Editor’s note: Gordon Bishop is general manager, B2B, with Western Wats Center, a Provo, Utah, research firm.

Business-to-business market research offers challenges not typically experienced with consumer research. Underestimating the effects of these challenges often leads to unnecessary frustration. Who needs missed deadlines, short quotas, higher costs, and headaches? A little additional planning will help you avoid most, if not all, of these pitfalls. Try the following tips to make your next B2B study a successful and even pleasant experience.

  • Allow sufficient time. Unlike most consumer projects, B2B studies usually call for a specific respondent and it takes time to arrange the survey at their convenience. Don’t create unrealistic time lines. Allow for adequate field time by planning better and starting earlier. When creating your field time line, keep in mind that Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are typically less productive than midweek days and if possible, avoid interviewing on the days immediately surrounding major holidays. You may be working, but some people - perhaps the ones you want to talk to - might have the day off. Also, think about all scheduling contingencies. Don’t try to interview tax professionals in the spring or call teachers at school during summer vacation.
  • Offer an honorarium. While not a perfect panacea, honorariums greatly help to boost response rates. Offer a participation incentive when interviewing hard-to-reach professionals such as physicians, attorneys, and IT/IS managers, or when the interview will exceed 15 minutes. An honorarium pays for itself through better cooperation and increased goodwill. Indeed, some B2B respondents expect an incentive to compensate for their time. Our firm recently conducted two virtually identical studies with construction workers where one client offered an honorarium and the other did not. Though the phone center used identical sample management and callback procedures, the study with the honorarium took 12 days to complete, compared to 25 days for the study without an honorarium. Imagine the time and cost savings accrued by spending half as many hours seeking the cooperation of the respondent!

Consider several factors when determining the appropriate honorarium. What will appeal to your sample universe? Respondents generally prefer cash; however, some researchers have successfully used free software, travel coupons, or charitable donations. Remember that some companies may restrict the types of honorariums their employees can accept, or forbid incentives completely.

  • Provide listed sample. Give your field house a clean, accurate sample frame. The hours spent wading through hundreds or sometimes thousands of disconnected, misdirected, or unqualified numbers takes time, wastes money, and exhausts patience. When possible, include an accurate contact name to minimize the need to go through call-screening gatekeepers. Fewer gatekeepers mean fewer refusals. If the sample does require significant screening, provide more sample and plan for extra data collection time.
  • Arrange to pre-notify and recruit. Give respondents advance notice of your call and obtain their cooperation before attempting the interview. A comparison between two similar Western Wats studies found that recruiting, coupled with subsequent notification, decreased field time by as much as 50 percent.

To obtain the best results, recruit via telephone or e-mail. Recruiting can be conducted prior to study fielding or concurrently with questionnaire administration. Remember that not all recruited respondents actually participate so virtually every study requires some over-recruiting to actually reach the end goal. When determining your recruiting quotas, consider the respondent type, the expected incidence, and the study topic.

Notification alone can dramatically increase cooperation rates among respondents. Depending on the timing and nature of the study, notify respondents via telephone, mail, e-mail, or fax. We recently completed a study consisting of two identical waves of physician interviewing. In wave one, the client elected to cold-call the physicians and procure cooperation when administering the survey. Before the start of wave two, the client mailed a letter to each physician in the sample base, asking for their participation. The letter briefly explained the purpose of the research, gave the approximate length of the questionnaire, and provided a phone number where physicians could confirm the validity of the study. Thanks to these efforts, wave two of the study was out of the field in three weeks as opposed to the six weeks needed to complete the first wave.

When notifying or recruiting hard-to-reach professionals, always include an 800 number directly to the call center so respondents can initiate an inbound call at their convenience. Our call centers are equipped with multiple 800-lines expressly for this purpose. You never know when a busy professional will find the time to complete the study and providing them with the additional flexibility increases the likelihood of their cooperation. In wave two of the physician study outlined above, the 800 number was given in the introductory letter, resulting in more than 60 percent of the completed interviews coming from inbound calls. Since most call centers price inbound calls considerably lower than outbound ones, this little bit of advanced planning can result in big cost savings. When using an 800 number, make sure to include the study field dates and the call center hours in your materials to potential respondents.

  • Manage survey length. In market research, less is more. The shorter the questionnaire, the better the response rate. Calling a respondent at work is, at best, a minor disruption. Keep your questionnaire as short as possible. Resist the temptation to ask unimportant questions simply because you have the chance, you’ll pay for it through increased terminates. To get the maximum respondent cooperation, keep questionnaire lengths to 10 minutes or less.

Some field services have even gone so far as to restrict long B2B questionnaires. The Gallup Organization no longer accepts any B2B questionnaire over 15 minutes in length. According to Jane Miller, executive vice president and CFO for Gallup, negative influences on respondents and higher costs to researchers prompted the restrictions.

  • Consider the Internet. With many businesses providing e-mail and Internet access to their employees, a Web survey offers a viable and cost-effective alternative to more traditional forms of data collection. Market researchers have used and refined the Internet as an interviewing vehicle for the B2B crowd almost since its inception; consequently, Web-based B2B studies pose fewer sample problems and limitations than their consumer counterparts.

Cooperation rates for Internet studies continue to increase. According to the 1999 Respondent Cooperation and Industry Image Study conducted by the Council for Marketing and Opinion Research (CMOR), nearly one in five individuals who participated in any type of survey within the past year did so over the Internet. Furthermore, those who refused to participate in a telephone survey indicated that they preferred the Web second only to mail as a survey method.

In addition, the Internet adds wonderful flexibility to your study. For example, you can notify or recruit via telephone or e-mail, then provide the respondent with a Web address to access the questionnaire. Or you can collect data using both the telephone and the Internet (remember to account for differences in the two methodologies in your final data analysis). An Internet survey also provides creative design freedom to incorporate graphics or sound into the questionnaire. Just don’t get too carried away. A visually stunning but very slow-to-load display will only frustrate respondents and may increase terminates. Slow modems still abound, so keep your survey friendly to even the slowest models. And remember that length remains a major factor, even with the Internet. Once again, the shorter the better.

With an Internet study, be especially selective when choosing a field service. Do they have the capacity and the experience to host your study? Can they implement either a telephone-to-Internet or an e-mail-to-Internet methodology? Can they supply live online or telephone assistance if a respondent hits a snag or has a question. Do they provide study updates and data in real-time?

While there is no magic formula for the perfect B2B study, using the suggestions here will help your project run smoother and minimize your headaches.