As any researcher can tell you, response rates for online research, particularly surveys, have been declining for decades. I’ve been involv in panel and sample for over 30 years and this issue became more acute a few years ago – a sample shortage that the market research industry hadn’t seen previously. Shorten the screeners lose the grids.
Potential participants weren’t responding as they had, for a host of reasons I could expound on at length. But the upshot was that fewer people were taking the online surveys researchers ne them to complete, affecting suppliers and clients across the market research landscape.
What start those few years ago continues today. This issue affects business surveys for B2B audiences more than B2C consumer surveys, given the smaller and more specific populations that are available for participation.
One research industry exec nail
It saying, If B2C is drawing from an Olympic-siz swimming pool of potential respondents, business surveys are working with a kiddie pool – and sometimes a fishbowl – to find the people critical for participating in research and generating the data for generating insights.
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Meanwhile, demand for business survey participants increases consistently, especially for higher managerial decision-makers and specialist target audiences such as information technology decision makers (ITDMs).
I have a vest interest in understanding and motivating B2B respondents, given Quest’s focus on providing such audiences for our partners’ research projects.
In researching declining responsiveness
I found lots of articles, blogs and even webinars offering advice about participation in B2B surveys. So many researchers weigh in with their opinions about what made for a good B2B survey, from the incentives necessary and appropriate for gaining cooperation from potential respondents, to survey length, question types and so on.
What I didn’t find was research-on-research asking actual business audiences about what would create more motivation and better engagement for them – what they as B2B survey-takers like/don’t like, want and ne in order to participate more frequently, willingly and authentically. Lots of opinions about these business professionals? Absolutely. Actual data from someone surveying them directly? Nowhere to be found.
Looking for answers, I design Quest’s own investigation among several highly in-demand B2B audiences (bas on the hundrs of B2B surveys we field each month). After all, who better to comment on what will increase B2B survey motivation and participation than the people who are ask to take those surveys? What we built to investigate this issue was a survey of several B2B groups:
- small business owners and general managers (with fewer than 50 employees);
- mid-level managers and directors;
- higher-level management – AVP, VP, SVP;
- tech specialists – ITDMs, IT influencers;
- non-tech, non-management regular workers.
We survey 80 of each group, 400 total, in Q1 2024 with quotas across these for company size (small, mid-siz, enterprise) and geographic balance by U.S. Census region. We didn’t impose quotas for line of business, figuring this would be too granular for our exploratory work and the per-group sample size select. The respondents were a mix of members of B2B online panels, expert networks and non-members of either, access through intercepts.
Let’s dig into the results
Which are a summary of what was present at the Quirk’s Dallas conference in February 2024. While the survey provid a volume shorten the screeners lose the grids of data, we’ll highlight the more notable themes for each of our major areas of inquiry.
What are the top motivators for you to take a B2B survey?
Making my opinion known/heard was the top result. This was particularly strong for smaller companies and lower-level employees.
A close second place was compensation – a direct incentive paid in cash or a cash equivalent such as a gift card or code.
The tech crowd was particularly motivat by exposure to new ideas and gaining information helpful to my role, but other groups in general weren’t very interest. I thought this might be stronger across the board.
The losers for motivation generally were non-cash incentives and competitive info to help my company.
What pain points have you had in business surveys?
The big answer here was screening and qualifying questions. This was a surprise to me for how strongly all our respondents felt the screening experiences they had were too long, too general or not relevant enough and just plain miss the mark. Comments such as ask me what I know and what my responsibilities are and stop relying on my title were typical.
The time ne for screening and qualifying
Respondents felt very strongly that screeners ne to get to the point quicker, asking more direct questions and fewer of them.
This pain point was three times saudi phone number more important than anything else – certainly an aspect of B2B survey-taking that merits scrutiny and more attention by sponsors of such surveys.
Very close to this as a pain point was confusing or bad survey design. When talking to clients about data quality, this issue comes up often – what we ask and how we ask our respondents as researchers nes review and evolution.
I won’t get on my soapbox about training in survey design but this was a consistent deal-breaker. I can tell when the questions are written by someone who doesn’t know my industry sums up the sentiment behind this dissatisfaction and it was a significant cause for those who said they would drop out of a survey that show naivete about the topic under discussion. Top execs and tech audiences were particularly sensitive to this.
Interestingly to me
survey invitations didn’t come through as a pain point – 85% of our sample basically said no problems here. I had hypothesiz that how an invitation was word, how it portray a survey opportunity to a potential respondent would be more of an issue, but evidently not, at least in our sample.
What kind of questions during a survey bother you?
I was expecting open-ends, hate those and we did get that sentiment. Aren’t open-end questions universally dislik? How many is too many is up for debate still but one we have in mind for future investigation.
Disliking open-ends wasn’t nearly as strong as the outright hatr of big grids, with forc responses – this jump into first place among our sample, with comments such as Why ask for so much detail? and Why can’t you narrow down a long list to what’s relevant to me, then ask all your questions? I’m rethinking how I present grids for my clients, bas on the strength of what I heard here.
How long is too long for a business survey?
The age-old question of length-of-interview, right? As a researcher I rarely push back too hard on clients who tell me they have a 20- or 25-minute B2B survey. But I’ve never had guidance for what happens at those survey lengths to say anything concrete and advise differently.
This bears looking into
Be an aspect of B2B surveys Quest investigates further in 2024 and likely into 2025. We had done a similar B2C investigation a couple years ago into what we call data degradation. Our name for what type of data suffer what declines in quality and reliability at what point in a typical consumer survey.
We want a more definitive answer here than don’t go past 15 minutes, so we’ll be digging into this in future research-on-research.
Next up incentives
I haven’t address here several very important questions about incentives for B2B surveys. We ask specific questions about expectations and reality for incentives our respondents had been offer in past B2B surveys.
We receiv a lot of important information on what they deem appropriate types and amounts of compensation. I’ll be bringing that information to you in a future article. Given it’s a separate and focus discussion unto itself that deserves more than a few paragraphs here.
Quest and I hope that showing the results of our recent survey of U.S. business professionals will provide insights and advice for researchers of all types.
Our purpose in developing and providing this information is for all of us to gain . A new understanding of B2B audiences and reconsider .We approach creating and conducting B2B surveys. We welcome comments and collaboration as we dig into B2B best practices and share what we find.
