
B2B Research Doesn’t Have To Be So Hard
Connecting with B2B software product users is complex. We spoke with four experts to learn how they circumvent the challenges in B2B research. Although their approaches varied, one theme was clear: their path to meaningful B2B research has been through relationships.
Whether your users are knowledge workers busy with deadlines or car mechanics who rarely leave the garage, connecting with folks who buy and use B2B software products is challenging.
“B2B is definitely more complex,” says Hannah Shamji, former psychotherapist and current B2B research specialist. “There are so many stakeholders involved in any type of decision. Having to juggle all of those, it’s just much more of a web.”
Tools needed throughout the workday are specialized—whether for accountants, mechanics or marketers—so your participant pool is smaller by design. But it’s not just the size of the total addressable market that makes the research challenging. It can be hard to compel B2B users and decision-makers to participate in a study.
We’ve heard numerous examples of “hard to compel” users:
- High-earning executives who can’t spare an hour
- Managers responsible for a large task load
- Operators who spend near-zero time in their inbox
“There’s no incentive that you can pay that would buy their time,” says Benson Low, a 20-year veteran of UX Research and a board member of ResearchOps.
In Low’s experience, compelling those who make a B2B purchase decision (often c-suite executives) with financial incentives alone doesn’t work. “They’re not going to care if you’re paying them $1,000. They probably wouldn’t give you their time.”
Researching in the enterprise space adds another layer of complexity to the recruitment process.
“You can almost play the same playbook in small to medium-sized businesses—same research methodology, approach, even recruitment,” says Low. But, in large organizations, the approach will look quite different.
“When it starts getting difficult is when your organization has an account management team supporting specific businesses. That’s where you have to work with that account management team first before you even reach out to customers.”
Overcoming the challenge
We talked to four experts with a combined 80+ years of experience in product about how they circumvent the challenges of B2B research. Although their approaches varied, one theme was clear: their path to meaningful B2B research has been through relationships.
“It’s about relationships, ultimately.”
Read on to hear how four research pros overcome challenges in B2B research.
- Benson Low — Research Lead & ResearchOps Board Member
- Paul Stevens — UX & Product Design Director
- René Bastijans — Growth Research Consultant
- Hannah Shamji — Customer Researcher for B2B SaaS
1. Learn the problem space before you talk to customers
Because actual users will likely be hard to connect with, using their time to learn the basic details of their role or industry would be a waste.
As such, Low recommends doing internal research before even talking to customers.
“Know the product and how it's positioned in the market. Understand the business. Then you can design the right capabilities, right research sequencing, etc.”
Our experts mentioned several methods for this discovery:
- Listening to sales calls
- Interviewing CX staff
- Reviewing service blueprints
- Scouring communities to learn about the users your product serves
Internal research gives you the foundation you need to interpret customer feedback meaningfully and assures that you don’t waste precious customer interviews just coming up to speed with their lingo.
2. Relationships, relationships, relationships
Marketing, sales, and CX have a wealth of knowledge and connections that can ease the research process.
Paul Stevens, a UX leader who’s been in digital design long enough to have A/B tested print mailers, heralds the power of a relationship with your sales team.
“Really good salespeople will get you into a customer. They’ve got relationships; they can get you in. They can make that all-important introduction,” says Stevens. “You need to be best friends with your sales team.”
But salespeople won’t be ready to give up their contacts without some established trust, so our experts emphasized building trust and connection rather than focusing on information extraction.
To earn their trust, show them you’re aligned with their goals. Understand their OKRs so you can frame your initiatives in a way that is mutually beneficial. “You essentially have to research the stakeholder in order to get them to buy in on the research,” says Shamji.
3. Use team members as research proxies
Beyond just making intros, your sales team can actually be a partner in research, working prototypes and early feedback into their sales calls in a lightweight form of “testing.”
René Bastijans, who describes himself as a “recovering Product Manager,” is currently a lead researcher at a growth-stage startup. As a research team of one in a company of over 100 employees, he’s found ways to loop his colleagues into the research process.
His sales team is trained to lightly survey prospects during sales calls and report back to the wider team. This creates a healthy feedback loop that keeps everyone abreast of evolving user needs.
“We’ve trained our sales team to ask for specific data and enter it into Salesforce. Researchers and the product team have access to these data, and therefore, sales has allowed us to keep a pretty good pulse on the market.”
But it’s not just a few questions here and there that sales can support with. Bastijans works with the sales team to get quick feedback on product updates in a lightweight form of testing.
“We give them a couple of slides and they slot them into their conversation when they speak with prospects to get input from real people. That’s been working really well for us.”
Stevens advocates for relying on your team to conduct field research where you can’t.
“If you’re in a global organization, you want to do research in a country that you’re not in, and you can’t fly around the world to do it, you can put an education program together. Find like-minded people within the org. In my experience, there have been marketers in each country and they are usually aligned with design and research.”
Sending them out with a camera, a notepad, and a directive to report back on what they see has allowed Stevens to extend his reach beyond global borders. And he says teams love to participate. “I’ve never had anybody snicker. I’ve had them say ‘that’s fantastic; how can I get involved?”
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4. Stand up a Customer Advisory Board
Because B2B customers are impossible to engage en masse, one way to circumvent the challenge of recruitment is to create a “board” of customers that gives regular feedback in exchange for value. As Low describes, the relationship should benefit both parties.
“There's a benefit for them in that we provide them with training, support, discounts, or access to new features. On the flip side, we expect them to give us feedback—how their business has been going and what their needs are.”
