Buyer research interviews. The shortest path to messaging that resonates.
Most messaging is written by founders who think they know what their buyer cares about. The buyer almost always cares about something different, and uses different words to describe it. Buyer research interviews close the gap. We talk to your prospects, you get a messaging foundation built from their actual language.
Why founder intuition is not enough
Three reasons it breaks.
You have heard your pitch a thousand times. You have rehearsed it. You believe in it. The problem: you cannot un-know what you know about your product. That makes you the worst person to test how it lands with someone hearing it for the first time.
Your buyer is also not the person who you thought they were. They have a different role, different priorities, different vocabulary. The job title on your ICP sheet rarely matches the actual decision-maker.
And the alternatives they consider are not the ones on your G2 comparison page. Your real competitor is often "do nothing" or "build it in-house". Buyer interviews surface this.
How we structure the work
Tightly, because two weeks is not long.
Profile definition
You give us your assumed ICP. We refine it together in a 60-min kickoff. Roles, company sizes, pain points, the alternatives you think they consider.
Recruit interviewees
We reach out to prospects in your defined ICP, cold. We do not pay for participation (it skews answers). We typically get 15-20 calls scheduled in 8-10 working days.
Structured interviews
Each is 30-45 minutes. We are not pitching, we are listening. The interviewer is independent of you. Buyers tell us things they would not tell a vendor.
Coding and synthesis
Every transcript is coded against the framework. The phrases buyers actually use, the criteria they actually evaluate against, the alternatives they actually consider.
Working session
90-min final session. We walk you through findings, you push back, we agree the implications for messaging.
What changes in your business after this
Specifically.
Your home page hero gets rewritten. The current line is in your words. The new line is in your buyers' words. Engagement rate up immediately.
Your sales discovery script gets shorter and more pointed because you now know the questions buyers are actually weighing. You stop describing features and start asking about the specific outcomes buyers told us they were chasing.
Your cold outbound stops opening with what your product does and starts opening with the specific phrasing of the problem. Reply rates roughly double.
Your case studies stop highlighting the wrong outcomes. You realise that "we saved 30 hours a week" is not what buyers care about, it is "we stopped losing deals to [competitor]". The case study leads with the latter.
Who runs this well
Honest about fit.
Good fit when
- You are pre-launch or recently launched in a new segment.
- You are about to overhaul positioning or messaging.
- Your sales team complains that prospects do not understand the pitch.
- Your home page conversion rate is flat or declining.
- You suspect you are talking to the wrong person inside the buying committee.
Less of a fit when
- You have done this in the last 12 months and acted on it.
- You are pre-product-market-fit (need product validation, not message validation).
- Your category is so niche that finding 15 prospects to interview is a problem (under 500 target accounts in your TAM).
FAQ
We reach out to prospects in your defined ICP via LinkedIn and email. Cold but personalised. Typical response rate 25-35% to a low-friction ask (30-min anonymous research call). We schedule interviews independent of your CRM.
Yes. They are usually the most useful. They have considered buying something in your category, but not from you. They surface why.
No, the interviews are conducted on behalf of an unnamed sponsor. We disclose the sponsor only with the participant's consent at the end, when we ask if they want a copy of the findings.
Win-loss interviews are people who already evaluated and decided (won or lost). Buyer research interviews are prospects in your market who may not have specifically evaluated you. Different stage of the funnel, different output.
£4,500 standalone, or £6,000/month bundled with broader Intelligence retainer.
Want to talk through your situation?
Thirty minutes with the team. We will pressure test your numbers, not pitch.
Book a strategy call →