gets a few hours with your buyer will use every minute. In those minutes, the real price, promises, and lines about you come out.
Second, many buyers prefer not to speak to a representative at all. Gartner has found that about three out of four B2B buyers prefer to make a purchase without one. With fewer conversations, each one becomes more important. As a result, competitors take more care when preparing these calls.
Third, what firms claim and what they do can differ greatly. The Harvard Business Review audit found 37% of companies replied to a web lead within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never replied. The same authors found that firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even one hour longer. Every one of those companies would have said it valued its leads. The secret shop showed what they did.
If you combine those three findings, then the case is clear: the live sales conversation is short, infrequent and decisive. It is also the part of your competitor’s business that you cannot observe from the outside.
What do B2B secret shoppers look for? The four aspects.
All business-to-business sales go through four stages, and we apply these stages when planning our shops since each stage contains a different type of evidence. The first door is response. How fast does the competitor reply? Who replies and through which channel? Does a person call, or does an automated sequence take over? Does anyone reply at all? This door is the easiest to test and most often ignored.d.
The second stage is discovery. What does the seller ask? How do they check the budget, timing and who the signers are? Do they understand the buyer’s problem, or do they immediately move on to the demonstration? The discovery process reveals how well-trained the sales team is and which kinds of buyers they target.
The third consideration is price. When does price first come into play? What is the opening number? How far does it move when the buyer pushes? What is included, what is an extra cost, and what payment terms are offered? The guide on how to find competitors’ pricing explains why this door matters.
The fourth door is about positioning. What does the seller do when the buyer brings up your name? Do they attack a weakness of yours? Do they ask the buyer a question you can’t answer? And do they bring up a fault you fixed a year ago?
Most companies focus on the first door because it is easy to measure. However, in our experience, the findings that drive changes in decisions are behind the third and fourth doors. This includes the kind of discount a competitor will offer when pressured and the question they put in the buyer’s mind; this kind of evidence cannot be obtained from a database.
How does a B2B secret shop function in practice?
We operate our secret shops as we have been trained to carry out intelligence work; the procedure begins with a question and concludes with a graded finding.
It starts with one decision. Are we losing to this rival on price or something else? Should we match their bundle? Is their new product ready for enterprise buyers? A clear question keeps the shop short and focused. We once received a list of 80 technical questions from a client. No seller answers 80 questions from a prospect, and a buyer who asks them stops looking like a buyer.
Next comes the legend. In intelligence work, a legend is the backstory that makes a person believable. In a secret shop, it covers the company, role, budget, current supplier, trigger for looking now, and timeline. It must match what the competitor sees as a qualified lead. It must also hold up across every call and email for weeks. One mismatch in company size or headcount is enough for an alert seller to go quiet.
And moving on…
The shopper then moves through the process by asking for a demonstration, answering the seller’s questions, taking part in the first few calls, and requesting a quote. They raise the kinds of objections a genuine buyer would. They refer to the client by name as one option, and they listen to the reply. Throughout, they record what a real buyer would see and nothing more. Every email, price sheet, deck, and proposal becomes evidence. When a seller records a call, the shopper can ask for a copy.
The final stage is grading. Each finding is noted as observed or inferred and assigned a confidence level. If a price is stated in a written proposal, it is considered observed and carries a high confidence level; a comment made over the phone about a planned price increase is given a lower confidence level. The client can see this difference and therefore knows which findings will significantly impact the decision.
The result will vary by question; it could be a scorecard for each competitor, a table showing prices and packages, or a record of what competitors have said about the client. You can see how our secret shopping case study in AR automation addresses this.
What Goes Wrong With Secret Shopping Projects?
Most shops fail for only a few common reasons.
The first problem is too many questions. If a shop attempts to answer every question, it will, in effect, answer none at all. Only four or five questions about the buying process will be answered, while eighty will flag the shopper.
The second is the wrong shopper. A shopper who cannot hold a tech call gets the stock pitch. The report looks full but says nothing.
The third one is merely a legend. If two individuals in the same “firm” have different staff numbers, the seller will notice. His manager will too.
The fourth person is seeking proof. In some cases, clients ask a shop to verify a belief; they want to catch a rival in a lie. When the shop proves the rival is honest and better prepared, they feel the money was wasted. It was, however, the most useful thing they could have paid for.
The fifth point involves no actual action; if a report remains in a shared drive, then nothing changes. We cover this more closely in the sections on B2B mystery shopping and real-world competitive intelligence.