Sometimes called “Sales Advisory Boards” or “Customer Advisory Boards" these can start as a partner to either sales or product, but their insights will support various disciplines within the organization.
Stevens has had success in previous roles with what he calls “Customer Days,” in which the Customer Advisory Board spends an entire day on-site, rotating between different practice groups to provide insight to various business functions. “It’s not a full day of UX testing, but researchers will have a slot to talk with them.” It’s a great way to regularly solicit the perspectives of your customers.
5. Create an expert-level playbook for B2B interviews
When you do get a chance to interview B2B clients and users, Low emphasizes the need to take it seriously: put senior staff on the task and do adequate preparation.
“Make sure you pay the utmost respect to those hard-to-recruit participants. You want to make the best use of their time and be able to ask questions effectively while being able to protect the organization's brand, reputation, and business.”
Low recommends an extensive preparation process for B2B interviews, including researching the participant’s background, reviewing their account details, and chatting with their account manager, which Low says may reveal any potentially sensitive discussion points. “You just don't want anything to impact the business unintentionally.”
But preparation alone doesn’t guarantee an effective conversation—you have to have experience as well. Low recommends that only very experienced moderators conduct conversations with existing clients. “You don’t want them to be in a power dynamic issue. Then they can’t execute the research effectively.”
Ineffective moderation risks producing research that can’t be used effectively and a feeling of time wasted for the participant.
“Especially considering how small this panel likely is and how small the population is. You likely don't have too many enterprise customers, and you might want to talk to them again next year. So, build a rapport and make sure that you are able to access them. If not yourself, then your peers—other researchers, designers, or product managers on your team.”
6. Use automations to maintain trust (and stay sane)
If you’ve been introduced to customers via your sales team, it can feel like you’ve won a golden ticket. But our experts remind us that trust needs to be maintained, so they’ve built workflows that foster trust and transparency.
Bastijans uses Zapier automations that push updates at critical customer touchpoints:
- When a prospect books an interview
- When interviews take place
Automations Slack the sales team when a conversation is booked or takes place, and auto-magically import CRM data and update a Notion page. “Zapier has been a really huge help for me just automating mundane tasks that I would have to otherwise do manually.” For Bastijans’ research team of one, he’s been able to ramp up his output without upping the workload.
7. Hire an outsider to play a neutral third party
Depending on your research objectives, it can be hard to solicit honest feedback from your recruits. To circumvent this issue, Low recommends occasionally using outside firms to act as a neutral third party.
“If you can’t do the research because of baggage you have representing your company, you might do it in a roundabout way by getting a third party involved. This way, an independent researcher, consultancy, or research firm might do this centrally, saying ‘we’re just doing industry research,’ they can interview all sorts of customers without damaging anything.”
Agencies can be especially useful in projects that involve talking to the customers of your competitors, says Low. While participants might be hesitant to give honest feedback to a direct competitor of a company they’ve been loyal to, agencies can frame their work more neutrally to enable participants to give candid feedback.
“Essentially, you’re trying to find a Switzerland. Someone that is unbiased with no interconnection that could cloud the insights that you want to get out. So you get, from a data perspective, cleaner insights.”
Plus, agencies can often work much faster, says Low. “The difficult B2B customers that you can’t get to, or have constraints or limitations to access, an independent consultancy might do much quicker.”
8. Make sure the insights stick
While it’s one thing to find the workflows and relationships that enable excellent research, the endeavor is fruitless unless you know how to stick the landing, says Shamji. “It's great to have all the data, but are they going to action on it? Is it going to help make decisions?”
With many teams globally distributed and an average ratio of 1 researcher per 50 developers, the average researcher is, as Stevens puts it, “a very, very, very small fish in a very big pond.”
As a result, our experts say that visibility is key.
To build visibility and buy-in, Stevens suggests a healthy dose of self-promotion: of yourself, the importance of your role, and the outcomes that your research enables.
“As soon as you've got any results, you have to publicize it as much as you can, but especially the right eyes. Depending on the relationships that you have in the business, how comfortable you are, and what the C-Suite is like, there's nothing wrong with dropping a Slack message to the CEO.”
Bastijans solicits buy-in and builds visibility through what he calls “Learning Lunches,” a 25-minute presentation with Q&A, designed to circulate the latest research and keep the team rowing in the same direction.
And for research teams in their infancy, Low says it’s especially important to advocate for the importance of research within your organization. “When you’re establishing a research team, people don’t know what we do.” Rituals like Slack memos, Learning Lunches, and direct conversations can go a long way toward building user-centered thinking within your organization.
The importance of B2B research
Despite the numerous challenges of B2B research, our experts assured us that it is workable.
The sales journey is complex, the personas are many, and the execution needs to be handled delicately. It’s why Shamji sees B2B contexts as the best application for UX research.
“B2B is just more of an obvious place for research,” says Shamji. “All of the touch points like customer success and sales—they're all seeing different parts of the process, so it just kind of warrants a researcher's 360 view of what's going on.”
It’s also why Low says AI isn’t coming for the enterprise researcher’s job anytime soon. Today’s AI interventions just aren’t prepared for the task. “I actually don’t think AI is going to take over our jobs.”

About the Author
Natalie Thomas
Natalie Thomas is the Director of Digital Experience & UX Strategy at The Good. She works alongside ecommerce and product marketing leaders every day to produce sustainable, long term growth strategies.