Recruiting the right B2B research participants
Editor’s note: Rachel Cope is managing director of Business Advantage. Based in the U.K., she has over 20 years of experience in B2B research, is a certified member of the Market Research Society and is an industry mentor. Find Cope on LinkedIn.
There is one lesson that keeps repeating itself throughout my career: The decision maker is rarely just the person with a particular job title. And it often isn't the most senior person.
In today's organizations, decisions are increasingly made by multiple stakeholders spread across shifting structures, functions and geographies. That makes recruiting the right participants, and generating insight you can actually rely on, much harder than a job title would suggest.
A tale of two IT decision makers
Take IT decision-making as an example.
Picture two people, both plausible candidates for a research project on enterprise technology purchasing. On paper, they look similar. In practice, they hold very different roles.
One might set technology strategy, approve all major tech investment and decide whether the business buys, builds or outsources its technology capability. They report directly to the CEO and carry accountability for cyber security, digital transformation and technology risk.
The other might lead a small team that purchases IT equipment and chooses vendors; keeps the laptops, printers, networks and user accounts running; manages day-to-day operational support; and works within a modest, delegated budget for routine purchases.
Both are legitimate recruits for some research questions. Neither is automatically right for all of them. This pattern shows up again and again, particularly as organizations vary in size and budget responsibility.
It gets more complex still. Where a team is responsible for a purchase, a senior leader might delegate the specific product or service you're interested in to a team member. There may be a central corporate team based at another site, or even in a different country. There could be a buying committee spread across regions, or a procurement function that leads the decision.
It's a good illustration of why knowing who you're really trying to speak to matters more than the title on their email signature.
Decision-making is fragmented by design
None of this is a flaw in how organizations are structured. It's simply how complex B2B decisions get made. But it means two things need careful attention in every project brief.
Who you're recruiting needs to be defined with real precision – not just by title, but by where they sit in the organization: technical team, central corporate office, procurement function or somewhere else entirely.
Where matters too, and not always in the way you'd expect. If you've been asked to recruit buyers in a specific market, the decision maker might not actually sit in that geography. What matters is the market they're responsible for, not where their desk happens to be.
Layered on top of this is a second challenge: Organizations restructure constantly, especially in technology sectors and roles. Titles change, and so do the people filling them. A screener written six months ago may already be describing a role that no longer exists in the form you expect.
What this means for screening
The practical consequence is that B2B recruitment screeners tend to be longer and more layered than those for consumer research. They typically need to probe:
- Sector or industry.
- Location and the markets someone is actually responsible for.
- Organization size (turnover, sites, employees).
- Decision-making authority (e.g., final sign-off, consortium or something in between).
- Length of time in role.
- Employment status.
- Purchase size and frequency.
- Whether the purchase is outsourced.
- How much direct experience the person has with the product or service area.
That's a lot of ground to cover, and it's exactly why getting it right takes careful briefing, thoughtful screening design and, where the project warrants it, working with specialists who know the sector.
None of this is intended to put anyone off B2B research. Most projects go smoothly precisely because researchers know their target audience and markets well enough to write good screeners without reinventing the wheel every time. But it's worth treating any claim of a "magic list" of the right people to recruit with healthy skepticism. In B2B, the right participant is rarely one search away. Rather, it's the product of a well-defined brief and a screener built to match.
That said, careful screening isn't the only tool available. The role of data in identifying who really influences a B2B decision is continuing to grow.