7 ways to recruit B2B audiences for User Research

I spent two full months this year trying to reach a very specific audience for my client, and I had failed.

At the end of those two months, I’d booked a grand total of two participants.

This had never happened to me before.

Over years spent recruiting B2B participants, I had never had such a hard time finding at least a handful of people to speak with.

I knew just how important it was for my client to learn from that very specific audience. I could not fail. Insights from this particular audience could be the key to understanding why the company hadn’t reached product market fit, and possibly help us solve a slew of other challenges.

I had to find these participants.

A lot of my time in the past 10 years has been spent recruiting narrowly defined professional profiles for B2B companies. I’ve recruited North American restaurant owners with 2–10 locations, German veterinarians, and Swedish doctors with city-based practices, just to name a few.

Thanks to the added challenge of my tough-to-find audience, I’ve tested more options for recruiting this year than ever before. I’ve narrowed down my methods to the seven sources that have continued to reliably deliver.

Special credit goes to the last on the list, as a method that can be combined with any of the others. It was largely responsible for saving my hardest project this year.

The list is ordered based on my perception effort: starting with the least effort and increasing down the list. For example, it doesn’t take much effort at all to contact a test platform support team, but it probably takes more effort to ask everyone you know for their relevant contacts.

7 methods for recruiting B2B audiences (non-customers)

Conferences and professional associations are specifically excluded and avoided as much as possible.

• Ask your team/client company for contacts: If you work for a company serving other businesses, your colleagues may have industry connections you haven’t taken advantage of. Ask around internally for anyone who knows the professionals you’re looking for. It’s the easiest place to start.

• Contact support at PingPong, TestingTime, respondent.io or other recruiting site you use and ask if they have your target audience in their panel. If so, max out their screener questions: It takes 5 minutes to message these teams, and often to get a response. Since setting up a project in any of these platforms may require you to pay up front, asking support is the cheapest and fastest route to knowing if you can reach your audience there. If you can, then use all the allowed screener questions.

Recruit your own website/Storefront visitors: If your company uses Intercom or other customer support tool, you can recruit your website visitors there. Simplest option: link from a message in the support chat window (see below) to a screener survey (Google Forms or other). My preferred setup is connecting a survey plugin with Intercom, so you can embed a short screener survey directly in the chat view and recruit visitors without sending them somewhere else.

• Ask your friends, family and friends of friends for connections (personally or by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram…): There’s always a chance that your perfect participants are a few connections away. You just have to find them, and the only way to do that is to ask around. It’s my least favorite method because it’s not often efficient, but this list wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging that leveraging your network can be cheap and effective.

• Set up an automated message in LinkedIn with targeting for specific job titles, locations, etc.: LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager is made for advertising and recruiting for job roles, but the tool works for recruiting professional research participants, too. You’ll need to set up a screener survey elsewhere (ex: Google Forms) and link to it from your message to make sure that anyone who received your LinkedIn message and wants to participate is a great fit for your audience.

• Use Bumble or Lunchclub (yes, really): Bumble’s Biz networking mode and Lunchclub are not the fastest for recruiting very specific professional profiles, but they can work. I’ve connected with people who had a very specific professional role over both platforms. You’ll just need a bit more lead time here.

Number 7 is the Bonus Method here, because it’s powerful in combination with any of the above.

• Reward participants for referring others like them: Even your first participant can be a source of multiple other participants. I’ve had huge success asking participants if they know others like them, who might be interested in joining (compensated, of course). I save some of the total recruiting budget for compensating people who refer me to others with their same profile. Each participant you run research with can make the rest of your recruiting exponentially easier.

Why aren’t professional associations and events on this list?

Do you have the time for them? I don’t. In my experience, it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort to track down the right professional groups and sneak past the gatekeepers. Many such groups don’t want researchers in their private networking groups and perceive our requests for help as spam, or something close enough.

This list is optimized for the busy User Researcher, PM, Design Lead or Founder who needs to get research done, as quickly as possible. Over years — with a little extra push to test and re-test some of these options — I’ve found that these options take the least effort so you can get recruiting out of the way and focus on implementing your research well.

Originally published on UX Collective