Category — Recruiting

Incentives are a normal part of any market research project. With each project we ask ourselves: What will we give participants?  How much will it cost?  How do we sweeten the pot to ensure high participation?

Today we’d like to take a step back and ask:  Do we really need to give people stuff to make them talk to us?

Now, before anybody panics, we do believe that most of the time the answer is “yes.” When we’re reaching out to new audiences that we have absolutely no relationship with, we need something to get their attention.  And if we’re asking for something big – driving across town to attend a focus group for example – of course the stipend is important.  We’ve discussed guidelines for compensating participants in the past, and we still think that post is relevant and useful.

But that doesn’t mean that we always need a “prize.”  Especially when working with customers, the best reward might be that they see the feedback they give influencing the product roadmap or support. Sometimes just being heard is a very strong driver.

For example, we have just completed an annual customer survey for a customer we’ve been working with for years. The first 3 years we gave a typical stipend of a $25 gift card to anyone who completed the survey.   But, this year the budget was slashed, so we figured we’d try it without a stipend and see what happened.  A couple of observations on this test:

• We got the same number of completes as last year – when we did offer a stipend!  The customer base had grown by 15% so we can expect that the lack of stipend hit our response rate by that much, but we still had a very significant response rate so the results were valid.
• Responses were higher quality than in the past (as evaluated by the thoughtfulness of responses to open-ended questions).  Since nobody completed the survey just for the $25, participants were more engaged.  They took the time because they cared.
• Perhaps this wouldn’t have worked the first time? This was the fourth in a series of customer surveys, and this client has definitely responded to the findings of past surveys.  Perhaps their customers now realize the survey is worth their time for other reasons then the stipend?

Net-net: We felt we got at least as good as – and arguably better – results from the customer survey without stipends for less than half the costs of previous surveys. Moving forward, Dimensional Research is making sure we evaluate whether the stipend is truly adding value to a project.

One of the realities of doing technology market research is that you end up dealing with people in the real world. For those who work in roles that deal only with the hottest new innovations, it can be a bit of a shock to shift gears from the cutting-edge of hype and the  super-early-adopters that use new technology.

There is definitely good news. Your technology market research project will give you a good dose of reality and a much better understanding of the market that you’re actually marketing and selling into. And any good market research firm will help you to find exactly the group you need to hear from: whether a cross-section of the entire market, a group of early adopters, or conservative corporate IT executives.

However, bear in mind that the market research project may not feel like the rest of your life. Everyone you talk to on a daily basis may know about your technology and your space, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the world does.

A few important things to remember:

a. “Buzz” usually isn’t happening with the entire market. It may feel like everybody is talking about cloud computing these days, but in reality they aren’t. There are plenty of smart, informed people that simply haven’t got cloud computing on their radar because they are focused on other things.

b. Your competitors are not “everywhere.” We know it feels like that to you, but in reality, only a small percentage of the market uses your competitor’s tools.

c. Even your own customers aren’t as educated about your product as you are. Don’t expect to have the same deep conversation with them that you have in your internal meetings. Remember:  you spend 120% of your time thinking about your product. Your customers probably spend only a fraction of their time doing the same.

d. In the real world, corporate IT doesn’t get as excited about change as technology startups do. It may feel like a wet blanket to hear corporate IT research participants finding the negative aspect in the amazing new technology that you know is going to change the world.  But the reality is that it’s much better to hear the objections, so you can deal with them.

You should work with your research provider to make sure that you understand exactly who you want to talk to, and it helps to be realistic about the level of effort it takes to find exactly the right people and engage them in a beneficial conversation.

I was really surprised to be pointed to this article from Zoomerang (our main online survey tool provider, who I think makes a great survey product). The article states that more than 40% of online IT panels contain survey takers who are not really in IT.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.

It’s challenging to find appropriate IT participants for research – online or in person.  It requires a very specific knowledge of the people, processes, and technology in IT.  As this article clearly points out, generic market research providers don’t do well here.  I do genuinely think they have TRIED to “fix” this, but I know it’s hard and don’t believe that they really have.

The challenge is that IT professionals are compensated well  for participating in technology market research, so the motivation to misrepresent skills is high.  A better way ensure that you’re talking to real decision makers in corporate IT is to work with a provider who specializes in technology and has years of experience building up the resources to find these people, and has the technical savvy to know immediately if something has gone wrong with the recruit.

