How To Really Understand Your Buyer - The Enterprise Technology Playbook
- Phil Turton
- 1 day ago
- 24 min read
A definitive guide to understanding your future customers, winning more deals, and keeping more of the customers you have.
Introduction - Why Buyer Understanding is Crucial For Technology Vendors
Most enterprise technology vendors believe they know their buyers. They have personas. They have CRM data. They have years of sales experience in the room. But when you look closely at how sales and marketing decisions are actually made - the messaging chosen, the accounts targeted, the campaigns launched - much of it rests on assumption rather than evidence.
The result is marketing that lands with the wrong audience, sales conversations that miss the mark, pipelines that grow slowly, and win rates that stubbornly refuse to improve. Deals stall. Renewals slip. Competitors gain ground. And nobody can quite explain why.
This is not a problem of intelligence or effort. Sales and marketing teams work hard. But they work from an internal view of the world - shaped by their own experience, their internal slide decks, their historic wins - rather than from a clear, current, and evidence-based picture of how buyers actually think, decide, and buy.
At Viewpoint Analysis, we sit in a unique position. We are Technology Matchmakers -operating in the space between enterprise technology buyers and the vendors who sell to them. We have spent decades on both sides of the table: running hundreds of technology selection processes for buyers, and helping vendor sales and marketing teams understand the people they are trying to win over. That position gives us a perspective that no vendor, no analyst firm, and no CRM system can replicate.
This playbook distils what we have learned into a single, practical guide for enterprise technology vendors who want to move from assumption to clarity. It follows the natural progression of buyer intelligence: starting with understanding the market and the accounts you want to win, moving through the buyer groups and their motivations, then covering what buyers think of you, why you win and lose, and finally how to understand and retain the customers you already have.
What You Will Find in This Playbook
This guide follows the complete buyer intelligence journey in logical order:
• Introduction: Why Buyer Understanding Is Crucial for Technology Vendors
• Phase 1: Understanding Your Market – The Bigger Picture
• Phase 2: Understanding Your Target Accounts
• Phase 3: Understanding Your Buyer Group
• Phase 4: Understanding What Buyers Really Think About You
• Phase 5: Understanding Why You Win and Lose
• Phase 6: Understanding Your Existing Customers
• Phase 7: Preventing Churn – The Intelligence You Need to Retain
• How Viewpoint Analysis Can Help
and Quick Reference: The Buyer Intelligence Checklist
Phase 1: Understand Your Market
Before you can understand individual accounts or buying groups, you need to understand the market you are operating in. This is the broadest layer of buyer intelligence, and it is often the most neglected. Many vendor teams are so focused on the accounts in their pipeline that they lose sight of how the wider market perceives their category, their company, and their competition.
Market-level understanding answers fundamental questions that no amount of account research or sales call review can address:
How do buyers define the problem your product solves?
Do they know your brand?
If they do - what do they think you do?
What capabilities are considered table stakes in your category?
Is your product or service what they actually need?
How is your category perceived from the outside - not from the inside?
Where does your vendor messaging consistently miss the mark?
What will the market reasonably expect over the next two to three years?
These are not questions that your existing customers can answer reliably. Their views are shaped by their own implementation experience, their internal politics, and the need to justify the decision they already made. They will tell you how to improve what they have -they cannot tell you why the rest of the market hesitates, delays, or walks away.
Customer Advisory Boards vs Market Advisory Boards
Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) are a familiar and valuable tool. They provide access to real-world feedback from people who are invested in your product. But they have structural limitations - and in most cases, companies are missing what we call a Market Advisory Board.
Where a CAB tells you what your customers think, a Market Advisory Board (MAB) tells you what the market thinks. The members are senior buyers, former buyers, and industry professionals who are not your customers. They have no emotional or contractual investment in your success. Their role is to represent how the wider market evaluates, perceives, and decides - without the filter of an existing relationship.
In practice, this means a CAB explains why customers stay, expand, or tolerate limitations. A MAB explains why the rest of the market hesitates, delays, or chooses a competitor. Both answers matter, but they are not the same answer.
At Viewpoint Analysis, we build Market Advisory Boards around a specific question or challenge that the vendor needs to address. A MAB might be formed to:
• Pressure-test a new product or capability before launch
• Sense-check a new brand, message, or market repositioning
• Understand how a specific segment or industry views a technology category
• Explore why deals stall or fail at a particular stage of the buying cycle
• Validate assumptions about where the market is heading next
The result is a decision-ready insight that can directly influence product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy - from people who have no agenda other than honesty.
