How to debug participant recruitment in B2B user research

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Finding the right people for research is the bane of every user researcher’s existence. There is so much that goes into successful recruitment: from identifying the right sample size and characteristics to writing an air-tight screener to scheduling and managing all the participants. But this challenge takes on a whole different flavour in a B2B SaaS setting, where the users of your product are professionals working within complex and multifaceted business entities.

Ever since I shifted focus from end-user (i.e., consumer) to business customers in my role as a user researcher at a B2B scale-up, I’ve been working to improve and ease the research recruitment for my product organisation.

Here are the three main recruitment challenges I’ve encountered and two ways to address them in a B2B SaaS environment where direct sales is the main customer acquisition channel.

Challenge 1: The potential participant pool is very limited.

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With B2C user research, the starting point for your sample is the general population, i.e., millions of individuals who already use or could potentially use your product or service. This is your starting point for recruitment: the point from which you begin to niche down to find the right people with the right characteristics for your research topic.

With B2B user research, your potential participant pool is significantly smaller because it is limited by two factors:

• Your company’s customer base made up of companies rather than individuals. This could range from single digits to hundreds of accounts, depending on your stage of growth, but it will not come even close to the size of the general population as a starting point; and
• The specific, often quite narrow set of participant characteristics that the users of your product within each company will have to meet. More on this below.

Now, in spelling out these factors, I’m assuming that your study is focused on your current customers, and of course, there will be times when that’s not the case. For example, if you’re looking to create a completely new product or enter a new market, you may want to recruit professionals in the industry who are not your customers (yet). But in most cases, you’ll want to test new products and features with your existing customer base, and this immediately slashes the potential participants available to you from millions to a few hundred thousand at best.

Challenge 2: The sample characteristics are more niche.

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With B2B technology, it is not uncommon to have a single product that is bought and deployed to solve several different use cases. In other words, your one product could be solving different problems for different types of businesses and also different problems for different stakeholders within the same business.

So when it comes to recruiting participants for any given B2B user research project, you need to get extremely clear about two things:

1. The type of businesses you’re targeting. This can include things like what industries and geographies they operate in, their size, age and technological sophistication, what they use your product for, how important they are to your company’s growth, etc.; and
2. The type of workers you’re targeting within those businesses. Do you need to speak to the person who bought your product? Or do you need to interview the person who integrated it with their internal systems? Or maybe it’s someone who is the only person in your customer organisation who uses that one high-value but super technical feature on an irregular basis that your product team desperately wants to improve on? If your customers are exclusively small businesses, you might get lucky and have one person wear all those hats, but the minute you start going upmarket, your user personas will multiply.

Getting super clear and explicit about these two things will be key to the validity of your insights because it will enable you to target the right user personas within your customer organisations while also accounting for the incentives and biases that participants from different personas will inevitably bring to the table.

But the challenge here is also a mathematical one. The more use cases and user personas you serve, the more varied your sampling needs become. But as highlighted above, your recruitment pool is pretty limited to begin with. So finding the right people in the right customer accounts and having enough of them to run research without returning to the same customers repeatedly becomes a constant balancing act in B2B user research.

Challenge 3: Direct access to customers is limited.

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Another participant recruitment challenge unique to B2B SaaS companies is getting access to the right people.

Firstly, chances are, the person who bought your software for their employer or business — and who is the point contact between your company’s sales team and the customer business — is not actually the user of your product. Or perhaps they’re not the right user. And to find them in the customer org, you have to go through the buyer of your product.

Secondly, to speak directly to your product customers, you normally need to go through your account teams (eg, folks like account executives and/ or customer success managers), which means that your request for time with the customer competes with business-as-usual account management tasks and critical customer success activities, such as customer escalations.

Thirdly, recruiting customers via this route means that you’re competing with a sea of other customer communications, such as new features and product announcements, marketing campaigns and customer research requests from other product teams.

All this can quickly result in three highly unfavourable outcomes:

• The customer experience suffers from communication overwhelm;
• Your recruitment timelines balloon so much that you’re unable to deliver timely insights to support fast-moving product development cycles; and
• Research recruitment comms become hard to distinguish from sales or marketing messages, adversely affecting your ability to recruit and introducing bias into the research process.

It is important to note that these three challenges will look somewhat different depending on your company’s growth stage and size. The customer acquisition channels in your business also matter because they impact the proximity of your product team to your customers. For example, having a product-led growth channel can alleviate some of these pain points, whereas partnership-led customer acquisition can exacerbate them.

But here are two solutions that I’ve been working on that are helping to ease the recruitment pain for user researchers and product managers in my org.

Solution 1: Build your own research panel

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This may seem counterintuitive, given that, in theory, your entire customer base is your research panel. But creating a dedicated pool of potential participants has several distinct advantages:

1. Participation by consent. Building an internal research panel enables you to find individuals who are genuinely interested in joining research studies and providing feedback on early and in-flight concepts, ideas, and prototypes. Regardless of what motivates them to do so, these people choose to opt in to be part of a special group of customers who you can co-create your product with, which means you get a significantly more responsive audience for your recruitment while also reducing any potential en masse spamming of your customer accounts.
2. Direct access. Building an internal research panel also enables you to nurture a direct access channel between your product teams and your users. This reduces the time it takes to recruit great participants and the burden both on the researchers and the account teams to manage outreach and recruitment manually via account owners. It also helps to draw clear boundaries between marketing and commercial communications your customers receive from the business and communications about new research opportunities. This sets clear expectations upfront that user research sessions are not sales meetings while also ensuring that your research-related outreach is ethical and privacy-centred.
3. Better profiling. Last but not least, building out a dedicated research panel helps create participant profiles that are tailored to research recruitment needs. At sign-up, you can collect data that about your panel members’ professional roles, responsibilities, and feature awareness to ensure that you reach out to the right personas with the right background for your next study.

Given that you can rarely go for quantity in B2B research recruitment, your best bet is to go for quality, and building a dedicated research panel enables you and your team to do just that. But while the panel can go a long way to solving some of the common recruitment woes, there’s another aspect to B2B user research that should not be overlooked: strong stakeholder relationships.

Solution 2: Build cross-functional relationships

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If you’re a researcher in a B2B company, I cannot stress this enough: you have to get to know your customer-facing, frontline teams.

• Make an effort to learn what different people in sales, customer success, and marketing do, how they see, think about and communicate with your customers, how they’re incentivised, and what they care about the most.
• Help them understand your and your team’s role at different stages of product development.
• Find common ground between your disparate objectives and flex that creativity muscle to explore ways in which your skills can be leveraged to benefit both the product and growth parts of the company.

Building strong, trusting relationships with folks in sales, marketing, and customer success will not only help you get access to the right customers quicker for your next study and build out a strong internal research panel — it will also enrich your own understanding of your customers and your business.