Dimensional Research specializes in technology market research, and work extensively with companies that sell to corporate IT.  That’s all we do. And because of that focus, we do it well.  We know the reliable sources to find participants that match your needs.  Just as importantly, we understand technology ourselves,  so we can quickly catch someone who is BS-ing.

This blog post can be summed into one sentence: “I talked to some people I know” is NOT market research!

Of course you should talk to people you know about your ideas, but you need to ask yourself, who is your target market?

Will your drinking buddies ever buy your enterprise software?  Maybe they will, and count yourself fortunate if you play poker with only CIOs. But you probably interact with a lot of other people who are not actually in your target market.

It’s a good idea to get ideas from everyone, but you should put significantly more emphasis on feedback from the people who are actually part of the community you target.

It may be obvious that your high school buddy who runs his family’s (very successfull) car dealership doesn’t know enough about technology to give you feedback.

The really problematic conversations are usually the ones with people who are in the periphery of your target, just not IN it – people who sell to IT in other companies (especially ones with big established brands!), VCs who invest in tech companies, journalists and bloggers – even your fellow co-workers.

All of these people will have insights for you, and you should certainly pay attention to them, but you should never use the info you get from these people INSTEAD of having conversations with your actual target market, the people who will eventually buy your solution. They are the ones you really need to talk to.

If your day-to-day routine does not easily facilitate those conversations – make a point to make it happen.  Find those people and talk to them in a way that gets unbiased feedback. Any market research firm would be happy to help.

According to a recent survey from a specialist PlayStation 3 site, geeks make the best lovers.

Let me clarify right from the start that as someone with distinct geek-ish tendencies, who is married to a confirmed geek, I have no intentions of arguing with the study’s conclusions – just with its methodology.

The problem with the survey is that it was biased. Given the audience likely to peruse a PS3-specific site, it’s fair to assume the respondents skewed more toward the “geek” end of the spectrum.

When conducting research you must know who you’re talking to in order to interpret the conclusions correctly. If they had done the same survey with a running site, would they have found out that marathoners are the best lovers?  

In technology market research, identifying your research target audience is especially important.  Customers will give you different insights than prospects, employees, partners, or even the customers of direct competitors! 

If you’re talking to your customers, you need to acknowledge that by definition they have the pain that you’re selling to, or they wouldn’t be using your product. So, you shouldn’t do a customer survey and then announce, “100% of the MARKET does this.”  Of course, it’s completely fair to say, “100% of our CUSTOMERS do this.”

In comparison, if you’re talking to the general market who isn’t as fully educated on your solution, you’ll need to tailor your questions accordingly. If you ask questions that are too detailed and specific to your solution, you’ll get uninformed answers. The type of questions that are appropriate for customers who are familiar with your product, are not the same ones to use for the general market.

For example, if you’re asking about product features, you will get vastly different answers from existing customers who know your product, and from your competitor’s customers who know an alternative approach. Both of these will be different from the answers you’ll get from prospects who don’t have any product experiences.

As with everything in market research, it comes back to goals. Your very first step should be figuring out your business goals. Then, figure out what you need to know in order to achieve these goals. Next, figure out who has that knowledge, and who doesn’t. Only once you’ve answered all these questions, you can dive into the details of the market research project.

Are you a technology professional? Do you like sharing your opinions? You might enjoy being part of a Dimensional Research Project.

The only real qualification is that you work with technology in your profession - we’re especially interested in people who work in corporate IT.  We welcome participation from around the globe!

Important information for participants:

• This is market research – no one will every try to sell you anything.
• Your input will be anonymous. Nothing you say will ever be attributed to you or your company in any way.

What do you have to do?

Register here (you may need to scroll down a bit). We’ll ask you a few questions about yourself. Then, as research projects come up that you seem to fit, we’ll contact you with some more detailed questions and information about the specific project.

What is involved?

The actual level of participation depends on the project. For our Web surveys, we’ll send you a link and you can go online to complete the survey. For in-depth interviews we’ll contact you and schedule a time to talk – usually about an hour. For focus groups we’ll let you know when (and where, if necessary) and see if you’re available – usually about 1½ – 2 hours.

What’s in it for you?

This depends on the project. For a Web survey, it may be a copy of the final report or a chance to win a cool prize. For a focus group or interview usually it is a cash stipend payable via Paypal or US dollar check. And of course, with all projects you have the knowledge that you’re influencing the future of technology in some way!

REGISTER HERE>>

In my last post, I talked about the similarities across Corporate IT groups when it comes to pain and product benefits.  This week I’d like to talk about key differences that are important to consider when doing research.

