Claude · Touchpoints
Follow the file, not the funnel diagram
A touchpoint is a place a buying group already handles the decision: a thread, a form, a meeting, a badge desk, a renewal call. Claude fieldwork maps those places for one kind of purchase. It does not assign them conversion rates. The point is to see who touches the file when the champion is not narrating, and which artifact is open while the decision sits still.
A path you can check against a real chronology
Use the rows as a checklist while you listen, not as stages every company must pass. If a row never appears in the interviews, write “not in this decision” instead of inventing it. Methods for hearing the chronology are in decision-maker interviews.
| Contact | What to notice | A false comfort |
|---|---|---|
| Internal complaint | The first sentence that made the pain someone else’s problem. Who was addressed. | Assuming the first vendor meeting was the start. |
| Peer check | A colleague, a community thread, a sister team. The phrase they borrowed. | Treating a logo on a slide as the peer. |
| Shortlist | The spreadsheet, the criteria that are real, the column nobody fills. | Believing the public criteria are the ones that decide. |
| Security and legal | Which question repeats, who must sign, how long the file sits. | Calling the whole stretch “procurement” and moving on. |
| Pilot | The success line, the owner of the measurement, the people absent from standup. | Counting enthusiasm as evidence the criterion was met. |
| Renewal | What is re-argued, what is now habit, who threatens to leave the workflow. | Assuming signature meant the friction ended. |
How to sit in a touchpoint without taking it over
Ask to observe a meeting that would have happened anyway. Arrive with the log line from market observation: role, artifact, sequence, silence. Do not “add a quick slide.” The moment you present, the touchpoint becomes a sales call and the silences change. If you cannot be invited, read the artifact the meeting revolves around — the questionnaire, the redline, the scorecard — and mark your vantage point as document, not room.
Reception desks, visitor badges, and shared inboxes are touchpoints too. They show how a stranger enters the decision. They do not show market demand. Write what the ritual requires. A blank badge and a hallway are data about access, which is often where consensus friction starts, long before a pricing page.
After two or three decisions, lay the rows next to each other and mark which contact actually moved the file. If security is a rubber stamp in one case and a month of silence in another, keep both. The difference is the finding. Averaging them into “security matters” throws away the only comparison this kind of fieldwork can honestly make.
Field note
The shortlist is a social object
A shortlist looks like a rational grid and behaves like a truce. Columns are added so a late stakeholder can see their fear represented. Rows survive because someone powerful already had a conversation. When you treat the grid as a score, you miss the negotiation inside the headings. Ask who created each column and which column has never changed a ranking. That answer belongs next to purchase friction, not in a feature matrix.
Positioning that ignores the shortlist’s real alternative — often an internal patch — will be corrected in the room or ignored in it. Take the correction. The writing step is positioning synthesis.
The words used at each stop
A touchpoint changes vocabulary. Legal does not say what the champion says. Keep both.