Using a survey to gather primary data within industry....

Find out how big a sample size you require - do you needs hundreds of junior people or will a handful or senior execs suffice? Do you have any connection to the sector already? If yes, then leverage them and network to get the connections you need. If not then you're going to have to start cold-calling. If you can't identify anyone by name (eg through LinkedIn or corporate webpages) you could call the switchboard and ask to be put through to 'the person responsible for xxx' and hope you get lucky. Be prepared to get a very very small sample size - online surveys are notoriously difficult to get people to respond to, more so if they don't know the person sending them out. If you get really stuck then speak to your supervisor. Good luck.

For anyone thinking about choosing a research topic, at any level, thinking about whether you can actually obtain sufficient data, both in quantity and quality, needs to be considered early on. For my MBA project we were told not to use SurveyMonkey or other online survey tools for this reason.

So you were told not to do anything survey based?

That's correct. The rationale given was along the lines of stopping us being lazy by just sending out a blanket email and hoping for lots of quality responses. It forced us to come up with a sound data-gathering methodology and target responders who could provide good quality data. There's nothing that a survey could tell me that couldn't have been significantly improved by an interview or phone conversation. We were dealing with manageable sample sizes (20-30 responders within my industry) so this approach worked well.

Of course, if you're looking for the opinions of a hundred 14-19 year olds, for example, then an online survey would be ideal.