B2B Research Recruiting 101: Process best practices

Published by Ulf Johansson on

This post covers practical questions on getting started with research recruitment, on topics such as defining who you want included in your study, writing effective invitations, working with vendors, writing screeners, etc.

Topics covered in this post:

DEFINING PARTICIPANT PROFILES

A key early decision in your research will be what type of respondents to include in your study. Even if you decide to recruit only from within your current customer base, you will want a point of view on who you want to speak with and why their feedback will be relevant to your research.

Primary Target Audience

Some of the key profile criteria you want defined are:

  • Business relationship – do you want current customers, prospects, churned customers, lost prospects, customers of competitor products, etc.
  • Product experience – should they be active users of your or competitor products, market newcomers, etc.
  • Decision making responsibilities – do you want to speak with buyers of your or competitor products, people with influence on purchase decisions, or gatekeepers from a budget, legal or management perspective, etc.
  • Company size – are you looking for feedback from SME customers, enterprise accounts, etc.
  • Job titles – a list of target job titles is especially helpful when recruiting outside of your network through vendors or on LinkedIn.
  • Industry – target industry is another of the key filter criteria for recruitment through third party channels.

If you’re doing qualitative research, you’ll want to ensure you have enough of a sample from each segment that individual outliers don’t skew the analysis. A good rule of thumb is to assume that you need a minimum of five interviews per segment. If those initial five interviews are incredibly consistent, you might be satisfied with that, but more often you will have to add interviews until you have a more complete picture. This means some segments will require more interviews than others, depending on how diverse the segments end up being.

For quantitative research, I never want to have less than 100 high-quality completed survey responses per segment, and preferably more than 300 responses per segment, as you’ll want to be able to cut the data in more ways during your analysis.

Expanded Target Audience

You also want to consider how you can use partial-fit candidates, where the respondents fit some but not all of your recruiting criteria. In B2B recruiting, you rarely have the luxury of choice, and you have to make do with what respondents you can find, even if they’re not ideal.

It helps to determine early what type of partial-fit candidates you can use, so you can expand your recruitment pool from the start rather than having to to refit your screener halfway through your project.

Partial-fit participants are most useful for 1:1 interviews. In focus groups you need people with proper understanding of the subject for useful conversations, and in surveys you’ll never know how much they actually know and how much is bullshit.

WRITING EFFECTIVE INVITATIONS

Persuading potential research participants to help offering you feedback can be challenging. Recruiting often consists of a cold outreach through email, IM, or forum post, and getting this right will significantly improve response rates.

Your initial outreach message has three key objectives :

  • Reassure potential candidates – people always distrust cold outreach messages, especially from outside their network. Your message needs to overcome their skepticism about you and the project in order to avoid the spam folder.
  • Educate them about the project – make it clear what you are contacting them about, and why they would be a fit.
  • Make them desire to participate – you can do this by creating curiosity, selling them on the value their feedback would bring, or just by focusing on the money.
Recommendations

How you communicate with potential participants will vary depending on what you’re recruiting for, and the channels you use, but here are some universal considerations.

