The best starting point for B2B research recruitment is often your existing network of customers, followers, subscribers, etc. This group will be the most engaged and easiest to recruit, though they bring with them a substantial risk of an echo chamber if they’re the only ones you talk with.
This post discusses common owned channels and how to recruit through them:
- Your community
- Your sales network
- Newsletters
- Customer support & CSM
- Owned social media
- Intercom, Web & In-App Intercepts
- Research panel & Customer advisory board
RECRUITING THROUGH YOUR COMMUNITY
Your lowest hanging fruit for soliciting feedback will likely be your existing company communities – your forums, Discord channels, etc. If you have a vibrant community, you can fill surveys from there, allowing you to turn around research in days.
Starting recruitment in your community can be as simple as just posting a link to the survey or qual screener, with a note on why you’re looking for their feedback.
Recommendations
In order to effectively recruit in your communities:
- Be an active long-term participant – it’s a lot easier to recruit for projects if you’re a known quantity in the community. Participate in the forums even between research projects, and build out your profile.
- Be respectful of their time – just because your community members are enthusiastic about your product doesn’t mean you can ask them to fill out a 30-minute survey. Be succinct and engage them on high-value topics.
- Reward participation – even if you don’t want to incentivize every community survey with cash rewards, consider if you can offer swag, invites to special community days, chats with the product team, etc. in return for participation. Make it clear that you appreciate their feedback.
- Track all recruitment initiatives – if multiple teams want to solicit community feedback, ensure you track and coordinate between them so that you don’t overwhelm the community with feedback requests.
- Be prepared for criticism – your community will mostly want to offer product feedback. That’s great for UX research, but community members will frequently complain when you ask business questions. Be prepared for any pricing or business model research to be picked apart and criticized publicly. This doesn’t mean you can’t ask it, but alert your PR team ahead of time and be prepared with messaging around potentially sensitive topics.
- Share back results – sharing concrete results from your research drives a lot of goodwill and future engagement. A good idea is to run an annual community survey which you can share in full with the community.
- Recruitment burnout is real – you want to build a sustainable recruitment mechanism for your community that lets you conduct research for years to come. This means not over-sampling your most engaged users. Monitor response rates and pull back if you’re starting to see them dip. I’d be cautious of more than one research request per quarter per community channel.
- Remember that users are not necessarily decision makers – your community will primarily be made up of product users. This is ideal for UX researchers but not so much for market researchers. You will mostly want feedback from decision makers, which is frequently not the same people as the users, making your community less fertile ground for market research.
- Recognize that your community is a self-selected cohort of highly engaged users – they are not representative of your overall user base, both in terms of positive and negative signals. Don’t implicitly trust community feedback more just because it comes from users you might know personally.
LEVERAGE YOUR SALES NETWORK
Your sales team’s network is a treasure trove of high-value research participants, though it might be difficult to pry their contact details out of your sales reps’ hands. Sales contacts are especially valuable for interviews around purchase behavior, win/loss, churn prevention, price sensitivity and other higher-level topics, as they are the decision makers that you’ll be hard pressed to recruit through other channels.
One very valuable segment that is almost exclusively accessible through your sales team is churned customers and ‘Closed Lost’ prospects. If you’re looking to do purchase funnel research, these segments provide incredibly valuable feedback.
Recommendations
In order to effectively recruit research participants through your sales team:
- Don’t mix research and sales – make clear to your sales reps that your research is not a back channel sales pitch. Nothing makes a customer clam up faster than if they believe their feedback will be used for future sales plays. For the same reason, sales reps should not be on research calls.
- Consider sales an infrequent recruitment channel – you can probably only do one or two recruitment initiatives per year through your sales team.
- Convince your sales reps it’s in their interest to help – you are unlikely to be allowed to do your own outreach to sales contacts (and anyway, you will want warm intros), so it’s important to convince your sales reps that it’s worth their time to help you despite there not being any direct sales opportunity. Some strategies I’ve seen work:
- Sales reps often want opportunities to engage with clients, to get top of mind. Pitch the research invite as an outreach in between sales cycles.
