Introduction

When you're preparing to run a decision maker survey, one of the first things that you'll do is create a screener. The screener is a short set of questions that asks respondents about their fit with the survey and their history with the product or service being reviewed. It's essential because it helps you figure out if they're the right person to be taking your survey in the first place. If they aren't, then they shouldn't be wasting their time by answering questions about your survey.

Let's backtrack a little to explain what a decision maker survey is. A decision maker survey will usually fall under the B2B market research category. This type of market research is conducted to gather insights from Business-to -Business customers i.e. B2B customers. In fact, a B2B customer may also be a decision maker. You might be wondering who then is the decision maker. Gartner defines this term as a person who is responsible for making strategically important decisions based on a number of variables. These variables include time constraints, resources available, the amount and type of information available, and the number of stakeholders involved.

Therefore, a decision-maker survey can be understood as a survey that gathers data on a topic from these individuals. The subject matter of the survey could be just anything. From assessing a new product launch to entering a new market, decision-maker surveys help businesses make forward-looking decisions. 

Now that we know what a decision maker survey is, let's dive into the 6 reasons why you should screen your respondents for this type of survey.

6 reasons why you should adopt screening for a decision maker survey

Screening can be defined as a survey practice that helps you filter the right respondents by filtering out survey respondents. For a guide on using screeners, refer to this Help Centre article by Google. 

1. Screening helps you target the right person for a decision maker survey

You want to make sure you're talking to the right person and this is especially true for decision-makers. You don't want to be wasting your time and money on someone who can't actually do anything about the problem or give you any input on how they feel about it. Decision-makers are typically more highly educated and experienced, so they may have a lot more knowledge than non-decision-makers in the same field.

They also have a lot more influence over the direction of any given project. Decision-makers are usually in charge of making important decisions and they have a lot of power in their organisation.

Are you a decision-maker wanting to participate in surveys? Sign up here to become a survey respondent!

2. It helps you identify qualified survey respondents for your project

If you screen everyone, you won't have to worry about not getting a decision maker in your survey. Your results will be more accurate and useful to the people who need them most. Let's look at the following ways in which screening helps identify qualified survey respondents:

• ensures that only the right people take your survey (and not just anyone). It saves time, money, and effort by ensuring that only qualified respondents are invited to participate in the study.
• helps avoid wasting time and money on a bad survey. It's expensive to conduct surveys with unqualified respondents because you'll spend more per completed survey when compared with qualified respondents.
• is an important part of survey design. It can help you avoid wasting time, money, and effort on a bad survey by ensuring that only qualified respondents are invited to participate in the study.

3. If you don't screen, then there's a chance that you'll get feedback from people who don't qualify

It's important to know who you are talking to when conducting a decision maker survey. If you don't screen for decision-makers, then there is a chance that the feedback you receive from your respondents won't be from qualified individuals. This means that the information they give isn't reliable and can negatively impact your company's bottom line if used incorrectly.

Screening for decision-makers helps ensure that those giving feedback have firsthand knowledge of the issues facing your organisation. Without this kind of vetting in place, there's no way for you to know whether or not their responses are accurate or relevant without conducting additional research—something that takes time and resources away from other critical areas of business operations like marketing campaigns or product development initiatives (to name just two).

The bottom line is that the more you know about your target audience, the better equipped you will be to create effective surveys. This means taking into account the demographics, psychographics and even purchasing power (or lack thereof). If you don't have this information in hand before designing a survey, then there's no way for you to know who exactly will be completing it.

4. If people go through the screener, they'll be more likely to complete your survey

You can get a better response rate. If you screen out people who aren't qualified to take your survey, you'll be left with the best possible respondents—ones who are interested in answering your questions and are willing to spend their time doing so.

You'll improve the quality of your data. The more likely you are to receive responses from qualified respondents, the more likely it is that these respondents will be consistent with one another in terms of demographic characteristics (like gender or location) and behavioural traits (like buying habits). This means that when you compare one group of participants' responses against another group's, there won't be as much difference between them as there would have been if no screening was done at all. This will mean that your research will yield more accurate results!

You'll save time. When you're conducting a survey, it's important to have as many responses as possible—as quickly as possible. If you don't screen participants beforehand, they'll have to go through the same tedious process of filling out each question on your survey before being able to submit their answers—which means more time spent waiting for responses from people who don't qualify.

5. You could skip the screener for your decision-maker survey, but it's not worth the risk

You may not want to waste time on a screener. After all, it's not as fun as asking open-ended questions or analysing the data that comes in. But it's important to keep in mind that decision-makers are busy people and they don't want to be bothered with surveys if they don't think it's worth their time. If you skip the screener, you risk getting bad data from respondents who aren't qualified for your survey—you could end up wasting hours of work cleaning up responses from non-decision makers and/or not having enough relevant respondents (and therefore not being able to accurately represent your target audience).

To help you decide whether or not you need a screener, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What are their demographics?
• What are their job functions?
• Where do they work?
• What kind of data would I like to collect?
• What questions should be asked during the survey?
• How long should the survey be?
• What are my goals for this survey?
• Do I want to collect data on specific issues, or do I just want to get a pulse of how people feel about their jobs and companies?

6. Screening respondents protects your time and work so that you don't get bad data

Screening may seem like an extra step to your survey, but it’s worth doing. It helps you eliminate respondents who are not good for your study or aren’t interested in participating. This can save you time and money that would otherwise be wasted on bad data or surveys. You might be wondering how to clean your data. Don't worry, we've got some tips for you!

When you’re ready to get down to the nitty-gritty, cleaning your data is a must. Here are some tips for how to clean your data:

-Remove any respondents that don’t fit your demographic (for example, if you are conducting a survey for people under the age of 18, remove anyone who doesn’t match this requirement).

-Analyse the data to see how many people didn’t answer each question and remove those who didn’t answer at least half of them.

-Remove any duplicate responses.

-De-duplicate your data by using a tool such as Excel’s “Remove Duplicates” function.

Conclusion

So what do you think? Should you be screening your survey respondents? We think so. If you're going to spend time creating a survey, then it's worth making sure that the data is good quality. And by screening everyone who takes your survey, there's no doubt that they're qualified. This will save time and money in the long run because you won't have to worry about getting bad data back from people who don't qualify for your decision-maker survey. Looking to learn more? We've got just the right blog post for you. Learn the best practices for screening in 5 best practices for screening b2b survey respondents.