  • Reassuring potential candidates:
    • Emphasize that it is not a sales call – be very clear that it is a feedback-only call, with no sales pressure involved. This is especially relevant when you talk with non-customers (lost opportunities, churned customers, prospects); they will be much less open to sharing their feedback if they believe it will provide grist for your sales team’s next initiative.
    • Use an individual email address – an email from ‘Jane@company.com’, who has an authentic LinkedIn profile, is much more credible than a message from “no-reply@company.com”.
    • Add a LinkedIn link – include an email footer with your title and a LinkedIn link that verifies your identity.
    • Mention if you’re the primary interviewer – in qual research, if you’re running the actual interviews, mention this. “This is who I am and why I’d like to speak with you” is a much more compelling story than “someone at the company wants your time”.
    • Be personable – in B2B outreach, I’ve found success with messages where it’s clear there’s a specific person asking for their time. This is different from B2C messaging that is often written in a company voice.
  • Educating & making them want to participate:
    • Share research objectives – explain why their feedback matters. Sometimes money is all a candidate cares about, but people often respond because they genuinely want to help improve your product. Sharing objectives can also help respondents direct you to a colleague who may be a better fit.
      • Be concrete when sharing objectives. Generic phrases like “help me help you better” should be avoided at all costs.
    • Be succinct – shorter messages have more chance of being read (though don’t be so brief that you don’t tell them why they should care). Review your initial draft and cut it down by 1/3.
    • Don’t over-promise – make it clear that they haven’t been accepted into the study just because you’re reaching out, as most often, you will want to screen them before actually accepting them. If you’re posting on a forum, highlight profile requirements in the post to avoid ineligible respondents wasting their time filling out the screener.
    • Outline the time commitment – make it clear if you’re looking for a 45 minute interview, or a five minute survey, etc.
    • Mention deadlines – if you have surveys that close on a specific date, mention this in the invite.
    • Confirm incentives – share how they will be compensated for participation, and in what format (gift cards, discounts, etc).
  • Other recommendations:
    • Track response & completion rates by channel – once you’ve done a couple of projects, you’ll know what channels work best for you and approximately how many candidates you need to reach out to in order to hit your research targets.
    • A/B test everything – in formats where you can stagger invites (e.g. emails, LinkedIn messages), A/B test subject lines, copy, incentive levels, how you describe the incentives, etc. Over time, you’ll develop your own best practices.
    • Include a clear CTA – make it clear what you want them to do next. Adding a link to book a call, or embedding the first question of the screener in the email, will significantly increase response rates.
    • Consider time of week and day for your posts – I find mid-week (Tue to Thu), and mid-morning (9-12) for your largest audience segment, to work best for emails.
    • Follow up on emails exactly once – if you’re doing email invites, send a follow-up note with a tweaked subject line 3-5 days later. Don’t keep spamming.
    • Let respondents determine interview time – the more flexibility you can give respondents, the more luck you’ll have in recruitment. Offer generous time windows for interviews and give them a tool like Calendly to book their own time.
    • Mail merge is your friend – if you’re sending out a bunch of near-identical emails, invest in setting up a mail merge tool that let you batch send emails to contact lists while changing some parts of them. This will be a massive time saver.
    • Subject lines are tricky – there’s a lot that goes into email subject lines, but I don’t have a ton of detailed best practice advice on this front. My suggestion is to do a lot of A/B testing to see what works best for your audience.
      • A Stripo blog post has examples of survey subject lines here. You might note that these “best practices” are all over the place, so I’m not sure anyone knows what’s actually best.
Email Copy Templates

There’s a lot of research invite email template examples online, so I’m just going to link to some. Though note that some of the B2C survey email templates are not suitable for B2B audiences as they’re trying to tap into an emotional relationship that your B2B customers are unlikely to have with your brand. In B2B, I suggest to be less colorful and more straightforward and transactional in tone.

Some survey email template blog posts for ideas:

CONTACTING VENDORS

When you decide to use a research vendor for recruitment, your first step will often be to submit a Request for Quote, asking the vendor if they can fill your required sample and at what cost (since you’re just buying sample, no need for a more complex RFP).

In your email to the vendor, it helps to include:

  • Project outline and objectives.
  • Planned methodology (survey, interviews, focus groups, etc).
  • Target number of participants, split by quotas (i.e. you’re looking for 300 survey respondents, of which 200 are individual contributors and 100 are managers).
  • Length of participation (10m survey, 45m Zoom interviews, etc).
  • Geographies or markets.
  • Details of your target segments, ideally with some example LinkedIn profiles (if you’re using a qual recruiter).
  • Expected vendor deliverables (e.g. just access to participants, survey fielding or interview moderation, video and transcript, etc).
  • For qual projects, ask about policy for follow-up interviews with participants. Will you be able to book follow-up interviews yourself (probably not), is there a discount to the recruitment fee for follow-ups (there should be), etc.
  • Preferred timeline for recruitment.

INCENTIVES

Most times you will want to offer incentives to research participants to compensate them for their time, with some exceptions for e.g. a super short two-question satisfaction survey.

Deciding on type and level of incentive can be challenging, though it gets easier as you do more projects. Here are some suggestions for how to approach managing incentives.

