Customer/Prospect Interviews

For those of you who value doing lots of customer/prospect interviews when researching a business (like I do), how do you go about incentivizing folks to speak with you? Expert networks typically work great but are quite expensive for smaller deals and may not perform as well given niche local markets that are typical for searches. I was thinking of reaching out to relevant folks and offer to compensate them with $[TBD] Amazon gift card for [30] minutes of their time. Not sure whether folks out there have nailed this approach.