The bane of any UX researcher’s work is finding participants to get relevant information. Well, in some B2C contexts it may not be so difficult, as long as you make sure your participants are indeed the ones you want to talk to – more on screening willing people as often some are just not who they claim to be.
B2B is a different beast – here are some ideas to consider:
Your pool is limited
There are only so many people who you can talk to – maybe your company has 100 clients and you can talk to them only so many times.
What can you do?
- Get creative with recruitment – go to conferences and trade meetings, use connections, but stop at kidnappings.
- Leverage look-alike audiences – think about what other groups of people are similar to your target audience. E.g., you need to talk to pharmacists placing orders on your website. What other people place orders and have to contend with strict regulations?
- Create a research program
Your pool is shared
An extra challenge is that the pie of potential participants is “nibbled on” by other segments of your company, most often the product and marketing teams. If you get a client to talk to, they will often complain that they have “already explained it to your colleague just a week ago”. This is frustrating to both sides. Or, the company will have a list of potential participants, shared by the departments and whoever gets to the list first, wins.
What can you do?
- Collaborate with Customer success reps –
- They want the same things as you do – get satisfied customers, who are happy with the service and/or feel listened to.
- They have a wealth of information that you can mine, to the extent that you may not even need to talk to an end user, OR know which customers are the most worthwhile to talk to AND get the relevant context so that your customers do not have to repeat themselves.
- Establish guidelines and guardrails for your colleagues.
- Share the information you have already collected – UX researchers can often answer questions that the marketing team wants to know, and vice versa.
- Combine questions you would pursue in a conversation with a client. Often clients do not need to interface with two different professionals from your company when answering a few questions.
- Create a spreadsheet with contact information and a schedule for accessing your clients. Agree on the frequency of contact and how you divide up the access times.
Your participants are busy professionals
This needs no explanation or elaboration
What can you do?
- Make is frictionless and easy for your participants to sign up. Basically, apply your UX knowledge to reduce any frustration:
- make your invitation email clear and easy to understand, and scan. If in doubt, A/B test your invitation email for future recruitment efforts
- If you need your participants to sign any NDAs, include the link in the invitation email.
- Offer a direct link to schedule, and enable the participant to automatically add it to their calendar
- Schedule shorter sessions
- I know, this one is painful but you are more likely to recruit your target audience
- Often, your busy participants realize how important and/or enjoyable it is to talk to you. They will then extend the session, or want to schedule a follow-up session.
How about incentives?
This is where the legal department enters the scene. Quite often, your B2B participants are not allowed to accept financial incentives. But here are the plus sides (though you may look at not having to pay already a plus side):
- B2B participants (assuming they are your clients, and not look-alikes) are heavily invested in improving your product as they are the primary beneficiaries.
- Offering to send a token of appreciation (e.g, mug, Tshirt) is often received with gratitude and grace, but really, nothing replaces a heartfelt, genuine thank you from you!