Recommendations
  • Offer incentives – sometimes I hear teams not wanting to offer incentive because they believe it skews the feedback or that they can get by without it. Most times this is misguided – it’s the feedback from non-incentivized respondents that you should be the most wary of (who would spend time offering a for-profit company in-depth quality feedback for free?). Offering incentives aligns your objectives with that of your participants.
  • Don’t focus too much on minimizing incentive levels – incentives are a visible up-front cost, so there’s always pressure to find the lowest viable level. But often it pays to spend a bit more for faster recruitment and higher quality participants (see point above). If it takes a staff member an extra twenty hours to complete recruitment, it probably costs the company more than increasing your participant incentives by $50.
  • Use incentives that are valuable to your target segment – gift cards are the default option, but if your target is customers, product discounts, conference tickets, or swag can be equally impactful and cheaper.
    • Though be mindful of tax implications of product discounts. And remember that B2B company swag is rarely very interesting, unless you have a really sexy brand.
  • Decide on guaranteed incentives vs sweepstakes – always use guaranteed incentives for qualitative research, but for surveys it is often more impactful to offer e.g. a sweepstakes with the chance to win one of five $250 gift cards than a guaranteed payout of $10. Plus sweepstakes are a lot easier to manage than distributing small incentives to a lot of respondents.
    • Enlist your legal team to draft your sweepstakes rules, and exclude regions with complicated sweepstakes laws (e.g. nordic countries, Montreal, etc).
  • Use a gift card management service – I’ve found Tremendous to be very useful. Tango is another good option. It’s a lot faster and easier to use a management service than to distribute cards yourself, and at a relatively minor extra fee. It also saves you a lot of time on the back end when it comes to expense reporting.
  • Involve legal early – there’s a lot of legal complexity involved in incentives. Sweepstakes rules can be a nightmare, with different regulations for different regions. Paying people for services rendered can involve tax implications. Different legal teams treat these questions with different levels of rigor, but this is definitely an area where it’s better to ask for permission than forgiveness (the same goes for managing customer PII).
  • Decide if you will prorate incentives by time spent – I usually offer a fixed-level compensation (e.g. $300 for a 45m interview), but expert networks usually offer prorated rates (e.g. $400 per full hour; if the interview lasts 45m, they pay out $300, if it lasts 30m they pay $200). I think this adds unnecessary complexity, though the benefit is that you can offer higher nominal incentive levels.
  • Work backwards from your candidate pool – consider the size and composition of your target audience, and decide on incentive levels based on what percentage you need to convert.
    • A smaller potential participant pool requires a higher incentive level (e.g. if you need more than 5% of potential participants to respond to your survey, you will need to offer a larger incentive).
    • More senior participants require higher incentive levels (e.g. a C-suite exec won’t find a $100 gift card worth their time. Senior managers tend to start at 150% of base, with c-suite 200%-300% of base).
    • Research projects with an ‘exciting’ story can offer smaller incentives (e.g. a tiny startup with a cool product, asking for input on their product roadmap, might be able to offer only a nominal amount, while an established company asking about brand values will have to fully compensate participants for their time).
  • Consider using research results as incentives – sometimes you can offer to share the survey results with participants as the incentive to participate. However, this locks you in to not being able to share the results to non-participants, meaning your content marketing team can’t use the results.
  • Track how much you’ve paid each participant – in the US, if you’re paying a participant more than $600 per year, you need to report it as 1099 income to the IRS.
  • Experiment – don’t hesitate to tweak incentive levels mid-recruitment if you don’t get the response rates you want. Use a soft launch to A/B test messaging and incentive levels.
    • You don’t need to offer the same incentives in all channels (i.e. you can offer lower levels to your own community and higher on LinkedIn), but make sure your community can’t compare side-by-side (e.g. don’t offer $25 incentives in your own forums and $75 on Reddit).
Incentive amounts

Exact incentive levels are industry- and product-dependent, but some very broad levels for tech industry B2B interviews that I’ve found success with:

  • 1:1 interviews or focus groups: $50 to $400 per hour, with common levels around $150 to $250.
    • A GreatQuestion blog post suggests $1.50/minute for B2B respondents with an additional $1 for executive roles, corresponding $90 to 150 per hour.
    • UserInterviews’ incentive calculator suggests $85/hr for a B2B online interview.
    • Ethn.io’s incentive calculator suggests $150/hr for a B2B online interview targeting engineers.
  • 10 minute online survey: Sweepstakes for 1 of 5 $250 gift cards, or $20+ per survey completion. Expect to pay a lot more for high-value targets, to the range of $100+ for execs (though at that point, I’d argue you’re using the wrong methodology).

Generally, I find the online incentive calculators linked above to lowball the required levels. Vendors always want to make research seem cheap, and their recommendations often results in very junior B2B recruits.

When I’ve working with third party recruitment vendors for my own projects, I frequently pay $250-$350 for 45m interviews (plus vendor fee), and in expert networks, I see incentives of $300-$400 per hour as a mid-senior tech employee. Don’t hesitate to experiment with lower levels, but I’d be cautious believing the lower ranges offered by these calculators.

SCREENER DESIGN 

In most situations you will want the participant to fill out a screener survey, to let you filter out ineligible participants and ensure you have appropriate distribution of participants among your target segments. The more public your recruiting, the more important the screener.

Designing a good screener can be tricky – you want to ensure you identify eligible participants, capture partial-fit participants for manual screening, and screen out ineligible participants, all in a short, simple survey.

