How to generate high-quality leads with an industry survey
A guide to creating a survey with impact.
Conducting an industry survey is a great way to generate and qualify new leads. If done well, industry surveys can be one of your most valuable B2B sales assets. At Agrilyst, we recently surveyed over 150 indoor farmers, generating over 100 new leads within a two month period. Here’s how you can do it too.
Know your audience
Who are you sending this survey to? Understanding the behavior of your respondents is crucial to creating a successful survey.
Key things you should know:
- Will this person respond to a survey?
- When does this person typically open emails? Do they use email?
- How much time does this person have to respond to a survey?
Our customers are indoor farmers. Growers don’t have time to sit through a long survey. So while we included 56 questions in our survey, we highlighted only some as mandatory, and the rest optional. This helped us limit survey completion time to 10 minutes.
We sent our survey out to growers on July 7th. We knew with the holiday weekend, growers would be working to meet the produce demand surges, and immediately after would be less busy for them. We received 75% of our responses in the first week.
Designing the survey
Design your survey for maximum efficacy. First, identify the intended outcome. Our goal was to generate high-quality leads and to share industry data — what growers are doing, what they’re challenged by, and how they see the industry changing in the near future.
To generate high-quality leads, design questions aimed at understanding customer pain points, and their ability and desire to act upon those pain points. This data helps match respondents with your ideal customer profile and can help move leads through the funnel.
As an example, we learned the biggest challenge for our respondents is managing farm operating costs, and growers are spending close to $30,000 annually on technologies to help reign in those costs. Growers also understand the value of data analytics — 90% believe they can increase crop yields with analytics.
To build a great industry survey, design questions whose answers contribute to insights beneficial to the industry as a whole. It’s important to think beyond sales questions and to create real value for your customers.
Timeline:
1 month before sending survey — you’ll want to begin crafting your survey questions about one month prior to sending the survey out to participants.
Building a list
Start with a target response rate. If you’ve created both optional and mandatory questions, select a desired number of complete responses — our target number was 50. Then build in a buffer for incomplete and partial responses — we estimated a completion rate of 50%. That will give you an idea of how many participants you’ll need in order to get a clean dataset. In the end, we received 150 responses with roughly 100 complete responses — a 67% completion rate.
You list begins with your existing customers and sales pipeline. Existing customers will be more likely to complete the survey. It’s most valuable for leads at the top of your funnel to complete the survey. This way you can move unqualified leads through your pipeline.
Next, find survey partners — stakeholders in the industry who are working with potential customers beyond your reach. Ideal partners may be universities, adjacent technology providers, news publications, investors, and/or trade organizations. Partnering with organizations increases legitimacy and awareness for the survey, broadening the pool of potential respondents.
Give survey partners access to the raw data from the survey in return for sending the survey out to their networks.
Roughly 75% of our survey responses came through our partners. We ended up with 100 new high-quality leads by partnering with industry stakeholders.
Timeline:
2 weeks before sending survey — Start building a list of survey partners after you have a draft of survey questions. Send the draft survey to partners and ask for their input. Our survey partners were tremendously helpful in thinking through question structure and the survey as a whole.
Collecting and tracking responses
Choose a medium for distributing your survey. This should take into consideration the things you know about your audience. If your customers don’t read email, don’t send the survey out via email.
We designed our survey and collected responses with SurveyMonkey. Our survey was sent directly to our list via email and our partners shared links with their networks. Each partner was given a personalized link so we could track where responses came from.
Set aside time throughout the period when the survey is open to followup with your list. Aim for three touch points — first touch is an invitation to participate, second is a reminder, and third is a last opportunity to participate before closing the survey.
Timeline:
day of sending survey — send invitation out.
2 weeks after sending survey — send reminder.
day before closing survey — send last opportunity notice.
Sharing the results
You’ve closed the survey…now what? I believe the reason we had a great response and completion rate was because growers wanted to see the results. The results can be shared in a number of ways, from infographics to reports.
Tips:
- Survey results are not necessarily interesting on their own. If you don’t have a data scientist on your team, consider hiring one for the project. Our data engineer (shoutout to Karen Krieb) was able to pull incredibly valuable insights from our results for both lead generation and for the industry as a whole.
- Similarly, if you don’t have a designer and/or graphic designer on your team, you may want to hire someone to turn your data into something beautiful. (Shoutout to Jordan Koschei on our team, and to Carlos Williams at StudioDBC who does incredible work.)
- Ask for emails before downloading results if you’re sharing them publicly. It’s another simple way to add additional leads to your funnel even after you’ve completed the survey.
Following up
This is the best part. Now that you completed the survey and sent out the results, you have list of brand new, high-quality leads. You have all the information you need to reach out in a targeted manner.
If you want to see the results of our survey, check out the 2016 State of Indoor Farming here.
