Tips for recruiting B2B UX research participants
Recruiting participants for B2B research is hard! Over the years I’ve developed these tips and tricks that help make B2B recruiting easier:
- Minimise your recruitment criteria
- Divide and conquer
- Make friends with your Customer Success Managers
- Use proxies
- Do internal research
- Use third-party recruitment tools
- Frame the benefits
- Bake research participation opt-ins into agreements
In any case, give yourself plenty of time to recruit your participants. It’s likely to take longer than you think.
The Challenges
Recruiting B2B research participants is hard because
- Specialist participants: Often they are quite specialist participants e.g. they are in a particular industry, job function or job level. There’ll be fewer of them, they are not primed to participate in research (like participants on a user research platform) and may simply be too busy to participate.
- Gatekeepers: If they are your customers, your sales and customer success departments may act as gatekeepers. They may be quite protective of your customers and limit your access to them. Furthermore, your company’s relationship with your customer organisation may be managed on your customer’s side by Admins or similar roles, so that there are several layers of gatekeepers between you as a researcher and your end-users.
- Small Recruitment Pool: If they are your customers, you may not have a large pool of potential participants to choose from. Given many (often the majority) of those you invite to participate in your research will not accept your invitation, this may leave you struggling to recruit enough participants. This is especially true as you run more research projects: there are only so many times you can ask the same customers to participate in research.
Tips and Tricks to Help with B2B Recruitment
Minimise your recruitment criteria: Ask yourself if you really (really!) need very specific participants for your research. For example, for a basic usability test participants from the general population may suffice, depending on the nature of your research. Be sure you can justify why you are applying each research recruitment criteria. Each additional recruitment criteria will make your search for matching participants more challenging.
Make friends with your Customer Success Managers and other people in your company who have existing relationships with the people you want to recruit for your research. When planning a research project, keep them in the loop about the project, especially about what you might want from their customers, so they feel comfortable about what you will be asking of your customers. Ask them to leverage their existing relationships with your customers to encourage customers to participate in your research. But remember that your Customer Success Managers are likely to be busy people and you’re asking a favour of them, so do as much of the leg-work for them as possible, for example prepare an invitation template for them to send to their customers. You may want to offer to share the findings of your research back to them, if it is likely to help them and their customers.
Use proxies: If you cannot recruit exactly the profile of the participant you want, consider recruiting a proxy. For example, if you are struggling to recruit managers in a particular industry, consider recruiting managers in related industries. Or if you are struggling to recruit participants who are customers of a particular product, consider recruiting customers of their competitor products. Try to ensure that any proxy you select is similar enough to your target participants in the areas that matter to your particular research. Another way of using proxies is to research with people in your organisation that have a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and challenges. For example, your Customer Success Managers may be able to help you again here, participating as proxies for the customers they represent.
Do internal research: If you are really struggling to recruit suitable participants, or don’t have the time or resources to do so, consider using people in your organisation. Try to choose people in your organization who are not familiar with the product or feature you are researching. Even then, beware of likely cultural biases: your organisation is likely to have attracted like-minded people that may not represent your typical user. After all, you are not your user!
Use third-party recruitment tools: Try tools like UserTesting, UserZoom and Respondent.io to recruit participants. With a well-designed screener you may be able to recruit good quality participants for your research. You may even find some of your customers in this way! Be careful though, this does rely on carefully-designed screeners and can be quite expensive. Even with a well-designed screener, not everyone will answer honestly. So try to verify that the respondents are indeed suitable before inviting them to participate in your research, for example by examining their LinkedIn profiles.
Frame the benefits: When inviting people to participate in your research try to frame it in a way that highlights the benefits to them of participating. For example, when recruiting customers emphasise that participation will give them an opportunity to influence the future of your product and to have their say about new features.
Bake research participation opt-ins into agreements: If possible, include in contracts a default opt-in to be invited to participate in research from time to time. Also consider offering early access to new features/beta tests in return for agreement to participate in research about those features.
Divide and conquer: Consider splitting your research into parts that could be tested with general population participants (or other, easy-to-recruit participants) and parts that must be tested with specialist participants. You can run these projects in parallel. While you may still have a long lead time to recruit your specialist participants, at least you will be making progress with your general population testing.
Also consider running multiple recruitment tactics in parallel so that you maximise your opportunity for recruiting enough of the right type of participant. If I need to recruit, for example, learning and development leaders in large organisations, I might recruit through some or all of the following channels simultaneously:
- Recruiting through my user testing tool
- Recruiting through my user testing tool’s manual recruitment service
- Recruiting through my Customer Success Managers
- Recruiting through a third-party recruitment application
Tips from other UX professionals
I’m not alone in facing challenges with and finding solutions for B2B research recruitment.
Nina Suter, in her article Differences in UX design between B2B and B2C (January 2021), recommends partnering with specialist recruitment agencies and expanding your recruitment beyond your customers to address the challenges of B2B recruitment.
Mike Chirokas, in his article How to recruit participants for b2b user interviews (October 2020), clearly outlines his experience with four approaches to recruiting non-customer B2B participants. He reports that the best return on investment came from recruiting from meetups and groups and concluded that the most effective approach would probably be to combine recruitment methods.
Peter Berrecloth, in his article, How to recruit business users for B2B user research (September 2018), suggests piggy-backing on connections people in your organisation already have with your customers. This could including participating in Sales or Support calls or customer training sessions. Alternatively, you may be able to persuade these co-workers to ask questions of customers on your behalf.
Marketade, in their article Recruiting Hard-to-Find Enterprise Professionals for User Research, advocates using LinkedIn sponsored InMail and and screener surveys to identify and connect with suitable participants for your research. In their article they share several examples of how they have used this method.
Recruiting for B2B UX research can be frustrating and time-consuming. I hope these tips help you. How do you tackle the challenges of B2B research recruitment?