How Do You Run a B2B Secret Shop? Seven Steps
- Prepare a single decision question and state the decision that the shop will communicate, for example, whether or not to match the rival’s bundle. Each question the shopper poses should relate to this decision.
- Select two or three rivals; choose those you most often encounter in live deals. Going into greater detail about the rivals who actually matter is better than having a superficial look at ten.
- Create a legend that will endure. Decide in advance the firm’s role, budget, reason for the purchase, and timeline for first contact. Put this in writing so everyone at the shop tells the same story.
- Shop yourself first. Run the same process on your own sales team. You will find gaps to fix this month and have a baseline to compare rivals against.
- Go through each of the four doors and try out the response, discovery, price and positioning options. If you choose to name your own company, then note what the seller says afterwards.
- Grade every finding. Mark each as observed or inferred and give it a confidence level. Keep the source with the finding so anyone can check it.
- Tell the teams by two weeks’ time to update the battle cards, correct any false statements your rivals make about you, and pass the pricing findings to those responsible for setting prices. Use the guide on how to ask questions that make competitors sweat when drafting your replies.
Frequently Asked Questions
So, what constitutes a secret shopper in a business-to-business context?
A secret shopper in the business-to-business (B2B) sector is a trained researcher who acts as an actual business buyer. They go through the real sales process, from the initial enquiry to the submission of a proposal. They record how quickly the company replies, what questions it asks, how much it charges, and what it says about its rivals. Generally, most B2B secret shoppers focus on the company’s competitors.
Is secret shopping the same as mystery shopping?
Certainly, the two names refer to the same method: someone pretends to be a customer to see how a company treats its buyers. The difference lies in whether it’s B2C or B2B. While a retail shop visit may take an hour, a B2B engagement can last weeks, involving demonstrations, proposals, and price negotiations.
What happens if a competitor realises they have been secret shopped?
A well-managed shop should go unnoticed. The customer should use a believable story, keep it consistent, and pose the kinds of questions that an ordinary buyer would. Shops are identified when shoppers ask too many technical questions, confuse their story, or can’t carry out a sales conversation. Even if a competitor suspects it, most still believe competitors research one another.
How long does a B2B secret shopping operation take?
Most B2B secret shops last between six and twelve weeks, from drafting the plan to submitting the final report. The actual shopping process takes three to six weeks. The shopper must proceed at the speed of an actual sale. Large deals and multiple meetings may take longer, while simpler sales can be completed more quickly.
What is the advantage of using an agency like Octopus for B2B secret shopping?
B2B secret shops require shoppers who can carry out a tech sales call for several weeks, have a believable cover story, and deliver reliable results. Former British military intelligence analysts founded Octopus. Over more than 20 years, we have conducted B2B secret shops in the UK, the US, and the MENA region. Contact our B2B mystery shopping team to learn more.
What would a buyer learn?
Return to the web form. The researchers never asked 2,241 companies how quickly they responded to leads because they would have received 2,241 confident answers; instead, they filled out the form and then watched the clock.
You’re competing with the same companies. If you ask them how they sell, they will direct you to their website. If you ask your sales staff why you lost a sale, they will offer only their best guess. And if you talk to a customer who has decided not to buy, he or she will mention price.
Alternatively, you could take the buyer’s role. Then you can listen to the opening statement and observe how far the item moves. You could hear the question your competitor sets up about your product, and you could see which of your beliefs about the market are valid and which are not.
A secret shop provides evidence from the one area your competitor cannot prepare in advance—the conversation with a buyer they are trying to win.
If you want to find out how your competitors market their products when they think no one from your side is watching, then plan your secret shop using Octopus.
All competitors give two versions of the story—the one on their website and the one they tell your potential buyer—and secret shopping is how you get the second one.
Keep Learning
- What Is B2B Mystery Shopping and How Does It Work? A step-by-step look at how a B2B shop runs, from persona design to scoring.
- B2B Mystery Shopping and Real-World Competitive Intelligence What shops reveal in live deals, and why most projects fail to act on the findings.
- How Is Mystery Shopping Done? A short introduction to the core steps of any shopping programme.
- Competitor Analysis in Dubai: Why the Best Answers Come From People, Not Tools How secret shopping fits alongside interviews and desk research in the Gulf.
- B2B Mystery Shopping Case Study: HR and Payroll Software A worked example of shopping rivals in a crowded software market.
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