B2B Market Research Recruitment Difficulty: Try Zintro.com

April 17, 2013

B2B Market Research Tool
Last week, I shared 6 tactics for recruiting interviewees, focus group participants, or survey respondents for B2B market research. This week, I will explain what Zintro.com is, how it works, and what factors will determine if you should be considering utilizing this tool for your B2B market research project.

What It Is

As I explained last week, Zintro.com is an online platform for finding, identifying, and connecting with experts and vendors across a multitude of industries, functional areas, expertises, geographies, and research disciplines.

Pros and Cons

Zintro.com is great for identifying harder to reach and higher profile interviewees for research in a very timely fashion, but it can be quite a bit more expensive than other means for recruiting experts and prospects.
Zintro.com has over 60,000 experts and vendors that you can reach directly via its community with a single message. Experts join this panel with the intent of participating in research, finding new business opportunities, and/or consulting others, so the response rate to an inquiry posting or direct invitation is very high relative to other mediums. Consequently, the time you have to invest in recruiting interviewees is much less.
Zintro.com provides several different means for connecting with or seeking out experts, which makes identifying potential targets relatively quick. Below are the current search criteria that the site offers:

  • Industry Sectors
  • Professions
  • Hot Areas
  • Research Disciplines
  • Investment Asset Classes
  • Geographic Regions
  • Open Keyword Searches

The site does not offer a multi-criteria search at this point, which limits the system’s ability to deal with very targeted searches.
The site also allows members to post inquiries to the community, so that experts can seek you out directly. This is a double-edged sword. You should respond to all the respondents to an invite, but unfortunately the site at this point does not do a very good job of restricting respondents to those who qualify, so you end up having to respond to several people who do not qualify for what you are looking for.
However, it is still a great way to get proposals quickly, along with a sense of reasonable compensation prices for the target audience you are trying to reach. You can always put together a standardized decline message for those who do not interest you, but you have to send the message to each respondent one-by-one. This is because the platform does not allow members to mass respond to respondents with a decline message at this point.

Membership Fees

The site has two membership levels:

  • Basic Membership: Zintro Fees are 30% of the expert’s initial call fee with a minimum Zintro Fee of $99.95.
  • Premium Membership: The monthly rates are currently:
    • 1 Month Premium ($149.95)
    • 6 Month Premium ($239.70)
    • 12 Month Premium ($359.40)

Membership provides you with better access to the Zintro.com expert database for better vetting plus a reduced Zintro first time connection fee of 15% and no minimum.

The Verdict

Zintro.com can be a great resource for recruiting target interviewees in a pinch, but it is expensive and you have to keep in mind these people have made themselves available for the chance to make money or sell you business. This inherently can make them more inclined to act like they know more than they really do, so it is important to vet each individual well before setting up an interview with them.
I highly recommend combining your Zintro.com outreach effort with a standard LinkedIn outreach effort to your network contacts and active industry experts who you can identify via blogs, conference speaker lists, targeted industry forums, or other communities like LinkedIn. For more on this, see my previous blog post.
The key is that you want to make sure the individuals you are speaking with are going to give you well-rounded data. Getting data from various groups that have different perspectives and sources helps ensure this.
Next week, I will explain sample purchasing and what factors will determine if you should be considering purchasing sample for your B2B market research project.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.