How to recruit B2B UX research participants
How to recruit B2B UX research participantsA comprehensive guide - including low effort ways to find research participants if you’re in a B2B businessThe biggest challenge with UX research in a B2B organisation is finding the right participants in your project quickly. Some organisations I have spoken to need up to 6-8 weeks to find and schedule participants. It is due to policies, data access and organisational process. I have put together a quick list of ways I have used to identify and find participants. This article was written based on a subscribers’ request. Leave requests or ideas in our Suggestion Box. Photo by Pavan Trikutam on UnsplashCustomers who have submitted a support ticketThese are customers who might need help with something, making a complaint, or bug report.
Active community membersLook for places where your users congregate - either on your community site or social media (LinkedIn, Slack, Reddit).
Company-sponsored eventsThis might be a conference, meet up, training session, product announcement, either run by your own organisation or another organisation.
Professional industry groups and eventsAnother place your users might congregate.
Success/Account ManagementThis team focuses on retention of the customer. Larger organisations will have this department but not every organisation will. It helps to build a really good relationship and share your research with them.
SalesSales will be focused on hitting their targets and converting more potential customers to actual customers.
Conferences/conference booth/public eventsThis could be either having people opt-in somewhere where they check-in, a call to action in a conference talk, or a specialised both. This has some similarities to the professional industry groups.
Respondent.ioThis online tool focuses on finding participants based on their existing panel. There is also a referral feature in case people know someone who fits the criteria.
External participant recruitment agenciesThese are organisations that specialise in finding participants, generally through their existing database.
Other existing customer panelsSimilar to the point above. Some examples of these panels include SurveyMonkey, Usertesting, Userinterviews.
Customer advisory groupA customer advisory group is a select and tight group of customers that you regularly and consistently invite back for research.
A random pull of customers from your databaseThis is a generated list of potential participants based on project/segmentation or usage from your own internal database.
Site interceptSomething that pops up to invite people to sign up for a particular project or for your user research panel. This could be done via a chat, some tools which specialise in site intercepts like Ethnio, or other embedded tools like Sprig or Pendo.
Opt in from various points in a customer facing processSimilar to site intercept but it could be opt-in with any business <>customer interaction e.g. when they get onboarded by an account manager
Internal usersIf you have a product that your company is dogfooding, internal users will be easy to reach. I would work with this group and still compare it with a set of external users. Internal use of your product is likely to be highly sophisticated compared to external use cases. Your internal users as part of the organisation will have expert level product knowledge.
Other considerations:
Next up (inspired by Niels at The Lindhal Letter):
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