This is where segmentation comes into play – making sure you have enough participants of a particular type to represent the differences in your audience. How you segment, and whether you segment at all, depends on your goals. 

For example, if you’re doing a message validation where the goal is to evaluate if you are communicating well about a specific pain or the benefits of your technology, there are a lot of similarities between different geographies and verticals. In this scenario, you don’t need to have a dozen participants from each of the 10 vertical industries you sell into to quickly get a very real sense of how your messages are resonating with a corporate IT audience.

However, in some scenarios, you will need to get representation from different areas. Of course every project is different, and we at Dimensional Research work with our clients to really understand specific goals and make sure we recruit the right representation from any segment to reach those goals. Here are a few general areas to consider. 

The “Silos” of IT

Application Development, Production Operations, Security, …  They all act very differently from each other. They have different cultures:  development likes new features, while “change” often equates to downtime for production operations, and security would ideally prefer that nobody gets access to anything.  They purchase differently.  And (let’s be honest) these frequently have challenges communicating with each other.  If you have a product that crosses IT silos, you need representation from each silo to understand purchasing behaviors, objections, etc. 

Technical Buyer vs. Economic Buyer

The technical buyer will discuss features and functions.  This is a comfort area for many technology companies and they’re more likely to “get” you and your product.  However, the economic buyer is vital to tell you the non-product reasons why people buy – brand, sales execution, channel, financing, etc.  You will need both types of participants to understand competitive dynamics and purchasing behaviors.

Verticals

Government, Education and Non-profits can purchase very differently than IT in other vertical industries.  If you are targeting those verticals, you need to talk to them specifically about how they buy. 

Financial Services spends more on IT and is most likely to consider a new technology for competitive advantage.

ISVs and SAAS are organized and make purchase decisions much differently than corporate IT – although they often are an important market for technology vendors.

Geographies

There are big differences in how these geographies actually purchase products.  Culture can play a big part in acquiring a technology.  European countries frequently prefer working with local representatives – regional offices or channel partners.  Japan absolutely requires local language and culture in their purchasing process.  Canada acts like an extension of the US in the way they purchase and can be easily combined with a general North American study.

Technology and Process Maturity

If you are selling a cutting-edge technology, the best places to do market research are the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, London, and Sydney.  These are all cities with cultures of trying new things. 

On the other hand, if you want ITIL process maturity, Europe is great. And I absolutely love the mid-west (Chicago, Minneapolis, etc.) for identifying “objections” in a very straightforward and honest way 

Bottom line: You should work with your market researcher to figure out your goals and to determine which segments of the market you need to talk to. Then make sure you get the representation from these segments when executing your market research project.

There is usually some form of compensation for participating in a market research project. For focus groups and in-depth interviews, research participants are usually offered some kind of stipend in appreciation of their time.  The question I get asked frequently is – how much?

I’ll start by saying that the stipend is usually NOT the primary motivation for participating in technology market research.  I find people are genuinely interested in expressing their opinion. They like to be heard; they like to hear about new ideas coming down the pipe; they like thinking they are influencing the market or the product; and – in the case of focus groups and customer advisory boards – they like to hear what is happening with their peers.  And let’s face it, corporate IT employees are typically paid reasonably well, so a hundred bucks isn’t going to really compensate them for trucking across town to a focus group facility, spending 2 hours talking to you, then trucking back home.

That said, the stipend is key in attracting the right audience, and is perceived as an important added benefit. So back to the question of how much.  The answer depends on a variety of factors:

1. What are you asking people to do?  Focus groups typically take about 2 hours of participants’ time. In-depth interviews usually take from thirty minutes to one hour. In addition, for in-person focus groups, the participants need to get to a specific location.  As a result, focus group participants are usually compensated more generously.

2. How big is the target pool of participants?  The harder they are to find, the more you should sweeten the pot to simplify the recruiting.  If you have a straightforward recruit like “application developers” or “network administrators”, there are plenty of those and you don’t need to have a particularly large stipend to entice them to join. 

However, if you need something really specific like “DBAs responsible for MATISSE databases”, or customers of a competitor that only has a few hundred users worldwide, you want to have a large stipend to make sure that you’re doing everything possible to attract the few people out there that match the recruiting profile.

3. What level of participants are you looking for?  CIOs and other IT executives make more money than sys admins or developers, so the stipends need to be higher to match their expectations for the value of their time.

4. Customers or prospects?  Depending on the context, offering a customer money to give you feedback may be tacky.  Particularly if it’s a customer advisory board meeting, the real value is the chance to be heard.  In this case a nice gift with the corporate logo on it is much more appropriate.  

