Overcoming the obstacles to effective B2B panel research in 2022
How to build effective B2B panels that work for you
Time-poor, attention-starved respondents are an eternal challenge in building B2B panels
All things considered, B2B respondents are busy people. Approaching them to undertake surveys is akin to taking their time away from their work or eating into their water-cooler gossip time or their occasional stroll near the workplace.
Moreover, B2B panels are particularly hard to recruit since the pool of eligible respondents is small. Most sought-after B2B respondents belong to a profile that is difficult to access eg. IT professionals, C-suite executives. Even if accessible, selection among a defined target group (eg. multiple entry-level IT managers in a large company) is a tedious process. Such lack of ready access to relevant samples makes it hard to set up and maintain B2B panels.
These challenges become even more acute, when it comes to Specialist panels eg. surgeons from a particular specialty or senior corporate lawyers managing a certain profile of clients. Let’s consider the typical issues when setting up such panels:
- Attrition of respondents: A particular respondent might be of relevance only because of the role s/he enjoys in the organization that employs them. If they move to an organization of different size and/ or profile, they might become redundant to the panel’s target audience definition.
- Holding respondent interest/engagement: Specialist panelists are — by definition — a small, intimate cohort. Further, they are likely to be irregularly researched. This makes it more difficult to keep respondents engaged for long periods. Replacements are expensive to find and retain.
- Weeding out fraudulent respondents: B2B panelists tend to be incentivized significantly more than their B2C research counterparts. If such respondents do get past recruitment checks conducted by the panel company, they could easily dilute the panel’s integrity.
How do we solve for these challenges?
One way to solve the relevance problem is to go through third party partners having access to B2B respondents. For instance, banks, credit cards, airline loyalty programs etc. This approach brings in pre-qualified respondents (thus solving the fraud issue) who indeed fit the B2B research’s requirement. In addition, higher monetary incentives and creative incentives can both help improve participation rates.
Get Borderless Access Pvt Ltd’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Building engagement is essentially about following the 3W’s:
- Who to target: B2B prospects are individuals, after all. Catching their attention is possible, if they are targeted with a personalized touch. Personalized outreach basis individual-level data is likely to engage better than a generic, one-to-many connect.
- When to target: B2B prospects are time-poor and attention-starved. In addition, depending on their profession, they might be inaccessible during business hours. Thus, it is important to reach out only at hours that they are likely to be more open to non-work activities, rather than taking the survey during working hours.
- With which mode to target: Individual preferences of communication often influence how people respond when approached with research requests. Be it LinkedIn/ mobile/ work phone — identifying their preferred mode and using primarily that mode to establish contact can often improve response rates to B2B panel surveys. Post-pandemic, Online has gained increasing acceptance as a means of engagement. In context of B2B panels, it becomes even more relevant, since respondents can stop and restart the survey, as and when required.
Respondent authenticity is also a solvable challenge. While 100% quality might be a tall ask, one should attempt to get as close to it as possible. Some questions help get closer to choosing providers of authentic, quality panels:
- Age-on-panel: What is the average number of surveys that respondents have participated in, say in the past 6 months? Higher the number, more the chances of respondent fatigue.
- Source: Where are respondents sourced from — organic recruitment or third-party/ aggregator sites? If third-party/ aggregator sources — how often is their profile refreshed/ updated?
- Profile: Other than demographics and company information, what other profiling information is available, about the respondent?
- Pre-onboarding quality checks: How are respondent claims verified, after recruitment? Is relevant social media eg. LinkedIn/ Twitter used to confirm respondent claims?
- Lead generation & management: How do providers deal with a potential incoming lead? Eg. what is the empanelment journey like, how are they encouraged to participate in the panel, is the empanelment process able to spot misrepresentation/ false claims?
What is important is to accept is that traditional methods of sampling may not work all the time. instead, hybrid approaches are essential, to set up quality B2B panels and maximising return from such panels.
