Simon-Kucher

Rep Data’s creative approach to niche B2B sample recruitment helps Simon-Kucher and Partners find high quality respondents for high quality data

Background

Simon-Kucher and Partners is a global consulting firm with more than 1,400 professionals in 41 offices worldwide. Founded in 1985, the company has over 35 years of experience providing strategy and marketing consulting and is regarded as the world’s leading pricing advisor. Many of the company’s projects include a strong market research element. The insights from these projects allow the Simon-Kucher team to make the best recommendations to clients for optimizing things like pricing strategies, customer segmentation, user experience, offer design, packaging, as well as informing methods for sales and marketing excellence.

Challenge

Simon-Kucher’s client list is anything but mainstream. Many of its clients operate in very niche spaces, such as point-of-sale software for restaurants, technology platforms for eCommerce sellers, robotic process automation and other very narrow B2B applications. Finding quantitative primary research respondents who can provide actionable insights for these types of narrow industries is challenging, to say the least.

To source respondents, the team was often forced to turn to consumer panels containing panelists who were profiled for some B2B characteristics. This approach had a wide reach but often pulled in respondents who appeared to be appropriate for a study but lacked the necessary depth of knowledge about the niche industry being explored. This negatively affected data quality, not to mention project timelines and costs, as they attempted to fill quotas. Sourcing from expert networks yielded higher quality respondents, but this method was often cost-prohibitive.

Simon-Kucher needed a sample partner with a different approach in order to overcome hurdles surrounding quota fulfillment and quality data for its sophisticated, complex market research projects.

The Solution

Simon-Kucher discovered that Rep Data had a consistent, reliable way to deliver the respondents it needed. Rep Data’s custom approach to B2B sample includes tapping into key business databases (e.g. Dun & Bradstreet, ZoomInfo), professional business association lists and direct recruitment from social media, such as LinkedIn.

The recruitment team hand dials a respondent from their list of potential respondents. On an initial phone interview, Rep Data’s highly skilled set of interviewers qualify the respondent by screening the respondent using questions from the survey. If a respondent wishes to participate in a survey but is unable to during first outreach, interviewers work to schedule a call back. Each respondent’s information is again verified at the start of the next interview, including their name, company, job status, role, designation, industry, company size, revenue and more. This ensures that every respondent is well-qualified for each targeted survey project. And, Rep Data delivers these respondents quickly and within budget.

“Rep Data is so easy to work with, they always have a good attitude and even with seemingly impossible projects their response is ‘this is what we can do to make it happen.’ Their team is very experienced in the market research industry and they know exactly what they are doing. They partner with you to understand your needs, think strategically about how to access niche audiences, and they always deliver.”

Lynn Pellicano, Senior Market Research Manager, Simon-Kucher and Partners

With Rep Data as a partner, Simon-Kucher:

• Is confident that niche B2B respondents for its studies are who they say they are;
• Knows the respondents will be delivered as promised, on time; and
• Can rest assured that the ensuing data will be high quality and usable.

Even for very difficult studies, the experienced Rep Data team comes to the table with a plan, and are consistently able to execute and deliver even the most difficult-to-reach audiences. If quotas are not filling, Rep Data takes creative approaches such as blending sample with custom recruitment techniques and high quality online panelists. These kinds of pivots help find quality respondents for any study, and test data collected via various recruitment modalities, even on tight timelines and budgets. With Rep Data, Simon-Kucher found a true partnership that creates efficiencies for its market research projects, time and time again.