5.  Give the philathropic option.  More and more corporations have implemented strict policies that employees CANNOT receive any gifts of any kind.  Dimensional Research always offers our research participants the option of donating their stipends to the charity of their choice. 

6.  Web surveys are different.  When you’re looking for hundreds or even thousands of respondents, any stipend, no matter how small, can quickly blow up your research budget. There are certainly options like being entered into a drawing for a gift certificate.  Or the ever popular drawing for the hot electronic item of the day – the iPod Touch has been particularly common in survey drawings in the past year. 

One thing to consider, if the findings are not confidential, is to simply offer a copy of the final report to participants.  This is a very high-value offer to people who care about the topic – probably even more than a gadget – and has the added benefit of not attracting participants who don’t care about the topic and might not give the most insightful or informed answers.

“Thank you, I really enjoyed our conversation.”  This is the typical way in which customers end a market research call or customer advisory board meeting.

It still amazes me how many people love being involved in market research – especially customers.  They don’t see it as a chore or just another thing on the “to do” list. On the contrary, they love being involved and appreciate the opportunity to air their opinions.  Even when I talk to unhappy customers or to participants who clearly don’t connect to the pain we’re testing, they often end a call with sincere gratitude for being given an opportunity to be heard.

This is particularly important because people are often worried about asking their customers to participate in research.  Your company probably asks a lot of its customers already. They are asked to be sales references, PR references, and beta testers. Many companies are hesitant to add a research project on top of everything else they ask their customers to do.

But companies need to realize that customers LOVE being asked to do market research. Not all of them of course, but the ones that are not interested will say no quickly.  Most customers feel that being involved is empowering. They appreciate the fact that they get to voice their opinions anonymously and that there is no preparation on their side and no action items. In fact, involving customers in market research is a great way to increase customer loyalty.

Another incentive for customers is the participant stipend or honorarium – the money we give participants in appreciation of their time. Cash is always nice of course, but Dimensional Research also gives research participants the opportunity to direct their stipend to a charity of their choice. Just in the past month I’ve learned about several great causes through the choices of our research participants.

People often ask me where I get my research participants from. Finding the right participants is one of the real value ads of working with an external market research firm compared to any internal processes. When you hire a market research company such as Dimensional Research, you get the ability to talk to the EXACT prospect or customer you are targeting.

It’s not that hard to have a conversation about your product with your brother’s wife’s cousin who works as a system admin for a non-profit company that is 30 times smaller than your typical buyer, whereas you are trying to sell to large financial services companies. Or even worse, you could talk to your VCs as if they represent your target customers!  VCs have a very different point of view than corporate IT: VCs are visionary while corporate IT is usually extremely conservative.

It’s not that you shouldn’t have these conversations. They can provide you with very important insights. But you need to understand that they’re not the people you’re ultimately selling to. You need to invest effort and money to reach the people you are selling to. These are the people you must understand intimately.

Market researchers like Dimensional Research work with you to identify exactly who you want to talk to and who you don’t want to talk to, then use huge databases to recruit participants. Recruits can get incredibly specific so you know you’re talking to the people who are just like the ones you believe will buy your product.

So what makes a good recruiting guide?

First, start with a clear understanding of who you want to talk to. What companies?  Do you want only financial services or is any corporate IT organization a fit?  Maybe you don’t know and you need a mix of participants to find out.  Government, education, non-profits and ISVs all have unique ways of buying and using technology that may or may not be relevant to you.

Second, figure out who the people are.  Job titles are often misleading. It’s pretty common for a client to say they want to talk to “VPs of Application Development” and finish a great project without a single participant with that title.  It’s best to focus on job functions – roles and responsibilities – rather than on titles.

Third, have a clear understanding of who NOT to talk to.  You can read more about that here.  This final step – weeding out the wrong participants – is the most challenging. You need to look at the recruiting guide and identify the kind of person that the guide might allow into the study that you aren’t really interested in.  Remember that participants often use vocabulary differently than you.

Several years back, I did a study with CPG (consumer packaged goods) marketing executives responsible for “fast moving packaged goods.”  We wrote the guide, had the guide approved by the client, and got the participants. Two of the participants answered quite clearly that they sold “fast moving consumer goods” and did not sell “durables”, but the participants had a different definition of these terms than the client did and we ended up excluding those participants from the final analysis.  The project was still successful, but we could have done an even better job, and gotten two more valuable points of view, if we had done more work on our industry vocabulary up front.