You can find out more about Market Advisory Boards here, and more about how Viewpoint Analysis run Voice of the Buyer Research here.
Phase 2: Understanding Your Target Accounts
Once you have a clear picture of the market, the next layer of buyer intelligence focuses on the specific organisations you want to win. Account-level understanding is the foundation of any effective ABM, deal-based marketing, or enterprise sales strategy - and it is consistently underestimated in the time and effort it requires.
You may have a list of target accounts. But a list of company names is not the same as account intelligence. Sales and marketing teams that work from names and job titles -without a deep understanding of what each organisation actually cares about - will always struggle to engage with relevance and credibility.
What is Company Profiling?
Company profiling is the process of gathering, analysing, and documenting comprehensive information about a target organisation. The goal is to create a detailed, accurate picture of the business that enables sales, marketing, and business development teams to tailor their messaging, prioritise their outreach, and identify the contacts they really need to be speaking with.
A strong company profile is not a Wikipedia entry. It is a living, working document that includes:
• Company overview and key facts (revenue, headcount, headquarters, group structure)
• Stated strategic goals and current transformation initiatives
• Recent financial results and investment priorities
• Current technology estate (particularly relevant when selling tech)
• Key executives and their reported priorities
• Recent news, mergers, acquisitions, and leadership changes
• Internal terminology and language the organisation uses about itself
• Key contacts for the specific proposition being sold
When Viewpoint Analysis builds company profiles (for clients including Informatica, Nexthink, Riverbed, and Pluralsight) we research accounts across every industry and geography, from companies with millions of employees down to specialist mid-market businesses. We know from experience that the difference between a generic outreach and a targeted, informed engagement begins with this research.
How to Build a Company Profile
The raw materials for a strong company profile come from a range of sources, each with its own strengths and blind spots:
• Company websites - the starting point for products, services, leadership, and stated values
• LinkedIn - the most reliable source for current contact information and organisational structure
• Annual reports and financial filings - for understanding revenue trajectory, investment priorities, and stated strategy
• Industry press and news - for recent developments, partnerships, and challenges
• Conference presentations and webinars - often the richest source of what the leadership team actually thinks
• Business directories - for baseline firmographic data
• AI tools - useful as a catch-all at the end of the process, but not a substitute for primary research
One important note on AI: we recommend completing your own research first, and using an AI platform to sense-check for anything you might have missed. Running through the research process yourself forces you to engage with the material - and the finer details that bring an account to life are almost always the ones AI overlooks.
We refer to this level of research as 'Outside-In' research - because, as the name suggests, all our information comes from the outside of the business.
Inside Out Research - Learning from Within
Standard account research is what we call 'outside in' - gathering intelligence from public sources to build a picture of the organisation. But one of the most powerful (and most underused) forms of account intelligence is 'inside out' research: structured interviews with the people inside the account itself.
When we conduct inside-out research for our clients, a series of 30-minute interviews with relevant contacts within the account consistently surfaces intelligence that no public source can provide: vendor sentiment, upcoming projects, internal politics, people who need to be influenced, technology issues, and events worth sponsoring or attending. This is where the gold is found.
The question we tend to get asked is 'how' do we do Inside Research and why would a customer be open to sharing information with us. That's a trade secret - so we can't share it here, but we run lots of inside research and it is always the most popular output from our customers.
Types of Account Research
At Viewpoint Analysis, we offer account research across three main use cases:
• ABM and Strategic Account Research - deep-dive profiles for your most important target and existing accounts, covering all the dimensions outlined above.
• 1:Few Account Research - a faster, more cost-effective format that delivers the most critical insights: top contacts, industry trends, corporate strategy, key challenges, and account terminology.
• Deal-Based Marketing (DBM) Research - focused research triggered when a new opportunity enters the funnel, designed to help sales and marketing teams engage quickly and intelligently with a specific prospect.
The right format depends on the account's strategic importance and where it sits in the sales cycle. A named account deserving of a 1:1 ABM approach will benefit from the full treatment; a prospect entering an active sales process may need the speed of a DBM profile.
Why Outsource Account Research?
