Panel
The B2B side, tier by tier
Business audiences are not one population. A small-business owner, a mid-level analyst and a named budget holder need different recruitment, different pricing and different expectations about how long field will take. Treating them as one category is how projects get quoted wrongly and then miss quota.
| Tier | Who it covers | How they are reached | What to expect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 — broad professional | Any employed professional, any level, screened on sector and function | General panel, profiled on entry | Fields like consumer work; quota fills predictably |
| Tier 2 — functional specialist | Named function at a stated seniority: IT, finance, HR, operations | General panel, filtered on stored profile then re-screened | Slower; expect the qualify rate to drift as the pool thins |
| Tier 3 — budget holder | Signature or sign-off authority for a specific spend category | Profiled subset plus targeted invitation | Priced per complete at a premium; quota measured in days, not hours |
| Tier 4 — named-account or rare role | Specific employers, or roles that exist a few thousand times worldwide | Not panel work — recruited individually | We will tell you this is out of scope rather than quote it |
Where tiers get mixed up, and what it costs
The usual failure is a Tier 3 audience written in Tier 2 language. “IT decision-maker” sounds like a function; in practice the buyer means someone who signs. Those are different populations by an order of magnitude, and a quote built on the first will not survive contact with the second.
So the specification we ask for has a signature question in it: is authority required, or is involvement enough? Involvement is a much larger pool and often answers the research question just as well. Where it does, the project costs a fraction as much and fields in a fraction of the time — and it is worth asking before the quote, not after.
What we profile, and when it goes stale
Occupation, function, seniority band, employer size band, sector, and whether the member holds sign-off authority in a named spend category. Each answer carries the date it was given.
Job data decays faster than most profiling. People change roles, companies restructure, titles inflate. An answer older than twelve months is counted at a reduced weight in feasibility and re-asked in the screener rather than trusted. Providers who quote from a profile store without a staleness rule are quoting a population that partly no longer exists.
The honest limit
Employment is self-reported here as it is everywhere in panel research. We work to catch the cases where it is wrong — cross-form consistency, contradiction tracking, treating a profile edited just before a high-paying study as a flag — but we do not verify employment against an external register, and we will not say we do.
If a study genuinely requires confirmed employment, that is recruited-specialist work with a different cost base. Saying so at the quoting stage is cheaper for everyone than discovering it in analysis.