claude research
Purchase friction is a repeated stall, not a list of complaints
Buyers rarely say “we rejected you.” They say the review slipped, the pilot stayed local, legal asked for a template nobody owned, or the incumbent was easier to renew. Claude research calls that purchase friction only when the stall shows up more than once, in more than one telling. A single angry quote is not a pattern, and a pattern is not a market percentage.
How a stall earns the name
Start from interviews, not from the objection-handling slide. In Claude customer interviews, ask where time stretched. Then check whether a second role describes the same stretch. A champion who says “legal was slow” and a counsel who says “we had no standard addendum” are describing one stall from two seats. That is stronger than two champions repeating a slogan your sales team taught them.
Use decision-maker research to avoid false agreement. Users often name product annoyance. Economic buyers name a comparison. Reviewers name a missing attachment. If you average those into “trust,” you erase the friction you could have written a sentence about.
Observation keeps the team honest. If every interview mentions a security review but the questionnaires in market observation are short and fast, the story may be a polite excuse. Mark the conflict. Do not resolve it by picking the version that flatters the roadmap.
What to write down
For each candidate friction, record four lines: the trigger, the role who feels it, the artifact, and the workaround buyers already use. The workaround matters. “We renewed the incumbent” and “we ran it on a personal card to avoid procurement” are different businesses. Positioning that ignores the workaround will sound clever and miss the purchase.
Do not attach a dollar figure unless the buyer stated a cost in their own accounting and you are quoting that account, not generalizing it. Claude research does not convert friction into an ROI model. The cost of a stall can be described in time, in extra meetings, in a risk someone named. That is enough for a positioning choice.
“We did not lose on features. We lost the week the security packet asked for a diagram our champion could not draw.”
Composite, written to show the shape of a note. It is not a customer attribution and not a rate. If your own interviews echo it, carry the wording into pattern finding as a quote cluster, still unlabeled as proof.
How to talk about friction without a percentage
Say
“In four of the six stalled deals we opened, the review restarted because the diagram was missing.”
Do not say
“Sixty-seven percent of the market stalls on security.” You did not sample a market. You opened six files.
Then decide
Either the offer helps a champion draw that diagram, or the positioning admits the review and aims elsewhere. That cut is positioning synthesis.
Terms for stall, workaround, and pattern sit together in the glossary if the readout starts to swell.
Open the glossary