We used Custom Recruiting to find the hard-to-reach CFOs who could answer Fortune's burning questions.
Most market research companies can easily find B2C audiences (consumers), but struggle finding B2B audiences (professionals). Often high-quality B2B respondents are simply not in traditional market research panels. Or, the market research company has no technical way of searching their panel’s profiles for B2B professional knowledge. This leaves publishers constantly managing the tension of sharing timely insights against the time consuming task of pruning bad data.
NewtonX, the world’s leading B2B research company, had just launched its proprietary research arm, NewtonX Current, and its strategic partnership initiative when the editor at Fortune Analytics expressed interest in doing a study of CFOs.
To launch the first edition of Current, NewtonX partnered with Fortune Analytics, the data and insights publication within Fortune that focuses on the most discussed topics in the business world right now. The goal of NewtonX Current is to deliver instant access to hard-to-find insights from 100% verified professionals in order to help business leaders make confident decisions.
The Opportunity
After initial discussions, Fortune editorial realized NewtonX could help find any audience and gain insights on today’s most pressing business challenges. With a shared goal of helping businesses make confident decisions with insights, it was a natural fit to partner on a study.
CFO’s are a notoriously hard-to-reach audience, so when the team at Fortune Analytics learned NewtonX could access this C-suite audience at scale, there were a lot of questions Fortune was eager to ask. The idea was to do a competitive analysis to get a sense of what different CFOs thought about the future of work. Questions ranged from thoughts on the return to work post Covid, financial recovery trends within their organization, topical issues such as DEI, paid parental leave, current challenges and emerging technology like bitcoin.
NewtonX Delivery
NewtonX and Fortune collaborated on the survey questions to ensure it would be easy to make data cuts and programmed logic to screen out unqualified respondents.
First, the target 75 CFOs were custom recruited at the outset of the project. Every respondent met the criteria of a current CFO, working in the US at a small, medium or large business across a diverse mix of industries. They also had to have gone into an office prior to Covid.
Diving deeper into the process, NewtonX turns the traditional market research model inside-out through its custom recruiting process which can scan the globe to find professionals that meet a very exact criteria. Each professional is verified with corporate email or LinkedIn profile before taking the survey, with further quality checks by the NewtonX team during and after completion. To learn more about our custom recruiting methodology and the how NewtonX graph finds exactly the right audience, click here.
Next, the survey was hosted and coded internally at NewtonX on the Qualtrics survey platform. It was fielded by the in-house Client Delivery team to obtain the 75 completes in a matter of days.
With all of the data compiled, NewtonX analyzed the entire data set into a free, downloadable report, made available on NewtonX.com.
From start to finish the whole project took three weeks, with one additional week to create the analyzed report.
900,000
Daily page-views of Fortune.com prominently featuring NewtonX's study
Results
Positive feedback from Lance and his readers provides external validation of NewtonX data quality.
Fortune Analytics published highlights from the data in the FA newsletter that goes to 15,000 subscribers.
Fortune.com CFO Daily editor, Sheryl Estrada, published our data story on the Fortune homepage, which receives nearly 900k page views each day.
NewtonX Current is the proprietary research arm of NewtonX. Current research is designed, coded and fielded by our team of senior researchers to answer today’s most pressing questions. Each publication will be informed by topics of interest from the B2B research community and will range from trends in Cybersecurity to Advertiser spending. We’re excited to share B2B insights on the topics that matter most.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated change across virtually every aspect of our lives. From work life to the economy to emerging technologies to DEI and beyond, we continue to grapple with the journey to back-to-normal.
Building off the learnings of the report, we're hosting a 45-minute webinar to get to the bottom of what CFOs really think about the return and future of work.
NewtonX is the world's leading B2B research company. Discover how we spotlight the world's brightest minds across 1.1billion professionals and 140 industries.
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