Recommendations
  • Keep it short – max ~5 questions or two minutes. Long screeners reduce participation rate significantly, and shouldn’t be required if you clearly know you desired profile.
  • Cover each criteria with a question – e.g. if you seek participants who work in (a) architecture, (b) in companies with 500+ employees, (c) with budget ownership for planning software (d) who have evaluated this kind of software in the past year, that’s the frame of your screener. Add an open-ended question to evaluate their credibility and you’re pretty much done.
  • Only include relevant criteria that you cannot capture elsewhere – does your B2B screener really need demographics questions? Can you capture geo data based on IP address? If you are recruiting from LinkedIn, don’t ask about factors that can be scraped from their profile.
  • Ensure you keep in data on partial-fit candidates – a common issue in screeners are ones that exclude all but the perfect profiles. If you’re recruiting from a small target audience (which in B2B is the case more often than not), err on the side of keeping in partial-fit profiles which you can manually exclude later.
  • Don’t reveal your preferred responses – respondents will game your screener if you make it clear what profile you’re looking for. Avoid leading questions and include filler answers to mask your objectives.
  • Go from general to specific – start with broad firmographics, finish with specific questions on e.g. product usage or industry experience.
  • Be deliberate in using industry jargon – industry terminology can be helpful in filtering out respondents without appropriate knowledge, but make sure you’re not excluding eligible participants by using too niche language.
  • Make sure to include an ‘other’ – a lot of respondents won’t match any of your answer options, so make sure you include a catch-all ‘Don’t know/NA/Other’ choice. Include a text-field – e.g. ‘Other (please specify)’ – to get more info on how your ineligible respondents break down.
  • Include (exactly one) open-end question – open-ended question, where respondents are asked to write in their answer themselves rather than selecting from a pre-populated list, are very useful to gauge respondents’ knowledge and ability to articulate their feedback, and they are the best way to identify spam responses, but they take a lot of time for you and the respondent, so use them sparingly. As in, include exactly one.
  • Ask concrete questions – ask about e.g. past behavior or specific responsibilities, don’t ask hypotheticals (e.g. ‘how likely are you to switch invoicing software in the next 18-24 months’) or preferences in your screener.
  • Iterate rapidly – review screener responses as soon as they start to come in, and change questions if they don’t work. Normally you wouldn’t want to change a live survey, but for screeners, that’s less of an issue.
  • Use survey logic for branching screeners – branching surveys allow for more granular control of what you ask each respondent, allowing you to e.g. ask industry-specific follow-up questions once you know what industry a respondent is in.
  • For qualitative research, don’t hesitate to double screen – if you need more info than the initial screener allows for, send a personalized email to potential participants with follow-up questions. Make sure this doesn’t feel like a second survey, but as the start of a 1:1 conversation.
  • Leverage your screener for insights – there will be a lot of interesting information in the screener data. E.g. if you are recruiting from your community, the screener data can give you a pretty good idea of its breakdown by role, industry, etc.
Screener Survey Examples

Some links with more advice and examples of screener questions:

REDUCING NO-SHOWS

Participation in a research call or meeting will always be more important to you than it is to the participants, so it’s on you to make it easy for them to remember their appointment and know how to join.

After you have decided that someone is the right candidate:

  • Immediately send a follow-up email to lock down the time for the interview.
  • Once you have a time agreed, send an invite with all relevant information. Don’t expect participants to remember exact details if the call is in three weeks, so outline the purpose of the call as well as video links and dial-in numbers.
  • Always offer both video and phone dial-in, and ensure you use a service that is simple to operate.
  • Cover any NDA or other paperwork before the call.
  • Follow up with a reminder on the day of the interview (some third party recruiters do ‘day before/day of/30 minutes before’ reminders – I find that a bit much, but I expect it helps reduce no-shows significantly).

If you’re running focus groups, I’d encourage you to over-recruit (e.g. recruit 8 participants for 6 slots). If all participants show up, you can either send some home or, in B2B settings where participants are rare, just work with the larger group.

LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS

Research projects can be a legal and PII minefield, as you’re working a lot with personal information. Cultivate a good relationship with your legal team – they will be the ones telling you “no, that will get us sued in the EU” to your clever idea for how to expand your recruitment base.

Some topics you’ll want to review with legal:

  • Who you can contact – for example, what opt-out rules do your survey emails have to adhere to.
  • Regional PII rules – regulation for how to deal with PII varies significantly between regions, with especially EU law evolving rapidly. It’s easy to be out of compliance due to using obsolete information.
  • Sharing company data with vendors – if you run surveys, you will probably use a third-party cloud based survey platform. Work with legal to understand what data you can and can’t store in the platform, and how to minimize PII shared with vendors.
  • Vendor contracts’ PII terms – if a vendor shares a participant’s information with you, make sure it’s clear how it is supposed to be stored, who is responsible for it, what happens if an EU customer asks for their data to be scrubbed from the vendor system, etc.
  • Incentive distribution terms – sweepstakes T&Cs can be incredibly complicated. Same with the tax implications when you start distributing incentives to participants.

Bring your legal team in early in the process, brief them on your objectives and ask for help on how to achieve them. Legal can often help find solutions that let you achieve your objective with some tweaks if you bring them in early, rather than springing a fully formed project on them at the last minute and force a go/no-go decision.

Background photo by Andrew Neel

Categories: Recruiting

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