B2B Market Research: When to Buy Sample

April 25, 2013

Two weeks ago, I shared 6 tactics for recruiting interviewees, focus group participants, or survey respondents for B2B market research. In that post, I introduced the idea of purchasing sample as an option for quickly recruiting participants for primary research. This week, I will explain how sample procurement works and what factors will determine if you should be considering purchasing sample for your B2B market research project.

What is Sample Procurement and How Does it Work?

Sample procurement is the process of paying a vendor to recruit respondents for a primary research project from one of their respondent panels that they maintain and sell access to as a service. Sample vendors specialize in recruiting and maintaining individuals that can be leveraged by researchers to answer research questions. Each vendor specializes in one or more types of target populations. These can be broader panels like a business to consumer panel (B2C), business to business panel (B2B), and political panels or very targeted specific panels like a panel of cardiologists at public hospitals, a developer panel, etc.
Procuring sample is a simple exercise. The key to success is identifying the best fit vendors for the target audience(s) you are trying to reach with your research. A great place to start for identifying an appropriate panel provider is the Greenbook, which provides a list of 71 online panel providers and a short description.
The only other difficult part is getting your survey programmed and compliant with a sample vendor’s requirements.

6 Factors to Consider When Designing a Survey

  1. Most sample vendors are open to you using any survey tool as long as it enables redirects. However, it is important to ask. Having the ability to quota is also a bonus for controlling the number for responses, but it is not necessary.
  2. Sample vendors will generally not allow you to require a respondent to provide their name or company name as this violates their confidentiality terms of their panel membership.
  3. Sample vendors generally will charge you additional money to ask respondents if they would be willing to do a follow-up with you.
  4. Sample vendors charge a per-completion cost which is a function of size of population, difficulty to access, expected incidence rate, length of study, and incentive level.
  5. Many vendors will offer to field a test to evaluate the feasibility and/or expected cost of research study. It is a good idea to take them up on this as it will provide you with a better sense of the feasibility and actual cost to complete your study.
  6. Having more screener questions will lead to lower incidence rates and higher costs per a completion. It is also important to review the language and test these screener questions for biasing that may cause low incidence rates.

5 Factors to Determine Whether You Should Purchase Sample for a B2B Market Research Project

  • Time Horizon: One major benefit of purchasing sample is it generally is a very fast way of getting answers to your research questions.
  • Target Completions: The more completions you are looking for, the more difficult it will be to recruit these individuals directly.
  • Difficulty Reaching Audience: Some audiences are notoriously hard to reach due to the high level compensation they expect, the fact that they are heavily burdened by research targeting or sales targeting, or because they are simply very busy. These factors will make utilizing sample more attractive because do-it-yourself recruitment will likely have very low yields and become very time consuming.
  • Financial Resource Constraints: Purchasing sample can be very expensive. Depending on the accessibility of the target audience, there may be other ways to recruit the target audience in a timely manner that won’t break the wallet. Generally speaking, this will be the case with less difficult to reach target audiences.
  • Human Capital Constraints: Recruiting research respondents does not come easy. In fact, it is really time consuming. So you will need to have time to do so if you elect to not purchase sample. It is not a big deal to recruit a handful of participants as you can usually draw from the team’s networks, but it becomes much more difficult as you increase the number of completions or interviews you wish to complete.

Now you know how to evaluate whether or not if sample is a good respondent recruitment option to consider for your B2B research study.
If you decide to recruit your panel independent of a sample provider, I recommend reading an earlier blog post I wrote on 5 tips to improve the effectiveness of your research respondent recruitment.

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.