The honest answer is that nobody volunteers for account research. It takes two to three days per account to do properly, and the people best placed to do it - experienced sales leads - are needed elsewhere. Outsourcing the research to a specialist provider who does this work every day, across every geography and industry, is simply a more efficient and more thorough approach.
The result is that your team receives a complete, structured profile that drives more targeted messaging and better-informed sales conversations - without pulling them away from the activities that generate pipeline.
It's also a great way of making friends with the sales team - this level of account information is a major boost for their pipeline activity and you will have a friend for life (or a month maybe?!).
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Find out more about our Account Research Services here.
Phase 3: Understanding Your Buyer Group
So you know the market perspective, and now you know your target accounts. The next step is to truly understand the buyer group within those key target accounts.
Account intelligence tells you about the organisation. Buyer group research tells you about the people inside it - and specifically, which of those people are involved in making the technology decision you are trying to influence.
This is where many vendor marketing and sales strategies fall short. Enterprise software is never bought by a single person. It is bought by a group - and that group is typically larger, more diverse, and more complex than most vendors appreciate. Research consistently shows that enterprise technology decisions involve ten or more stakeholders, spanning IT, procurement, finance, security, operations, and the end business function. Yet most vendor outreach is built around one or two personas.
The consequences are significant. Marketing campaigns that target the wrong roles generate poor engagement. Sales conversations that focus on a single contact leave influence on the table. Deals stall because an influential stakeholder was never engaged. Contracts are lost because finance or procurement raised concerns that nobody had anticipated.
Stop Guessing Who is in Your Buyer Group
Buyer group assumptions tend to be built from two unreliable sources: previous buying experiences, and internal opinion about who the obvious buyer must be. Both have serious limitations.
Previous buying experiences are real, but they reflect the buying committees of specific organisations at specific points in time. They do not generalise reliably across accounts, segments, or geographies. A buying process that was led by the CIO at one company may be led by an operations director at the next.
Internal opinion is even less reliable. Sales and marketing teams tend to define buyer personas based on who they feel most comfortable selling to - not necessarily on evidence of who actually drives the decision. The result is single-threaded sales motions and campaigns that reach the wrong people.
How to Identity Your Real Buyer Group
There are two rich sources of buyer group intelligence that most teams underutilise:
1. Interviewing Existing Customers
Your existing customers have already been through a buying process for your solution. They know exactly who was involved, who had the most influence, who created friction, and who ultimately signed off. Running structured interviews with the people who participated in past buying decisions is one of the most reliable ways to map the real buyer group.
The questions to ask include: Who was involved in selecting the solution? Who needed to sign off? Who asked the tough questions? Who blocked progress? Did someone play a role they did not expect? Did any role have more influence than you anticipated?
These conversations consistently surface roles and individuals that were not on the vendor's radar - and often reveal that some job titles play a very different function in the buying process than their title suggests. This is inside-out research at the buyer group level, and it is where some of the most valuable intelligence lives.
2. Interviewing Your Sales Team
Your top salespeople are living through buyer group dynamics every day. They are the ones dealing with multiple stakeholders simultaneously, navigating competing priorities, and watching how deals move (or stall). Running structured internal interviews with your best reps can quickly surface patterns about which roles consistently appear in deals, where influence really sits, and which stakeholders are most likely to create friction late in the process.
For one of Viewpoint Analysis's largest technology clients, we interviewed twenty key internal contacts across sales, marketing, product management, and customer success. We asked each person to describe the buyer group from their own experience. The output was a consolidated list of twenty-three distinct buyer personas - which now sits at the centre of how that marketing team plans and executes its campaigns.
Understanding What Each Buyer Cares About
Once you know who the buyer group is, the next step is to understand each persona at a meaningful level. Not in the superficial way of 'the CIO cares about security' or 'procurement only talks price' - but with the kind of nuanced, validated understanding that changes how you write content, structure presentations, and approach sales conversations.
Buyer group research at this level involves direct interviews with individuals in each relevant persona - not necessarily your customers, but any person carrying that role or responsibility in your target market. The questions we ask typically cover:
• What are their primary goals in this role, and what pressures are they managing?
• What do they most want from a technology vendor relationship?
• What puts them off a vendor, a pitch, or a sales process?
• What language do they use internally when discussing this challenge?
• Who do they listen to and trust within their organisation?
• What does a successful outcome look like from their perspective?
