Any tips for recruiting good enterprise decision maker interviewees for persona interviews? Where do you hunt? Do you compensate them?

I love this question. I've done this in a really scrappy way at a start-up and then approached this with significant budgets at a larger company. The scrappy way was to identify a couple leads, reach out with a request to learn from them to influence your product roadmap, and bring them swag. This worked well for store managers, and I literally walked the mall and bought people coffee at the starbucks for my interviews. For a much higher level executive who can be harder to reach and medium budget, we ended up partnering with an organization who already produces thought leadership for this audience (think NRF conference to reach retail execs) to survey their members and publish learnings back to them with broader learnings. This was a great way to learn, produce content, and drive leads through sharing the results. Lastly, with larger budgets, you can work with research agencies to screen for specific people and compensate them. I've found all 3 methods to be effective for different needs!

A few tips to get to the right decision makers:

1. Look in your own database and reach out! Existing customers, as long as they're happy with you, are generally low-hanging fruit and fairly easy to reach.
2. Look on LinkedIn for people who fit your ideal persona/customer, and reach out. Response rates are generally low, but the better your copy and CTA the more likelihood you get a good response.
3. Use a research audience tool like SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro or others to target a specific audience beyond your network. This can be a great way to reach specific target buyers if you have some budget. You can also use tools like GLG as well to get 1:1 qualitative interviews with your target persona.

On compensation... generally speaking yes. Depending on the time-investment I find the response rate to always be better when compensating and valuing their time. 

If you have budget, definitely go with a specialty firm whose expertise is paneling the right mix of enterprise decision makers who may or may not be current customers and offer representation across geographies, firm size and other key designations. In most cases, interviewees associated with these firms are compensated and the specialty firm will manage everything from payments to anonymity (if required) to ensuring employees of public companies don't disclose insider information.

If budgets are tight, it's best to work with decision makers at your existing customers through programs like Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) that will manage things like NDAs and operate with oversight so the account owners can rest assured that nothing wacky is happening with key contacts at their customers. If you're at a start-up and you don't have many customers much less a CAB, try to work within the "friends and family" network of executives and decision makers that your investors and board brings to the table. Those networks can be strong and discreet, offering "Friend-DAs" that can be water tight. In either case, compensation is very likely not necessary nor possibly even allowed.

For interviews:

• UserTesting (compensation is built into the price)

• Respondent.io (compensation is built into the price)

• AlphaSights (compensation is built into the price)

• Churned customers - You can compensate them with gift cards (Visa, Amazon, etc.). If we’re being super scrappy, I’ll purchase them online myself and email them afterward.

For high quality panel responses:

• SurveyMonkeyMarket Research Solutions (compensation is built into the price)

Compensation will depend based on the size of the organization and their role. For example, a Director of Product at a 25 person company will be a lot easier to get a hold of and compensate than a Director of Product at Meta. There are some agencies you can use, but I recommend doing LinkedIn prospecting if you can.