Decision-maker research
Decision-maker research inside a buying group
A decision-maker is not a job title on a list. In B2B marketing research it is a person who can advance, reshape, or stop a purchase. klulkler studies those people by role in a real deal, and records the difference in their language as claude notes. The aim is a clear map of authority. It is not a claim that the map represents a segment.
The buying center is a working idea, not a chart to worship
Webster and Wind, and later Bonoma, gave practitioners a durable picture: industrial purchases are made by a center of people with different stakes. Users care whether the work gets lighter. Influencers supply criteria. Deciders commit. Buyers run the commercial path. Gatekeepers control access and information. Modern US deals add roles the older charts underplayed: security reviewers, privacy counsel, procurement, and the finance partner who did not attend the first call.
Use the roles as a checklist of ignorance. For the deal you are studying, write the name or the seat of each role, including “unknown.” An empty seat is a finding. Teams that cannot name the economic buyer will invent one, usually by promoting the champion. Customer interviews are how you test the guess. Ask each person who else could have killed the purchase, and listen for a name your current map does not contain.
Access is part of the evidence
Who will take the meeting is not a random sample of the buying center. Champions reply. Blockers often do not. Security sometimes will, if the question is about their review rather than about your roadmap. Procurement will, late, and often only about process. If your entire set of conversations is champions, say so in the brief. Do not “balance” the story with adjectives. The access pattern itself explains why internal narratives skew warm.
A practical rule at klulkler: do not write positioning from a role you have not heard. You may write a question about that role. “We have not spoken to economic buyers; champions believe budget sits with the COO” is an honest sentence. It is also a useful one, because it tells the team where the next interview has to go.
From a composite note
“I can get you a pilot. I cannot get you a signature. Those are different rooms, and I am not in the second one.”
A champion in operations, describing a facilities-software evaluation. Composite, built from the shape of many such lines, not a client quote and not a statistic. The claude note marks the hedge as a boundary of authority.
How language shifts by role
The same product passes through different sentences. claude notes should keep the speaker attached to the line. Mixing them produces positioning that sounds profound and convinces no particular room.
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First look
The user
Talks about the Tuesday afternoon task: the export, the queue, the workaround. Rarely talks about contract structure. A user quote is evidence of work, not of budget.
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Internal sale
The champion
Talks about allies, timing, and the slide they are afraid to show. Often overestimates their own signature power. Treat confidence as a claim to be checked.
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Commitment
The economic buyer
Talks about risk they must personally carry: an audit, a failed rollout, a number they cannot defend. They ask for a sentence they can repeat, not for a feature tour.
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The stall
Security, legal, procurement
Talk about checklists, prior incidents, and missing owners. Their friction is often a proof gap or a process gap, which touchpoint mapping will show more clearly than another champion interview.
What this research must refuse
Decision-maker research does not produce a persona with a stock photo and a fake quota. It does not rank “top pains” as if every role shared a denominator. It does not convert “three economic buyers said the security review was the long pole” into “the market is blocked by security.” Three is three. The mechanism can still be real and useful. Usefulness does not require a percentage of the industry.
When the map is stable enough to brief, carry it into pattern synthesis only for mechanisms that survive more than one account. Until then, keep the roles and the claude notes side by side. A sentence with no speaker is how a guidebook turns into a brochure.
Next, stand where the role actually works
Interviews tell you who matters. Observation tells you what they do when a colleague is watching. Read both before you write a line of positioning.