The Best Market Research Firm for Reaching Technology Buyers

When someone tells me they want to survey IT decision makers, I usually ask, "What did they actually decide?"

Think about the last software purchase at your company. One person may have run the pilot, someone else reviewed security, and a third signed off on the budget. Each can tell you something different about the same purchase. Ask the person who signed off why a tool lost the pilot, and you may never hear what happened when the team tried to integrate it.

The best market research firm for reaching technology buyers can explain who it would recruit, how it would confirm their role in a purchase, and which groups it would keep separate when it reports the results.

Screen for what people did

Say you sell cloud security software and want to know why vendors make it onto a shortlist. I'd start with people who helped build or evaluate a shortlist in the past year. Then I'd ask what they personally did. Did they set the requirements, compare vendors, run a proof of concept, or make the final recommendation?

For a study about why customers renew, I'd look for people who took part in a recent renewal decision. I'd also want to hear from the people who use the tool day to day. The buyer can tell us how they judged the cost. The user can tell us which workflows would break if they switched.

Look for a case study with an audience like yours

For Dropbox, CITE surveyed 1,000 people in the United States and United Kingdom with primary or shared responsibility for technology decisions at organizations with at least 250 employees. We designed the study so Dropbox could use the results across industries, including in reports for technology and construction audiences.

For SugarCRM, we recruited 400 directors and more senior professionals in sales and business development across the same two countries. The questions were about sales technology spending, productivity, and the role of CRM. That meant hearing from the business teams closest to how those tools were used.

If you're comparing firms, ask them to walk you through who qualified for a similar study and which comparisons the sample could support. Those details tell you more about the work than a panel size alone.

Ask how the firm would handle a hard audience to reach

Suppose you want to hear from CISOs at large financial institutions who recently evaluated a specific type of security tool. Ask the firm which criteria will make recruiting difficult, how it will confirm recent experience, and what it would change if the audience proves smaller than expected.

The answer might be to focus a survey on the people who evaluated the tools and interview a smaller group of CISOs separately about executive approval. If you need to compare those groups in a survey, ask how many qualified people the firm expects to reach in each. That's a conversation to have before you settle on a sample size.

At CITE Research, we design technology buyer research around the decision you're trying to understand. We also work with cybersecurity vendors and teams through our cybersecurity market research practice. If you're planning a study, tell us which purchase you want to learn about. We can start by working out who was in the room and what each person had a say in.