The full picture at a glance.
AIM designed and supported a 500 complete online study among senior IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) in the US, targeting professionals aged 25 to 65, at Director level or above, across five priority technology markets: California, Texas, New York, Washington and Massachusetts. The study focused on understanding how senior technology leaders evaluate vendors, allocate technology budgets and prioritise areas such as cloud, cybersecurity, infrastructure, managed services and AI.
Client
The client needed to reach genuine senior IT decision makers, rather than simply people working in IT.
Industry
Technology
Geography
California, Texas, New York, Washington and Massachusetts
Audience
professionals aged 25 to 65, at Director level or above
Responses
500 Completes
Timeline
LOI: 15 minutes
The business issue that triggered the study.
The client needed to reach genuine senior IT decision makers, rather than simply people working in IT. Respondents needed to have meaningful involvement in technology decisions and sufficient knowledge of their organisation’s technology environment and purchasing priorities. The client also wanted a balanced mix of organisations by size and profile across the selected markets.
The constraints and decision complexity behind the brief.
- The key challenge was distinguishing between:
- IT professional to Senior IT professional to IT decision maker to Actual technology purchasing decision maker
- Simply targeting IT job titles was not sufficient.
- Director level and above targeting
- Multi state coverage
- Maintaining company size diversity
- Ensuring respondents had genuine decision making influence
- Managing respondent quality across a large online sample
- Preventing duplicates and low engagement responses
How the research program was designed and executed.
- AIM developed a targeted recruitment approach combining specialist B2B sample sources with study level screening and quality controls.
- Respondents were screened for:
- Seniority and current role
- IT responsibilities
- Decision making involvement
- Company size and revenue
- Technology responsibilities
- Geographic eligibility
- Quality was managed throughout the project through:
- Duplicate detection
- Speeding and engagement checks
- Response consistency reviews
- Open ended response assessment where relevant
- Final data and quota validation
- Rather than relying solely on the respondent’s job title, AIM focused on whether the individual could genuinely speak to their organisation’s technology decisions.
What changed once the findings were made actionable.
- The approach created a more focused ITDM audience and reduced the risk of filling the sample with respondents who technically worked in IT but lacked meaningful purchasing influence.
- It also gave the client greater visibility into:
- Who was being recruited
- How respondents qualified
- Where recruitment was becoming difficult
- How quality was being maintained throughout fieldwork
The outcome signals that mattered most.
500 ITDMs
completed online survey sample
5
States California, Texas, New York, Washington and Massachusetts
15 minutes
survey length (LOI)
Delivery outcomes
Senior IT audience aligned to the agreed definition
Controlled geographic distribution
Mix of company sizes maintained
Study level quality checks applied throughout
Final sample reviewed for qualification and consistency
The clearest strategic lesson from the study.
The success of B2B research depends less on finding people with the right job title and more on finding people with the right level of responsibility, knowledge and decision making influence. AIM’s approach is to define the real audience first, recruit against that definition, and manage quality throughout the project rather than treating sample delivery as simply a numbers exercise. Representative case study format: use as an illustrative example unless the project history and results can be substantiated.