This insight reshapes messaging, campaign design, and sales strategy in ways that no amount of internal discussion can match. Knowing the right personas is the beginning. Understanding what to say to them is where the commercial impact is generated.
Another good approach is to review job boards - look out for the job description for the roles that fit in your buyer group - it's a great way to learn what they are charged with doing.
Finding the Buyer Group in Your Target Accounts
The final piece of the puzzle is translating buyer group knowledge into contact intelligence within your specific target accounts. Knowing that 'the Head of Data Governance' is typically part of the buying process is useful - but only if you can identify who holds that role at each of your named accounts and how to reach them.
This is where Viewpoint Analysis's contact research and profiling capability comes in. We go wide and deep across your target accounts to identify the full buyer group - not just the obvious names and job titles, but all the people you should be reaching with marketing and sales communications. The result is a contact map that underpins more precise ABM campaigns, more targeted outreach, and more intelligent account engagement.
Find out more about how we perform Buyer Group Research and Contact Research here.
Phase 4: Understanding What Buyers Really Think About You
You now know the market, the accounts, and the buyer group. The next, critical question is one that most vendors are surprisingly reluctant to investigate properly: what does the market actually think of us?
Most vendors have some version of an answer to this question. The sales team has anecdotal feedback. The marketing team runs occasional surveys. Leadership has its own convictions about how the company is perceived. But this patchwork of partial insight is rarely a reliable picture of market reality. It is filtered through the people who already engage with you, shaped by relationships that are already established, and softened by the natural tendency of people to tell you what they think you want to hear.
Enterprise technology buyers might see a vendor as too expensive without understanding the true value of the solution. They might not realise the vendor offers something they need. They may believe a competitor is more established or better known. They may associate the vendor with a market they no longer play in. They may have had a poor experience years ago with a sales team that no longer exists. Or - perhaps worst of all - they may simply not know the vendor exists.
The question is: do you actually know which of these applies to your business? Or are you guessing? Our guess is....you are guessing!
Voice of the Buyer Research
Voice of the Buyer research is the discipline of going directly to the market - to buyers, prospects, lost deals, partners, and your own internal team - and asking the questions that most vendors are too comfortable (or too cautious) to ask independently.
The key word is 'independently'. This is where the value of a third-party approach becomes decisive. When a vendor's sales team asks a customer for feedback, the customer self-censors. When they are speaking with an independent intermediary who has no stake in the commercial relationship, the answers change dramatically. The uncomfortable truths come out. The politely withheld criticisms surface. The real competitive threats become visible.
At Viewpoint Analysis, we sit in the middle of the IT buying and selling relationship. We talk to the same people your sales teams are trying to win over - buyers who are going through technology selection processes, prospects who have never engaged with a vendor, customers who are trying to decide whether to renew. That position gives us access to a level of candour that most vendors cannot obtain through their own channels.
The Voice of the Buyer 360
Our flagship research service in this space is the Voice of the Buyer 360 - a comprehensive, interview-led programme that gives vendor go-to-market teams a complete view of their standing in the market. The '360' reflects the breadth of perspectives we capture:
• Recent wins - why did they choose you, really? What almost changed their mind?
• Recent losses - what were you missing? What did the competitor do better?
• Long-term customers - why do they stay?
• Future prospects - Do they even know you?
• Partners and resellers - how does your offer perform versus competitors?
• Your own sales team - what are the patterns they see in buyer behaviour?
Every Voice of the Buyer 360 is built around the specific client's commercial objectives. We can run the full programme, or focus on a single dimension - for example, a targeted loss analysis, or a deep dive into how future prospects perceive a specific product area.
Buyer Group Panels - Direct Access to Market Opinion
For teams who want a faster route to real buyer feedback, our Buyer Group Panels provide direct access to senior IT buyers through structured, moderated conversations. Panels are particularly effective for testing messaging, exploring product concepts, understanding category perception, or getting rapid reactions to a new proposition.
The format allows your marketing, product, and sales leadership to ask questions of the people who look exactly like your target buyers - and hear unfiltered answers in real time. It is one of the fastest and most direct forms of buyer intelligence available.
Phase 5: Understanding Why You Win and Lose
Of all the buyer intelligence activities a vendor can invest in, win/loss analysis is arguably the one with the most direct and immediate impact on commercial performance. It answers the question that sales and marketing teams wrestle with after every significant deal: why?
