My current company is B2B, and I specifically lead our partners and alliances research workstream. I feel like my recruitment activities are much much different than previous companies. I spend a lot more time on networking internally and getting leadership alignment than cold-outreach. Specifically:

I spend a ton of time checking in and collaborating with our partner account managers, program managers, and even marketing managers. The better they understand my research, the more they can convey the benefits to their partner contacts during their 1:1s and office hours and help with introductions/recruitment. The partner team has also been able to share their internal contact tracking documents and segmentation.

Staying in touch with internal teams also helps me keep track of upcoming conferences and summits, both on-site and virtual. These are great opportunities to add an agenda item for a quick focus group or workshop. It often generally aligns with the overall event goal of strengthening a partnership or planning for the next quarter/year.

I also search internal platforms like Salesforce or Slack for records of conversations or support tickets on a particular topic.

Finally, I’ve found ways to match up sales/success objectives with product/research goals. For example, we’re working on a partner-facing info portal. Through internal conversations with the partner team and leaders, I learned one of their objectives is increasing co-sell revenue through better training and communication programs. I looped them into my research plan and committed to delivering them a set of recommendations relevant to their project. They’re now excited to see how journey and archetype/persona deliverables will help them better understand their audience. It’s also helped motivate their team to make introductions in my behalf.

The biggest caveat has been making clear to the partner teams that research conversations/outcomes will be anonymized just like any other study. It was a hard sell at first, but we didn’t want our research to turn into account strategy activities, if that makes sense.

(For anything where we need more of a potential partner perspective or something more random, we leverage a third-party recruiter.)

Yep. Maybe this is the best way because it's more contextually relevant and might increase the chances of getting feedback.