Field guide · United States
Qualitative B2B research, written as claude notes
klulkler is a guidebook for people who study how businesses buy: customer and decision-maker interviews, observation at real points of contact, the friction in a purchase, and positioning language. The house style is claude notes, a close record of what was said, hedged, or refused. It promises no return on investment, and a small set of conversations is not a representative sample.
Start with interviews
Lens
Interviews, not panels
Decision-makers in their own words, tied to a deal they can still describe.
Scene
Contact points, watched
Where a purchase slows, stalls, or moves: security, legal, procurement, onboarding.
Record
claude notes
A close reading of hedges and refusals. Not a score, and not a sample-size claim.
Firms that sold to other firms once learned about buyers from sales folklore and from surveys of people who had already chosen a vendor. In 1972 Frederick Webster and Yoram Wind described industrial buying as a group decision, not a lone consumer. Thomas Bonoma later named roles inside that group: users, influencers, deciders, buyers, and gatekeepers. The useful part of that history is still true in the United States. A B2B purchase is a small political system with a calendar, a security review, and someone who can say no without ever attending the demo.
The less useful inheritance is the habit of hiding qualitative work under a statistical costume. Nine conversations are evidence of language and friction. They are not a market-share study. klulkler keeps the count in the brief and leaves representativeness out.
Customer interviews recover how one deal was justified. Market observation records what a later quiet interview will smooth over. The bridge is a set of claude notes: verbatim lines, hedges, and refusals. If those notes never name who can stop the purchase, read decision-maker research before anyone writes a sentence.
Three readings
The same deal, asked three ways
Three questions, used together, are enough to brief a team. Each one has its own page because each one fails in a different way when it is forced to do the others’ work.
01 · Language
What did they say?
Customer interviews stay with one deal. They collect the words a buyer used internally, not a philosophy of vendors in general. The write-up is claude notes, not a satisfaction score.
02 · Stall
Where did it stick?
Purchase friction names the mechanism: a proof gap, internal politics, switching cost, a budget calendar, or an owner who was never appointed. An objection is not the same thing as friction.
03 · Sentence
What can we say?
Positioning synthesis writes a line a champion can forward without inserting a percentage the research did not earn. If the notes do not support the sentence, the sentence waits.
A working week
Watch one scene, then earn the pattern
A practical week looks plain. Recruit people from a real evaluation, not a gift-card panel. Sit in one allowed touchpoint, keep claude notes in their words, and only then ask whether the same mechanism appeared elsewhere.
Map
Touchpoint mapping
Choose where to stand before you decide what the market “thinks.”
Test
Pattern synthesis
A pattern needs a mechanism, a condition, and more than one account.
Watch
Market observation
See the contact point the later interview will tidy up.
Terms
Glossary
Shared definitions so a brief does not slide into jargon.
Library
Read where the ignorance actually is
The rest of klulkler is a small library. If you cannot name who stops a deal, start with decision-makers. If the notes are thick and the language is still vague, move to patterns. The glossary keeps the words from swelling.
Roles
Decision-makers
Champions, economic buyers, gatekeepers, and the quiet operator who inherits the tool.
Method
claude notes
How this guidebook records a close reading without turning it into a metric.
Judgment
Patterns
When a repeated phrase is a mechanism, and when it is only a mood.
Index
Glossary
Buying center, friction, proof gap, positioning line, and the claude note itself.