Understanding why you win is as important as understanding why you lose. Most teams focus disproportionately on the pain of lost deals, while the lessons from wins are left unanalysed. But wins contain patterns - of what resonates, what differentiates, what sales behaviours produce results - that, if understood and replicated, have a compounding effect on future win rates.
Similarly, losses contain patterns. The same objections surface repeatedly. The same competitors win for the same reasons. The same friction points in the sales process keep appearing. These are correctable problems - but only if they are identified clearly and traced back to their root cause.
What Win/Loss Analysis Reveals
A typical win/loss interview runs for around 45 minutes and is built around open-ended questions designed to let the interviewee speak freely. We cover the full arc of their decision-making process: how they defined the problem, who was involved, how they evaluated vendors, what created positive impressions and what created doubt, and what ultimately determined the outcome.
After each interview, we produce a written report that captures the interviewee's perspective alongside our own analysis - including what we believe the vendor team most needs to understand and act on. For larger programmes, we present findings back to the team directly, as we find that talking through the insights drives deeper engagement than written reports alone.
Over hundreds of win/loss interviews, Viewpoint Analysis has observed consistent patterns in why enterprise technology deals are won and lost. The most common loss drivers include:
• Messaging that speaks to the wrong stakeholders or uses language that does not match how buyers describe their own problem
• Sales processes that generate friction - too slow, too complex, or poorly managed at key decision points
• Failure to engage the full buying group, leaving influential stakeholders unaddressed
• Competitor strengths that were not identified and countered early enough
• Price that was positioned incorrectly relative to the value delivered
• Cultural mismatches between the vendor's sales team and the buyer's expectations
Win drivers are equally instructive. Deals are frequently won not because of product superiority alone, but because of the quality of the relationship built during the sales process, the clarity and relevance of the vendor's understanding of the buyer's challenge, and the credibility established through reference conversations and demonstrations.
Take a look here for more about our Win/Loss Analysis.
Phase 6: Understanding Your Existing Customers
The buyer intelligence journey does not end when a contract is signed. In fact, for many vendors, the most commercially important intelligence work begins the moment the sale closes - because the customers you already have are your most valuable asset, and understanding them deeply is the foundation of retention, expansion, and renewal.
This phase of buyer intelligence shifts the focus from future customers to existing ones. The questions change: not 'why should they buy?' but 'why are they staying?' and 'what would cause them to leave?'
The answers to these questions are not always what you expect. Customers who appear satisfied from the outside often have concerns that have never been raised directly with the vendor. Key contacts who were enthusiastic advocates at the start of the contract may have moved on, leaving the relationship in the hands of people who were never properly onboarded or engaged. Budget cycles are shifting. Competitors are circling.
Most of the time, nobody inside the vendor organisation knows any of this - because they have not asked the right questions, to the right people, through the right mechanism.
The Customer Success Check-Up
The Customer Success Check-up is a structured, independent assessment of the health of a specific customer relationship. It is designed to surface the temperature of a customer account - to identify where satisfaction is strong, where concerns exist, and where risks are building - before they reach the point of contract cancellation or formal escalation.
At Viewpoint Analysis, we conduct Customer Success Check-ups by speaking directly with the key contacts within the account: users, team leaders, procurement contacts, and executive sponsors. Because we are independent, we consistently hear candid feedback that customers would not volunteer to a vendor account manager. The report output gives both the customer success team and the broader vendor organisation a clear, structured view of account health - with specific recommendations for what needs attention.
Customer Success Check-ups are most effective when run on a quarterly basis across a portfolio of accounts, enabling patterns to be identified across the customer base rather than just within individual relationships.
We consistently hear things in Customer Success Check-ups that vendors tell us they had no idea about. These include:
• Key contacts who are about to leave the organisation - taking with them the institutional knowledge of why the vendor was chosen
• Budget pressures that are actively being cited internally as reasons to explore alternatives
• Support issues that were never formally escalated but have been quietly frustrating the user team for months
• Competitor approaches that the customer has received and not disclosed
• New internal projects that the vendor could be involved in, but has not been made aware of
None of this intelligence is available through standard customer success processes. It requires an independent, structured conversation with someone who has no commercial stake in the outcome.
Learn more about the Customer Health Check-ups here.