- Sales leadership often loves to use market research output in sales plays. Share research results and solicit research ideas to give them skin in the game. Once you have leadership on board, reps tend to be more helpful.
- Work with Sales Ops to build a referral program or contest for sales reps, with costs coming out of the research budget. Any internal referral bonuses will still be cheaper per respondent than external recruiters, so it’s worth spending money on sales incentives.
- Be considerate of your sales reps – it’s their contacts and livelihood that you are impacting.
- Ensure your outreach is not overlapping with active deals or sales cycles.
- If the rep says no to contacting a candidate, mark them as off limits.
- Make it clear ahead of time to the sales rep if the sales process will be part of the conversation.
- Confirm with your sales reps if you can follow up with past research participants yourself for future projects, or if you should always go through the reps.
- Surveys are not a good use of sales networks – I have never seen sales recruitment work successfully at a survey scale. Focus on using it for qualitative research.
- Expect sales reps to be flaky – even with the best intentions, sales follow-through on outreach plans tends to be spotty. Reps will naturally focus on work that offers immediate revenue potential, so even if you have sales leadership backing, expect most reps to invest limited time into your project.
- Be organized before contacting sales – once your sales team starts lining up high-value research participants, have your scheduling set up, interview guide finalized and signed off, and internal participants vetted. Sales leads are rare and valuable, make sure not to waste them.
USING YOUR NEWSLETTER
Another straightforward recruitment channel is your company newsletters and other marketing emails. Newsletters are especially good for surveys, if you can embed the research invite as part of the newsletter, as this tends to lead to higher open rates than sending out standalone survey emails.
Recommendations
Best practices for recruiting through owned email lists:
- Segment your email subscriber lists
- Send your research emails to the smallest cohort possible each time. The smaller fraction of your newsletter list you can target with each research project, the larger number of different projects you can run before you encounter survey fatigue.
- Work with your product marketing team to identify relevant targeting criteria, and add those as flags in your newsletter distribution software. It’s super helpful to e.g. know which newsletter subscribers use which of your products, so you can target only those with your invites. This can be challenging to implement, but it is powerful once available.
- Embed user ID metadata in survey url – avoid the need to ask newsletter respondents for their name or email by embedding an ID as metadata and capturing it in the survey software.
- Avoid research fatigue – as with your community, it’s easy to over-sample newsletter subscribers. Avoid emailing any one subscriber more than once per quarter, and make use of segmentation to allow for more projects.
- Decide if you want to let newsletter subscribers forward the survey link – letting newsletter subscribers repost survey URL’s on their social media can be very useful as a signal boost, but it can also drive lower-quality respondents.
- Allow people to unsubscribe specifically from research email – if you send out separate research emails (as opposed to including a research invite in a marketing email), it should be possible to unsubscribe specifically from these emails while remaining subscribed to general marketing emails. Make sure you know how to use the right suppression lists when sending out emails, so you adhere to opt-out preferences.
- Expect low response rates – B2B newsletters tend to have low open and click-thru rates, so even large contact lists might not translate to massive survey completion rates. Don’t be surprised by survey completion rates in the 2-5% range.
- Newsletter subscribers are atypical – Users who opt in to receive B2B marketing newsletters are not representative of your overall customer base. They actually want to be spammed with marketing pitches, which is pretty weird.
- Email addresses are sensitive information – be cautious about exporting subscriber emails anywhere from your marketing automation platform (e.g. by importing emails into Excel to manually match with user behavioral data to create target lists. This can be very powerful, but your legal team will be unhappy). Don’t send email addresses in plain text to your survey platform; hash them or use an anonymized user ID string as the unique identifier.
- Start the survey in the email itself – experiment with embedding the first question of the survey directly in the newsletter.
