Tips, tools, and advice for B2B exploratory research

How do you approach synchronous B2B research?

The go-to method for B2B research is typically a 1-1 interview conducted via Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Most of your target audience have these video applications installed on their workstations, so it's a low-friction way to do B2B or colleague research.

If this is your preferred method, you can use Indeemo's integrations with Microsoft Teams and Zoom to import your recorded interviews into the platform. Once imported, they're transcribed in 30+ languages and can be analysed in a fraction of the time using generative AI prompts.

How do you approach asynchronous B2B research?

Given the hybrid nature of work, and the fact that most B2B customer personas are hard to meet in person, researchers are increasingly turning to asynchronous, digital-first approaches like video diary studies and mobile ethnography for B2B research.

This asynchronous approach is the main focus of this post.

What's driving the growth in B2B research?

B2B projects now represent around 20% of the exploratory research we support, and that percentage is growing quarter by quarter. The demand is driven by the need for richer, contextual, "human" data to augment existing metrics and analytics.

When we looked at the uptick in B2B research, the client personas that emerged were:

• Technology-driven, data-rich, digital-by-default brands
• Traditional brands on a digital transformation journey
• Healthcare brands seeking to get closer to HCPs
• Research teams focused on colleague and employee experience research

Digital-by-default businesses rarely, if ever, meet their customers face to face. Their primary lens into the lives of their customers is typically an analytics platform, logs, or their CRM.

Although these disruptive businesses have more data than traditional incumbents, and can tell you down to the second how long it takes for customers to convert (or churn), they are blind to the context in which their customers are engaging or disengaging. More critically, they struggle to understand why.

As more brick-and-mortar brands come under digital transformation pressure to disrupt themselves into technology-powered, agile, data-driven organisations, they are unwittingly creating digital distance between their employees and their customers. That digital distance commonly creates "human data" blind spots that big data is failing to visualise. Remote, media-rich, in-context digital ethnography is a powerful methodology to help brands illuminate those blind spots by bringing the people behind the analytics to life.

How do you recruit B2B research participants?

Recruitment can make or break your B2B research project. There are generally three options.

Recruiting via a qual recruiter

A qual recruiter sources respondents who match your user or customer personas. By contracting with these respondents, recruiters make it clear from the outset that participants must complete all tasks and assignments to receive their incentive. These respondents are commercially opting in, so your recruiter has a stick (cash) to chase them and ensure they engage and complete.

If participants fail to engage, they don't get paid, and you can replace them with alternatives if needed. This is clean and easy. Your recruiter will do the hard work and become an active partner in helping your research succeed.

Working with respondents from your own CRM is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Recruiting via your CRM

The most authentic respondents you can recruit are the ones who either signed up to or are paying for your product or service. They're invested in the product. They're genuinely seeking value from it. If you can truly understand their needs and design something that gives them a great experience, revenue growth is inevitable.

Recruiting customers from your CRM needs to be considered carefully though. The relationship is not as transactional or commercially driven as it might be with a recruited respondent.

For some CRM participants, this might be the first research they've ever taken part in. They may not know or understand the rules of the road as well as a recruited participant. You won't be able to push them as hard as someone who has essentially contracted with you to do the work.

You need to manage the relationship more delicately, because their experience of your research project will also shape their experience of your brand.

Recruiting via Indeemo

You can now recruit B2B participants through Indeemo's platform integration with Respondent.io. You can launch a screener in under an hour and, depending on your target audience, start seeing applicants in two to six hours.

It's also worth considering a hybrid approach where you recruit from your CRM and via a recruiter or Indeemo's panel. This gives you the dual perspectives of users and non-users. Your recruiter can manage the relationship with your CRM respondents too, which leaves the chasing up to them while you focus on the research.

For more on recruitment strategy, read our guide to online qualitative research recruitment.

Why is transparency critical for B2B engagement?

Regardless of which recruitment strategy you pursue, you need to spell out to participants what they need to do, how long it will take, and how much they'll get paid for partial or total completion. This is critical.

You also need to explain why you're collecting the data, how it will be used, who will see it, and for how long it will be retained.

If this isn't clear, why would they sign up to take part? The more clarity you give them on your use of their data, the better.

In B2B contexts, you also need to consider the additional constraints of their employment contracts (if applicable). Is it OK for them to take part in your project and share information that relates to their workplace? Depending on your participants and the organisations they work in, this needs to be considered at the very outset.

Pseudonymisation strategies can help here to limit the amount of PII you collect. Our strategists can point you in the right direction if needed. If legislation like HIPAA applies, you'll need to take additional measures to anonymise the data. In these scenarios, it's useful to have an independent recruiter retained to act as a middleman between you and the participant.