Phase 7: Preventing Customer Churn - Intelligence Needed to Retain Customers
SaaS contract churn is one of the most damaging events in a technology vendor's commercial life. Losing a customer at renewal not only removes revenue - it signals a failure that often had its origins months or even years before the contract expired. And unlike a lost new logo, a churned customer is a public signal to the market that something went wrong.
The fundamental truth about churn that most vendor teams underappreciate is this: most renewals are lost well before the renewal conversation even happens. Customers do not wake up one day and decide not to renew. They go through a long process of assessing alternatives, building internal consensus, securing budget approval, running a selection process, and negotiating with a replacement vendor. By the time a renewal conversation officially begins, the decision may already have been made.
This means that by the time the renewals team is actively engaged, the window for retention has often already closed. Prevention requires intelligence - and that intelligence must be gathered continuously, not just at renewal time.
Why SaaS Customers Churn
Understanding the root causes of churn is the first step to preventing it. The most common drivers, based on Viewpoint Analysis's experience working across hundreds of vendor relationships, include:
• Poor onboarding and adoption - customers who never fully integrate the software into their workflows have no stake in renewing
• Lack of perceived ongoing value - if customers cannot articulate what the software delivers for them, the renewal conversation becomes a cost-benefit exercise they are likely to lose
• Inadequate customer support - unresolved issues accumulate and create pressure that eventually reaches the renewal decision
• Pricing concerns - customers who feel they are overpaying relative to alternatives will eventually act on that feeling
• Competitive pressure - a rival solution that offers better functionality, better pricing, or a better relationship
• Loss of key relationships - when the original champion leaves, the relationship can unravel quickly if no other contacts have been developed
Each of these drivers has something in common: they all produce visible signals long before the renewal conversation. The challenge is building the intelligence infrastructure to detect those signals early.
The Proactive Approach to Renewal Intelligence
The most effective churn prevention happens six to nine months before the contract end date - not in the weeks immediately before renewal. This requires a structured, proactive approach to monitoring account health that goes well beyond the standard customer success process.
The renewals team is often on the hook for renewal performance, but they hear only what the customer is comfortable telling them directly. True renewal intelligence requires looking beyond this single channel. That means polling all customer touchpoints - not just the primary account contact, but users, executive sponsors, and where relevant, channel partners - to build a complete picture of the account's health.
It also means mapping stakeholders carefully. The executive who gave the green light for the original purchase needs to remain engaged and informed. End users whose daily experience of the product shapes the business's overall sentiment need a voice. Finance and procurement contacts who will ultimately sign off on the renewal need to understand the value being delivered.
Renewal Risk 360
The Renewal Risk 360 service has a dual objective - to equip SaaS vendors with the insights they need to secure renewals, mitigate churn risks, and enhance long-term customer experience, and, as a result, improve customer satisfaction and user experience. A win-win.
It is called 360 because we interview all the key stakeholders - the users, the product owners, the sponsor(s), and procurement - to get a deep understanding of their experience, expectations, and plans. We use our Customer Success Checkup as the focal point for the customer engagement.
We also interview the sales team - account manager, product specialist, renewals team - to get a feel for what they believe is happening and how things can improve.
Our report then ties this all together and assesses the renewal risk and what steps can be taken to improve customer experience and mitigate contract loss.
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How Viewpoint Analysis Can Help
So, we have run through the 7 phases - each hits a specific issue - but done together, or at least a few of them together - it's a real game-changer for marketing, sales, and renewals.
Viewpoint Analysis is an independent technology consulting firm - Technology Matchmakers - that sits in the unique space between enterprise technology buyers and the vendors who sell to them. We help IT vendors understand their buyers in every dimension: the market, the accounts, the buying group, the sentiment, the reasons for winning and losing, and the health of existing customer relationships.
What makes our position distinctive is that we work on both sides of the equation. We run hundreds of technology selection processes for buyers every year. We sit in the room when buyers evaluate vendors, shortlist candidates, and make decisions. We know exactly how buying committees are constructed, what motivates different stakeholders, and what causes deals to be won or lost - not from theory, but from direct, ongoing experience.
That experience gives us a perspective that no vendor, no CRM system, and no traditional research firm can replicate. When we ask your buyers questions on your behalf, we ask them from a position of genuine understanding of the buying process - and we hear answers that your sales team simply cannot access.
