claude research

Decision-makers are a center, not a single interviewee

B2B purchases rarely belong to one person. Claude research treats the buying center as a set of partial witnesses. Each role saw a slice. None of them is the market. If you collapse them into a persona named “the buyer,” you will write positioning for a character who never sat in the room.

A small buying group around a conference table with documents kept out of focus — Several witnesses, one decision

What each role can actually attest

Use the table as a recruitment screen before you book Claude customer interviews. Ask what the person could have stopped. If the answer is “nothing, I just like the tool,” you are speaking with a user, and that is useful only if you label it as such.

Role	Can describe	Cannot settle
Economic buyer	The comparison that made the spend feel justified, and what else the budget could have funded.	Daily irritations inside the product, unless they still do the work.
Champion	The internal story, the meetings they had to win, and the phrase that traveled by forwarding.	Whether quiet stakeholders were actually convinced. Champions overhear agreement.
User	Workarounds, time lost, and the moment a pilot felt real or fake.	Price tolerance and legal risk.
Technical or security reviewer	The questionnaire, the missing answer, and the week the review sat in a queue.	Why the business wanted the tool in the first place.
Procurement or legal blocker	Terms, vendor-risk steps, and substitutes that were easier to sign.	Product love. Their job is a path, not a preference.

Economic buyer

Can describe the comparison that justified the spend. Cannot settle daily irritations unless they still do the work.

Champion

Can describe the internal story and the phrase that was forwarded. Overhears agreement and may miss quiet doubt.

User

Can describe workarounds and whether a pilot felt real. Cannot settle price tolerance or legal risk.

Reviewer

Can describe the questionnaire and the queue. Often cannot explain why the business wanted the change.

Blocker

Can describe terms and the easier vendor to sign. Their account is a path, not a product review.

Where the stories distort

Champion bias

The champion remembers the narrative that won. They under-report the reviewer who never replied. Pair them with someone who can describe silence.

Buyer compression

Economic buyers compress months into a rationale. Ask for the calendar, not the moral of the story. Dates pull friction back into view.

Blocker bluntness

Procurement can sound hostile to the product and still be accurate about the path. Do not translate their constraints into “they did not get the value.”

“I sold it internally as a time-saver. Legal stalled it as a new vendor. Both sentences are true, and they are not the same purchase.”

Composite field note, labeled as composite. It is not a quotation from a named account and it is not a statistic. It shows why one interview cannot stand in for the center. Read it beside purchase friction.

Do not merge them into one persona

A persona is a writing aid. It becomes a problem when it acquires a single job-to-be-done, a single objection, and a stock photo of certainty. Claude research keeps a small cast instead. In the readout, show two or three roles side by side and mark what each one did not see. That honesty is what lets positioning synthesis choose a primary reader without pretending the others do not exist.

You still need enough conversations to notice repetition. You do not need a sample that “represents the segment.” Say how many people of which role you actually heard. Point readers to market observation when a role is hard to book: a missing reviewer sometimes leaves a louder trace in the questionnaire than in a call. Definitions sit in the glossary.

Next, watch the traces those roles leave when they will not take a call.

Map the touchpoints