Background
A digital-experience agency had been commissioned to run content and website research for a major scientific supplier — its first engagement with this particular audience. The research skill was not in question. Access to genuine end-user laboratory professionals, and the judgement to screen them properly, was the part that could not be bought off the shelf.
The study needed to hear from people who use supplier websites in their actual work: how they research products, find technical information, and make purchases.
Our Approach
This was a recruitment-only engagement, and the division of labour was clear from the outset. We recruited, screened, introduced and paid; the agency scheduled and ran the interviews.
We recruited 18 life-science professionals across the UK and United States — researchers, scientists, laboratory managers and technicians, academics, and people working in biotech, biopharma, QA/QC, analytical science and diagnostics. Each was allocated to one of two segments: discovery and research, or applied solutions such as QC, microbiology, and food, environmental or clinical diagnostics.
Familiarity with the supplier's brands was deliberately not a screening requirement, so the study captured non-users alongside existing customers. We monitored soft quotas across the group for brand familiarity and for a mix of centralised versus independent purchasing behaviour — watching the balance rather than hard-screening on it, so the sample stayed natural.
Outcome
Recruitment and the wider project both closed in August 2026. Eighteen screened and verified participants were introduced to the agency individually by email, each with their segment and screening detail attached.
Both segments were filled to target and the brand-familiarity and purchasing-behaviour balance held across the group — so the agency went into fieldwork with a sample that reflected the market rather than whoever happened to be available.
Key takeaway: Recruitment is a service in its own right. When an agency has the research skill but not the audience, a clean handover — screened, verified, introduced — is often the only thing missing.