claude research
Touchpoint maps should be built from contact that actually happened
A touchpoint is a place where a buying group meets your offer, a rival, or an internal rule. If you cannot name the artifact, it is not on the map yet.
Start with six classes, then delete what you cannot show
britril uses six classes as a checklist, not as a claim that every B2B deal contains all six. Keep a class only when an artifact from the last few decisions exists.
- Introduction. The forward, the referral, the event conversation, the page a stranger opened first.
- Internal resale. The deck the champion edited, the sentence they added, the sentence they deleted.
- Proof. The pilot, the reference call, the sample that lived in one team.
- Review. Security, IT, privacy, or architecture questions, including the ones left blank.
- Commercial path. Procurement portal, redlines, substitute vendors who were easier to sign.
- After signature. The handoff that either confirmed the buying story or exposed it as theater.
Watch two of the surviving classes with the method in market observation. Ask the people who touched them, using decision-maker research, who else had to see the same artifact before it counted.
Questions teams keep asking
Is a website visit a touchpoint?
Only if you know which page and what happened next. An anonymous session count is not a contact with a buying group. Tie the visit to a later artifact or leave it off the map.
Should the map look like a funnel?
No. Funnels imply a single order and a shrinking crowd. B2B contact jumps. Review can precede the demo. Procurement can appear because a champion used the wrong template. Draw links you saw, including loops.
How many deals do we need?
Enough to notice a repeated artifact. Not enough to publish a percentage. State the count of deals you actually opened. If a stakeholder wants representativeness, say the map is qualitative. The glossary has the sentence.
Where does friction enter?
Mark the touchpoint where time stretches or language changes. That mark is a hypothesis for purchase friction, confirmed only if interviews or a second trace repeat it.
Artifacts worth keeping in the folder
Keep copies the company is allowed to keep: the champion’s edited slides, the security answers, the subject lines, the scheduling gap between “yes” and the review, the sentence a reference customer actually used. Strip secrets you do not need. You are studying the shape of contact, not building a dossier.
When the folder is readable, stop mapping and start cutting. Pattern finding will tell you which contacts are anecdotes. Positioning synthesis should mention the touchpoint a buyer must survive, not every channel marketing can name.
Language drifts as the artifact moves
Read the same deal at two contacts and write down the nouns that changed. A champion may forward “we need this before quarter close.” The security packet that follows may rename the work as a data flow. Procurement may rename it again as a new vendor. Those are not three messages to average. They are the handoffs where meaning thins out. Claude research treats the drift as evidence of who must be able to retell the offer without you in the room.
If a phrase only survives on your website and never reappears in the forward, the review, or the redline, it is not buyer language yet. Park it. The map’s job is to show which sentence actually traveled, and which role had to translate it. That traveling sentence is what later synthesis is allowed to keep.