Be as transparent and explicit as you can with participants from the outset. This establishes the rules of engagement and ensures everyone is on the same page. It will improve the success of your research significantly.

How should you approach B2B research incentives?

When recruiting from your CRM, you need to incentivise people realistically to capture their attention and maximise the likelihood of them completing their tasks.

Unlike B2C research — where participants are typically taking part to earn extra cash in their spare time, usually outside a work environment — B2B ethnographic research mostly happens during the working day. Participants need to interrupt their work routines to complete the tasks you allocate. This competition for focus requires a strong incentive so they're motivated to complete everything, not just engage superficially.

How can you gamify incentives to maximise completion?

Structure your incentives so the more participants do, the more they're rewarded. Weighting payments more heavily towards later tasks, and offering a completion bonus, is a proven way to maximise engagement.

If you get a CRM participant who genuinely engages in some tasks but is too busy to complete them all, you can pay them, honour your "contract", and minimise your outlay. Gamification also ensures that participants who are slow to engage still leave the project with a positive experience.

To make this work, it's critical that you or your recruiter actually speak with participants before inviting them to join. This allows you to screen out anyone who might not fit the persona. It also lets you tell them exactly what's expected so they have no excuse later.

Always outline in writing what they need to do to receive part or all of their incentive, and get them to explicitly opt in to the terms and conditions of your project.

Why do you need to over-recruit for B2B research?

Based on our data for B2B versus B2C projects, you need to over-recruit.

In B2C projects, we typically see over 90% of participants completing their fieldwork. In B2B, the numbers are lower. A successful B2B study will typically have 60–80% of participants completing.

We recommend over-recruiting by at least 50% so the number who engage actively and complete gives you enough data for your analysis and reporting. This is why the advice above on incentive size and weighting payments towards completion matters so much. With lower completion rates, you need to be clever about how you reward participants, so the ones who start and don't finish don't eat into your budget.

Why should you plan for longer fieldwork durations?

With B2C remote ethnographic research, participants are usually motivated to complete their tasks and receive the incentive. They'll take part in breaks during the day or in the evenings — mostly outside the workplace and its constraints. Completion rates are always higher as a result.

In B2B, you're competing with the pressures of their day jobs. Depending on your target personas, the pressure varies. Medical professionals, business owners, farmers, or senior executives are extremely busy. The demands of their jobs will always take precedence over your tasks.

For this cohort, you have to be patient and play the long game.

You need to prepare for the fact that fieldwork will never move as quickly as you want it to. Plan for longer fieldwork durations so participants have ample time. If the activity would take one week in theory, allow two to three weeks in reality. They'll do it when they have time, not when you want them to.

How do you establish dialogue and trust with B2B participants?

When you're working with B2B participants who need to complete tasks during their working hours, you need to build trust quickly. Your interactions should feel like a dialogue rather than a series of reminders that puts you in the persona of a school teacher chasing homework.

The most important thing is to introduce yourself to participants with a selfie video. This lets them see that you're a real person who, like them, is just trying to get your job done. It also helps them relate to you and dissipates any perception of you as someone in a lab wearing a white coat.

Have some fun with it. Inject your personality. Be authentic. Be real. This will pay dividends when it comes to cajoling them forward to complete their tasks.

As soon as they start to upload posts, respond as soon as you can. The first 48 hours are critical to building rapport. Participants need to know someone is listening, and that taking part is worth their while. You don't have to respond within minutes, but for the first few days, allocate time to check in regularly and respond. Ethnography platforms that send desktop notifications whenever there is activity make it easier to maintain this engagement.

Thank them for taking the time to upload. If you have follow-up questions, go ahead and ask. Platforms that enable commenting and probing via push notifications are ideal for this. With messaging-style push notifications, your interactions feel more like text or chat, which helps you establish rapport faster.

Finally, use video in as many tasks as possible, especially if they require a lot of explanation. Instead of participants scrolling through black-and-white text, a video from you explaining what they need to do, how, and when will cut through more powerfully and improve engagement.

Why does explaining the "why" matter?

A percentage of your participants won't be in it just for the money. They might be genuine users of your product, taking part because they care.

If your product or service is still in beta or just launched, the best participants will genuinely want to help you improve your offering. Why? Because if you do, it will improve their lives. It will make them more productive, solve a current pain, or help them make more money. It's rare that customers get to establish a genuine dialogue with the vendor they're invested in.

If you're a user researcher or experience designer who directly influences the product or service roadmap, your customers understand the unique value of this and will share their feedback and pain points openly. They're getting paid to take part, and they also get a rare opportunity to guide the feature set and ultimately improve their own experience.

