B2B user recruitment: boost success through cross-functional teamwork
What if your organization already has the solutions to B2B user recruitment challenges?
User research is the secret ingredient that sets successful B2B products apart, guiding critical decisions and ensuring your product resonates with customers. However, recruiting B2B users for research can be daunting. You face complex decision-making processes, a limited pool of potential participants, and the challenge of engaging multiple stakeholders and complex organizational structures. I know it’s hard. I’ve navigated the murky waters of B2B user recruitment in sectors like telecommunications, energy, and martech. Let me share tips on how to leverage diverse teams within your company to supercharge your user recruitment game.
Tap into Your Colleagues’ Networks
Every colleague in your organization has a network of hundreds of people, with some matching the profile you’re searching for or connecting you to those who do. To better understand the notion of weak ties, read Mark Granovetter’s insightful article, “The Strength of Weak Ties”. However, simply approaching your colleagues for their contacts may not yield the desired results.
To solve this problem, begin by fostering a company-wide research culture. By doing so, you’ll help team members understand the importance of user research and the significance of their contributions in providing valuable contacts. Spread awareness using various methods, such as webinars, projecting user tests and interviews, sharing insights on the company’s social network, internal newsletters, or poster campaigns in the kitchen. You’ll be amazed at how readily people help. This approach has enabled me to recruit hard-to-reach profiles, such as founders of clothing rental businesses, companies investing in eco-districts, or self-employed professionals in the online cosmetics industry. Cultivating this mindset can pave the way for strategic partnerships with companies that have a complementary user base. Be proactive and create opportunities for collaboration! When time permits, consider participating in industry-relevant events or professional communities to further expand your network.
Maximize Sales Team Cooperation
The sales team has direct contact with both current and potential users. To kickstart collaboration, ask to attend sales meetings. Grasping the business side is vital, and attending these meetings will help you understand the sales journey and pinpoint crucial touchpoints for user research. In my experience, sales teams can be initially wary — and understandably so. After all, you’re asking for access to their carefully curated contact database, which serves as their revenue source. The key is to prove that you’ll foster quality relationships with users, ultimately boosting user engagement with the product. B2B users are particularly sensitive to having a special status and expressing their opinions.
Once you’ve earned the sales team’s confidence, they’ll be more than willing to open up their address book and guide you to the right contacts. This saved me more than once, especially for a survey with a tight deadline, where, thanks to their personalized sending, I obtained a response rate of almost 100% in 48 hours.
Rely on industry experts
When diving into a niche market, especially unfamiliar territory, leveraging industry insiders’ expertise can be a game-changer. These experts possess invaluable knowledge about when and how to approach users in their sector with the most effective channels for communication. They can be actively working in the field or leveraging past experiences.
I recall my first project in the energy sector, quickly realizing that I needed someone to guide me through the nuances and codes unique to that domain. These experts will not only help you grasp the market’s intricacies but also open doors for invaluable field research opportunities. And believe me, there is no substitute for experience in the field; you will often learn more in a few hours than in dozens of exchanges.
Transform Customer Support Interactions into Recruitment Opportunities
As a user researcher, you’re well aware that customer support interactions are a goldmine of user insights. One way to take advantage of this rich resource is by attending calls, chats, or email exchanges. I recall an early experience in my career when I spent an afternoon at a call center during a company-wide tour. That short visit proved to be an invaluable lesson in understanding our users and became the most rewarding part of my onboarding.
To strengthen the collaboration between support and product teams, demonstrate your willingness and ability to help. You might offer to analyze support tickets or set up monthly reviews to identify trends and recurring issues to be discussed with the product team. As you become one go-between for the support team’s insights to reach the product team, they’ll naturally evolve into research advocates.
You can then empower them to identify potential research participants and teach them how to incorporate user research questions into their daily work. One simple yet highly effective initiative that has helped me tremendously was asking the support team to include a link in their email signatures, inviting users to participate in research projects.
Partner with Marketing and Communication
In many industries, you’ll find yourself working alongside communication and marketing teams, and there’s a good chance they have more resources at their disposal than you do. The trick is to identify shared objectives and forge strong collaborations to make the most of these resources. I remember how, in past experiences, I participated in animating a user community that the marketing team had established. This collaboration allowed me to conduct focus groups through the online forum, reaching users I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. In another instance, I teamed up with a marketing department on a big quantitative study, which led to the creation of a panel comprising hundreds of users matching specific criteria, readily available for interviews. On my own, I wouldn’t have had the budget to launch these initiatives, but by joining forces with these teams, we had amazing results.
Once you have established a first success, you can explore many other possibilities together. For instance, we planned specific social network campaigns and organized events to conduct guerrilla testing for a new product. Their expertise is more than welcome, especially for B2B users who expect a certain standard in interactions.
Reduce Bias: Merge Team Collaboration & B2B Recruitment Tactics
While employing these collaborative methods can significantly enhance your B2B user recruitment, it’s important to be aware of potential biases that may arise. The aim is not to do research with your colleagues’ family members who know the product’s entire history. Relying too heavily on a single channel or team can also lead to a biased sample, with research conducted only among highly engaged users or those who are particularly frustrated. To ensure a balanced and representative participant pool, make sure to complement your collaborative recruitment efforts with traditional approaches. These may include site intercepts, recruitment from your user base, external panels, and recruiting agencies.
Safeguard User Information: Ensuring Data Protection and Privacy
While employing these collaborative methods, it’s essential to remain mindful of data protection and privacy concerns. When handling user data and sharing information among different teams, make sure to follow your organization’s data protection policies and any applicable privacy regulations. This will help you maintain trust with users and colleagues alike, ensuring a smooth and compliant recruitment process.
Conclusion
You can boost B2B user recruitment by fostering collaboration and communication with your company’s various teams, such as sales, customer support, marketing, communication, and industry experts. Leveraging technology and tools can make the process more efficient and ensure everyone is on the same page: for instance, using CRM systems to manage user data, project management tools to track recruitment progress, and communication platforms to streamline discussions.
Remember, user research thrives when it’s a collective effort, drawing on the unique skills and insights of individuals across departments.
So, take the initiative and engage with colleagues from different departments. Inspire their interest in user research by emphasizing its importance and demonstrating how their involvement can contribute to the product’s and the company’s overall success. It’s time to collaborate, connect, and elevate your B2B user research approach!
