On the B2B Lead we have discussed using surveys to score leads but surveys are also a useful tool for getting to know your prospective buyers. Do you really know your target market? Are there shifting trends you don’t know about but should? By understanding a prospect’s business environment and specific business initiatives, marketing and sales teams can further refine their approach for targeting them. Surveys can be especially useful when launching a new product or entering a new market.

As B2B marketers are increasing their spend on social media, a survey may be an opportunity to find out where your customers and prospects are going online. If all of your customers/prospects are either on Facebook or LinkedIn, don’t bother with creating a MySpace page (on a side note, it seems to be fairly unanimous that MySpace is pretty much worthless for B2B).

As marketing budgets are being tightened, costly events are being cut. It can be difficult to decide which events to keep and which to drop especially if your product has a long sales cycle so ROI cannot be measured before it is time to sign a contract again. A show may be timed poorly this year, like on Election Day (sorry, I am calling you out salesforce.com), which could cause lower attendance. Ask your prospects which events they will be attending.

Things to consider when creating surveys:

• How long?
  • Shorter is always better
  • Ask only what you need to know
  • Try to keep it to 5 minutes or less
• To offer an incentive or not?
  • If you are doing a longer survey, a incentive is a must
  • If you are offering a incentive tell the participant upfront
  • Could the information you are gathering be useful to the participants. If the answer is yes, have the incentive be to give them the info you gathered. Remember people love reports on industry trends.
• Types of questions
  • Multiple choice are the easiest and fastest to answer
  • Free response may give you more qualitative info but is more difficult to get participants to fill out

Once you have completed surveying your prospects, use this information to segment your contact database and create different targeted messages for each segment. You may also find that different segments respond to different marketing mediums. If you are entering a new industry, be sure to find out if prospects are better reached by email, direct mail, events, etc.

Some good online survey tools include SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang. These are both free for basic functionality and are easy to use. I have used both. I personally liked the reporting better through Zommerang but SurveyMonkey offered better functionality in designing the survey questions. I haven’t used it yet, but VerticalResponse also recently added surveys to their offering.