Make your tasks easy and quick, and align them with participants' daily routines as much as possible. Don't be too rigid on how they need to respond. Any engagement is better than none, and you can always follow up with a comment and probe asking them to expand or clarify their posts.

Spell out the purpose of the research. Tell them what you're hoping to achieve and why. Tell them why their input matters. Explain how their feedback will have impact. Explain that they have a chance to guide the roadmap. This will improve engagement and completion rates. The more participants understand the purpose of each task, the more active and engaged they'll be.

How do you give B2B participants a voice?

Keep your tasks open-ended. What you're searching for is the unknown unknowns.

If we're being honest, none of us truly understand what really matters to our customers. So in every task, give participants the freedom to add information or detail on what they feel is important or relevant. A simple "feel free to share any additional information or detail you feel would be helpful in relation to this task" can open doors to unmet needs that massively impact your value proposition.

Why can a lack of engagement be an insight in itself?

B2B participants are busy. Their time is valuable. A lot of clients start out with lots of very specific tasks, programmed in quick succession to answer every question that internal stakeholders pose:

• Why are people abandoning after download?
• Why aren't they completing action X on day 1?
• Why are our monthly active user numbers flatlining?
• Why do Y% churn after Z days?

The instinct is to bombard participants with question-dense tasks that will magically shine a light on these human blind spots, only to find that participants sign up to the project and then do nothing for the first three or four days.

This can create a lot of internal pressure on researchers and designers, mostly coming from project sponsors who want answers fast. You need to design your study and manage expectations to avoid this scenario. It's not fun to be sitting at your dashboard after three days and see tens of uploads when you were expecting hundreds.

How do you manage stakeholder expectations?

Set realistic expectations with internal stakeholders. The very fact they're commissioning this research means their analytics aren't telling them everything they need to know. Get them to embrace the unknown. Ensure they know this will take time. Tell them you might not get the answers you need straight away. Tell them to be patient.

Don't view a lack of engagement as a failure. If anything, it's the real-life data that the business needs to embrace. It's likely no coincidence that your study to understand low engagement in the first three days of your user onboarding journey also results in low engagement from your research participants.

When should you pivot your tasking?

The challenge is to understand why. Don't be afraid to pivot your tasking.

If participants aren't doing what you asked them to do, then something is distracting them or keeping them busy elsewhere (assuming your incentives are realistic and you screened them before inviting them). If this happens, alter your tasking and find out what they're doing when they're not doing your tasks.

Come clean. Ask them what else is going on.

Comment on their first upload. Tell them you've noticed they seem too busy to engage and ask them what else is going on. A platform that lets you alter tasking based on the data you're gathering makes this kind of agile pivoting possible.

If they don't complete task 2 (which relates to feedback of their experience onboarding with your application), create a new task 3 to ask them what else is going on in their work lives this week. Broaden it out. Pivot your focus.

We've had studies recently where we noticed low engagement and scheduled brainstorming sessions with our clients. Our software tracks engagement and alerts our strategists accordingly. We usually recommend "Plan B" tasking, either with the same cohort or with a second wave of participants.

You're seeking multiple unknowns here. If your engagement is low, treat it as one more unknown and pivot your tasking to find out why. A quick change in focus lets you probe this new data. No engagement can be rich data. You just need to follow the signal it's sending.

Why is B2B exploratory research a marathon, not a sprint?

A magical one-week study will rarely produce the silver bullet you need. Anyone in startups who has read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz will be familiar with the phrase: "there are no silver bullets to fix most problems, you just need a lot of lead bullets."

B2B user research is the same. It takes iteration. It's not a one-off event. It's an agile process requiring continuous improvement. In our view, this approach can be executed two ways.

Be agile and recruit in waves

When designing your project, recruit participants in waves or phases. Start with 25–33% of your target number in the first phase. Give them a week to complete their tasks. This gives you time to synthesise and evolve.

If engagement is low, you can probe why the first wave didn't engage, and improve your tasks for the second and subsequent waves based on what you learned. This data-driven, iterative tasking will continuously improve your research. It's a proven strategy that has worked in multiple B2B projects we've supported.

It takes extra time, but if you manage expectations internally and design this into your research from the outset, it will begin an internal dialogue in your product or service design teams that's fuelled by real-life customer feedback rather than internally generated groupthink. Researching in waves also means low engagement in phase 1 won't torpedo your entire project. It lets you disprove your initial hypotheses and amend your tasking to research others.