- Understand who you are legally allowed to target – market research invitations are classified as ‘promotional emails’ (as opposed to ‘operational’ emails that goes out to all customers, such as purchase receipts or updates on your most recent data breach). If a customer has opted out of receiving promotional emails, you need to exclude them from the distribution list, though sometimes you can append e.g. a short satisfaction survey to an operational email if the survey is directly related to the email topic (e.g. asking about satisfaction with a purchase process in the receipt email). Confirm with your legal team what you’re allowed to do, and any loopholes they will allow you to exploit.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT & CUSTOMER SUCCESS TEAMS
Your customer support and CSM teams have a lot of interactions with your customers, and tend to have a great finger on the pulse of customer sentiment. A good first step in a lot of research is to gather internal feedback from your CS and CSM team before you talk with customers, to ensure you capture existing internal knowledge in your research plans.
Your support and CSM teams can also often offer warm intros to customers. Recruiting through these teams tends to work best when the research objectives match their most frequent types of customer interactions.
- When doing research around product quality and functionality, the customer support team can often connect you to a lot of informed users. The customer support team is less useful for e.g. business-related topics.
- Your CSM team can be a great source of feedback on early customer experiences, such as onboarding, customer needs, product roadmap, etc. If your projects touches on anything that’s related to the CSM team’s core objective of ‘making our customers more successful’, ask for their help to intro you to their customers.
OWNED SOCIAL MEDIA
B2B brands tend to not have a very active social media presence, but if you’re the exception, it can be worth tapping into this community for feedback. It’s easy to repurpose your community recruitment messaging and post it on social media, so the marginal cost is near zero.
Recommendations
In order to effectively recruit research participants through your sales team:
- Expect to be disappointed – I haven’t found social media to be very successful for market research recruitment. Engagement tends to be limited, the signal-to-noise ratio is low, and there is a risk that any controversial questions (e.g. around price elasticity or product bundling) will generate a negative messaging cycle. Go ahead and try it, but only if the time investment is low.
- Social media works best for surveys – I’d be wary of trying to recruit for qualitative research, such as interviews, through social media, due to your lack of control over who sees your invite.
- Quarantine social media responses – ensure you can differentiate between recruitment sources in your survey software, as you will want to do a more comprehensive quality control pass on any feedback you receive via social media.
- Social media respondents are atypical – they are not representative of your overall user base (just like your community and newsletter subscribers, but in yet another way…)
INTERCOM, WEB & IN-APP INTERCEPTS
Running surveys through a web intercept can be very effective for fast-turnaround research projects, though feedback quality will be lower than through more selective channels.
Almost all survey software have a web intercept module and most A/B testing solutions has functionality to run simple surveys. And if your website uses a tag manager, implementation can be done easily without requiring engineering resources. Web intercept surveys are especially useful for simple brand-related surveys (e.g. message testing, brand sentiment, etc) where respondent quality isn’t super important.
Intercom and in-app intercepts offer more control over who sees your survey, but integration is more complicated and usually requires approval by your product team. And interrupting a user’s workflow with a survey can become very controversial if you don’t do it respectfully, so be careful about the UX.
Still, Intercom and in-app intercepts can be a good channel for NPS or CSAT surveys, standardized surveys that repeat on a regular basis.
RESEARCH PANEL & CUSTOMER ADVISORY BOARD
The gold standard for research recruiting is an in-house research panel or customer advisory board, giving you a pre-vetted panel of candidates who offer turnkey access to high-quality research participants.
If you’re reading this guide, I expect that you don’t yet have one set up, but I’d encourage you to start thinking about creating a research panel in the future. It’s one of the best long-term investments you can make for effectively gathering feedback, across both UX and market research.
Developing and maintaining an in-house research panel is a significant investment of bandwidth and budget, but a start is to build out a participant list for your completed qualitative research projects, in which you track past research participants, with profile data, research projects participated in, quality of feedback offered, and interest in participating in future research.
Photo by Daria Nepriakhina
