Fielding a survey may sound like a complicated term but in essence it involves gathering high quality responses to your qualitative B2B survey. In this article, we’ll demystify the process of fielding by giving you some of the best practices to field a survey. 

What is fielding?

Fielding essentially means rolling out the quantitative B2B  survey to your respondents. This could be through panel providers, web, email or in person. However, you must take care to properly formulate the survey, structure questions well and ensure that the survey runs without bugs before pushing out the survey. Otherwise, respondents might be discouraged from taking your survey. 

Best practices for fielding

Below we share some tips to effectively field your quantitative B2B survey:

Test before you field

This is arguably the most important step before you conduct fielding for your quantitative B2B survey. 

Checking whether the questions flow well, investigating the code and logic behind each question and running a pilot survey are the steps that are involved in testing. Pilot survey is launching the survey to a select number of respondents to ensure that all survey processes including recruiting B2B respondents and running the survey flow efficiently. 

Also check that your survey questions sound clear to your respondents. Your quantitative B2B survey questions may seem clear to you, but can your respondents also understand them? Have a colleague proofread them to ensure they read well. Consider using a focus group if the subject matter is niche or complex. 

‍Targeting your respondents

One important consideration when fielding is who to target to take your quantitative B2B survey. Picking B2B respondents may be harder than picking B2C respondents because of several reasons. This is because businesses are fewer in number than individuals and the target audience can be niche. You can use a number of different approaches to pick your B2B respondents. If your website has sufficient traffic, you can include a pop up on your homepage directing businesses to answer surveys. You can also use your own CRM base that would already have a list of clients. Survey panel providers like us also have a host of B2B contributors for your survey. Finally, you can opt for a more traditional approach and ask clients to answer survey questions face-to-face.

Also, note that a lot of times your client will give you the exact kind of profile for B2B respondents that they are looking for. 

One thing that is often overlooked is the effect of targeting and screening together. Screening either qualifies or disqualifies B2B respondents to take your survey depending on the parameters that you set. Suppose that the client has asked you to target B2B respondents with revenue over $5million domiciled in the U.S. In this case, adding a screening question about revenue and location will further narrow down your pool of respondents. In such a scenario, it is prudent to estimate your incidence rate which is the percentage of respondents who qualify past your screening process. This will allow you to have enough respondents. 

‍Decide the number of people to survey

The next step is to decide how many people you want to take your survey. In other words, what do you want your sample size to be for your quantitative B2B survey? If you are a panel providing, this will be an easy task since clients specify  the number of people they want to target. However, if you are not one, here are some considerations to keep in mind for this step:

Budget

Practically speaking your budget will limit the number of respondents for your quantitative B2B survey. Also keep in mind that you will have to pay B2B respondents more than B2C respondents. Payments can range from £50 to £250 depending on the type of B2B respondent. This is because B2B audiences are more niche and more pressed for time as compared to B2C respondents. 

Time

Although online quantitative B2B surveys are pretty quick to administer, you need to still think about how much time it will take to gather all the data that you need. This is because you want to make sure you get the results back to your client as fast as possible without compromising on the quality of the responses. 

Feasibility

If it is an extremely specific type of B2B respondent that you are looking for, there may be only so many of them available. Thus, this will limit the number of responses that you get. 

Type of survey

Sometimes, the kind of quantitative B2B survey you are administering affects your sample size. For instance, you are using A/B testing to show one marketing campaign to 500 respondents and another marketing campaign to 500 different respondents. In this case, you will automatically need 1000 respondents.

Launching the survey

Now comes the time to actually launch your survey. You might want to consider the timing of your quantitative B2B survey. Research shows that more people take surveys in daytime rather than nighttime and on weekends rather than weekdays. When launching the survey, it’s also a good idea to use interactive displays and layouts.These layouts allow you to fit the contents of a screen on a mobile phone or a laptop, whichever one your respondent is using.  This is because research shows that people are more active on laptops rather than phones during daytime and vice versa during nightfall. 

To make sure you are getting enough respondents, you can send out reminders to your B2B respondents. When you have gathered the required number of respondents, it is then time to close your survey. Before closing, you can also implement any changes if needed.

Then you can analyze the data that you have collected. A couple things to look out for at the end of your quantitative B2B survey are:

1. Response and Completion Rate: The response rate is the percentage of people who opened your survey out of the total number of people you sent it to. Completion rate, in turn, is the percentage of people you completed your survey of those who opened it. 
2. Incidence rate :  incidence rate, as mentioned before, is the percentage of respondents who qualify past your screening process.

An important takeaway here is that you want to field your survey in such a manner that you get the highest quality of respondents. Still confused and need more help? Not to worry!  You can access our fielding services through GrapeData. We have an amazing team of professionals willing to respond to your survey to optimize your results. We generally get answers from 250,000+ contributors from 90 countries.

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