Our Services for Enterprise Technology Vendors
Account and Contact Research
We help sales and marketing teams understand their target accounts deeply, mapping the buyer group, identifying key contacts, and building the intelligence foundation for ABM, deal-based marketing, and strategic account management.
Market and Sentiment Research
We conduct independent Voice of the Buyer 360 research, build Market Advisory Boards, run buyer group panels, and deliver the candid, unfiltered market intelligence that internal processes cannot produce.
Win/Loss Analysis
We conduct independent structured interviews with recent wins and losses, providing the kind of candid deal intelligence that buyers will not share with a vendor's own sales team.
Customer Health and Retention
We run Customer Success Check-ups, Renewal Risk 360 assessments, and Renewal Rescue programmes to help vendors understand the real health of their customer base and prevent churn before it happens.
Let's Talk Whether you are trying to understand why your win rate is stalling, who your real buyer group is, what your market thinks of you, or why your best customers are at risk of leaving, Viewpoint Analysis can help. Contact us: contactus@viewpointanalysis.com +44 113 5129252 |
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Quick Reference: The Buyer Intelligence Checklist
Use this checklist to assess the completeness of your buyer intelligence programme. Each phase builds on the previous one.
Phase 1: Understanding Your Market
• Do you have a clear view of how buyers define the problem your product solves - before they have engaged with any vendor?
• Do you understand which capabilities in your category are table stakes, and which are genuine differentiators?
• Have you tested your market positioning with independent, non-customer voices in the last 12 months?
• Do you have a structured mechanism (such as a Market Advisory Board) for ongoing market-level feedback?
• Do you understand how your category is perceived from the outside - not just from within your existing customer base?
Phase 2: Understanding Your Target Accounts
• Do you have detailed company profiles for your top 20 target accounts?
• Are your profiles current - updated within the last six months?
• Do your profiles include current technology estate, stated strategic priorities, and relevant internal contacts?
• Have you conducted inside-out research (interviews with account contacts) for your most important accounts?
• Does your sales team have account intelligence that goes beyond company name, size, and sector?
Phase 3: Understanding Your Buyer Group
• Have you interviewed existing customers to map who was actually involved in their buying process?
• Have you interviewed your own sales team to identify the stakeholder patterns they observe across deals?
• Do you have validated persona research (not just internal assumptions) for each key role in the buying group?
• Are your campaigns and sales motions designed to reach all relevant stakeholders - not just one or two primary contacts?
• Do you have contact research in place for your named accounts that maps the real buyer group?
Phase 4: Understanding What Buyers Think About You
• Have you conducted independent Voice of the Buyer research in the last 12 months?
• Do you have unfiltered insight from people who chose a competitor rather than you?
• Do you have feedback from future prospects - people in your ICP who have not yet engaged with you?
• Have you tested your current messaging and positioning with buyers who are not already invested in your product?
• Do your sales and marketing teams have a shared, evidence-based view of how the market perceives your company?
Phase 5: Understanding Why You Win and Lose
• Have you conducted independent win/loss interviews - not relying solely on internal sales debrief notes?
• Do you understand the real reasons buyers chose a competitor, beyond the surface explanations given to the sales team?
• Have you identified the consistent patterns in your win behaviour - the things that, when replicated, produce better outcomes?
• Do you understand the specific competitive threats that are costing you deals in your most important segments?
• Are the lessons from win/loss analysis being actively applied to sales training, messaging, and campaign design?
Phase 6: Understanding Your Existing Customers
• Have you conducted independent Customer Success Check-ups across your key accounts in the last six months?
• Do you have a view of customer health that goes beyond the account manager's relationship with the primary contact?
• Are executive sponsors at your key customers actively engaged and informed throughout the contract lifecycle?
• Do you have a mechanism for identifying when key contacts within an account are about to leave?
• Are you gathering feedback from end users - not just from the procurement or IT contact you originally sold to?
Phase 7: Preventing Churn
• Are you starting renewal conversations six to nine months before contract end - not just in the final weeks?
• Do you have a structured Renewal Risk assessment process across your customer base?
• Are all relevant customer touchpoints (users, executive sponsors, partners) included in your renewal intelligence process?
• Do you have a rapid intervention capability for high-value accounts that are at serious risk of churning?
• Is retention responsibility distributed across your business - not concentrated solely in the renewals team?
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