Make your research an ongoing process

Very few product or service design teams magically come up with a eureka moment that quickly converts into recurring revenue. Even the rose-tinted, post-rationalised stories about founders renting out blow-up beds and turning that into a multi-billion dollar business gloss over the years of grind, failure, and iteration required to turn an initial lightbulb into an IPO.

Innovation is a grind. It requires a constant understanding of the needs, behaviours, and motivations of your users, or better still, your customers. The only way to continually understand them is to continually engage them. Your customers will guide you forward — if you engage them in dialogue.

Great remote ethnographic research in any B2B context starts with a quick sprint and, ideally, should evolve into an ongoing process. The most innovative companies we support conduct remote ethnographic B2B research longitudinally. We have clients entering their third year of research with Indeemo who are increasing their scope year on year.

Like any successful digital product or service, your user research needs to be always on. By engaging as few as 10 participants per month, you can constantly iterate your B2B research and stay continually tuned in to the needs and experiences of users and customers. It costs less than you might think, and the investment could save you a fortune in the long run by building what users need instead of wasting money and time on "wouldn't it be cool if" features.

In an era where disruption is the norm and the need to innovate is continual, B2B research needs to evolve from an annual luxury budget item to an ongoing investment.

How do you keep up the quest for the "why"?

Understanding your users and customers is a process of continuous improvement. You'll never be as good at it as you want to be, and with the speed at which trends change, the results rarely last very long.

Great research requires constantly engaging with your users to understand them better. Staring at logs or mapping behaviour flows on Google Analytics only tells you what they're doing and when. It will never tell you the why.

The real why can never be found in metrics or flow charts.

The real why is usually uttered in the moment by a customer, in their everyday context, while they're actually engaging with your product or service. You know it when you hear it. It instantly resonates across the research and design team.

The problem is, very few brands have the time or the budget to meet their users or customers in their everyday context to witness these moments. Users also rarely behave normally in a UX lab with a researcher looking over their shoulder.

That's why you need remote mobile ethnography in your research toolkit. With remote mobile ethnography, you can engage customers in their everyday context at a time that suits them. Using video or screen recording, you can remotely record what they experience when they're interacting with your product or service, with no one looking over their shoulders. The rich, spontaneous, in-the-moment feedback that mobile ethnography captures helps you shine a light on those digital blind spots and bring your B2B customers to life.

How do you design tasks for B2B contextual inquiry?

Participants in B2B ethnography projects are busy. They're not going to be sitting at home on their sofa telling you what they're watching or explaining why they're ordering takeout on a Tuesday evening. They'll most likely be at work, or trying to fit you in during their working day.

You're eating into their time. You need to make sure they know why it matters. This goes back to the point on purpose earlier. Participants need to believe their posts will make a difference, and understand how.

The best way to design for this is to be cognisant of the context in which participants will be posting.

• If they're doing this during the day, make the tasks brief and easy to respond to.
• If there might be concerns about recording video in the workplace, ask them to post photos with captions instead.
• If you're wondering what applications or technologies they use throughout the day, ask them to take photos or screenshots rather than writing long notes. Screenshots are rich in data: timestamp, applications in use, what they're doing.

Do you need to be a research expert to run B2B exploratory research?

No. Whether you're an experienced researcher or a brand team exploring mobile ethnography for the first time, Indeemo can support you.

Use the platform independently if you have the expertise in-house. Or partner with our Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, analysis, or the full project. If you have research ambitions but not the capacity to run the project yourself, we can lend a helping hand.

Indeemo can be more than a platform. It can be a partnership.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between B2B and B2C exploratory research? B2B research involves participants (often professionals) completing fieldwork during their working day, while B2C research usually happens in participants' spare time. This means B2B completion rates are lower (60–80% vs 90%+), fieldwork timelines are longer, and incentives typically need to be 2–5x higher to reflect the competing demands on participants' attention.

How do you recruit B2B research participants? Three main routes: a qual recruiter (who contracts participants commercially), your own CRM (more authentic but requires careful handling), or a panel integration like Indeemo's. Many projects use a hybrid of two of these to get both user and non-user perspectives.

How much should you pay B2B participants? Typically 2–5x the B2C equivalent. Gamifying the incentive structure — weighting payments towards completion and adding a completion bonus — maximises engagement and protects your budget if participants drop off.

How long should B2B fieldwork run? Plan for two to three times longer than you think you need. If a task genuinely takes one week's effort, allow two to three weeks in reality. B2B participants fit your research around their day jobs, not the other way around.

What do you do if B2B participants aren't engaging? Treat low engagement as data. Pivot your tasking to find out what's getting in the way. Ask participants directly what else is going on. Use the flexibility of a platform that lets you amend tasks mid-study rather than sticking rigidly to your original plan.