Hi Startup Networks Community!

We’re conducting some market research across B2B companies. We’re trying to understand how much time businesses spend finding, researching and reaching out to qualified prospects, and where the biggest challenges sit.

Would you be open to helping us by answering three quick questions?

If you could please give me your thoughts on these three questions, it would be great.

  1. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to finding high-quality B2B leads with enough insight to act on?

  2. How much time does your team currently spend manually researching companies, contacts and buying signals before outreach?

 3. What impact would it have on your business if that research was faster, clearer and easier to turn into client-ready outreach?

Your participation in this market research is much appreciated 

Best 

Tim

Hi Tim,

Happy to help.

At the moment we're not doing B2B outreach etc, this will change in the future, but for now its not a focus of ours. :)

1. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to finding high-quality B2B leads with enough insight to act on?

For us, the biggest challenge isn't finding companies — it's understanding intent. There are thousands of startups, service providers and ecosystem partners that could be relevant to Startup Networks, but knowing who is actively looking for support, partnerships, sponsorship opportunities or growth services at a given moment is much harder than simply finding contact details.

2. How much time does your team currently spend manually researching companies, contacts and buying signals before outreach?

Less time than most organisations, as we've built our own processes and tools to identify opportunities. However, we still spend time validating opportunities, reviewing company activity, looking at growth signals and understanding whether there's a genuine fit before engaging. The qualification stage is far more time-consuming than the initial discovery stage.

3. What impact would it have on your business if that research was faster, clearer and easier to turn into client-ready outreach?

The biggest impact would be improved prioritisation. We engage with a large number of founders, startups and organisations every month, so having clearer signals around intent, growth stage and immediate needs would help us focus resources on the highest-value opportunities. As Startup Networks expands into new commercial services and partnerships, this will become increasingly important and would likely improve both conversion rates and team efficiency.

Hope that's useful for your research!

James

Thanks James - appreciate your response - it's really helpful/

We work with a number of VC and M&A firms to provide them with exactly the sort of prospect data that you refer to - I should have perhaps termed my question more appropriately.

I'm interested in hearing from all companies that don't sell directly B2C as we don't deal in consumer data, it's more business data.