Service Spotlight - Understand Your Buyers

This is the first in a new series of Service Spotlights, where we take a closer look at the core pillars of Viewpoint Analysis and explain not just what we do, but why it matters.

This first spotlight focuses on one of the most important, and most misunderstood, challenges facing technology vendors today: understanding buyers.

For many sales and marketing teams, buyer understanding is assumed rather than proven. It is built from fragments of insight, anecdotal feedback, and internal opinion. And while that can sometimes be “good enough” in the early stages of growth, it becomes a serious constraint as vendors try to scale.

Why You Need To Understand Your Buyers

On the surface, most technology vendors believe they know their buyers. They have personas. They have CRM data. They have win-loss notes. They have years of sales experience in the room.

But when we start working with sales, marketing, and leadership teams, the same questions come up again and again:

• Does the market really understand who we are and what we do?

• Which roles are actually involved in buying decisions, beyond the obvious job titles?

• Do we truly understand our buyers’ priorities, pressures, and internal language?

• Why do customers choose us in the first place?

• Why do deals stall or fall apart, and what do competitors do better in those moments?

  
  

In most organisations, the honest answer is uncomfortable: much of this is guesswork. Teams piece together insight from sales calls, marketing metrics, and customer conversations, but rarely step back to validate whether their assumptions are correct. Over time, those assumptions harden into “truths” that no one challenges.

What happens when buyer understanding breaks down

When buyer understanding is incomplete or outdated, the impact is felt across the business:

• Marketing teams create messaging that lands with the wrong audience, or at the wrong level.

• Sales teams repeat the same motions, conversations, and pitch decks, expecting different outcomes.

• Product teams miss critical gaps because they are solving for imagined needs rather than real ones.

• Sales leadership pushes harder for more pipeline, only to see conversion rates stay stubbornly low.

  
  

The result is frustration, wasted effort, and a growing gap between activity and results. This is why buyer clarity sits at the heart of our Technology Matchmaker services.

How Viewpoint Analysis helps vendors understand their buyers

Our role is to remove assumption and replace it with evidence. We help sales and marketing teams see their buyers as they really are, not as they are described in internal slide decks.

We do this through a combination of structured, independent research services.

Voice of the Buyer 360

Voice of the Buyer 360 is designed to surface the truth that rarely appears in sales reviews or customer success meetings. We conduct confidential interviews across the full ecosystem around a vendor, including recent wins, recent losses, long-standing customers, newer customers, partners, and internal stakeholders such as sales and marketing.

The goal is not to validate existing beliefs, but to uncover:

• Why buyers engage in the first place

• What genuinely differentiates the vendor

• Where friction, confusion, or doubt creeps into the buying process

• What needs fixing versus what needs amplifying

This creates a grounded, 360-degree view of reality, rather than a filtered internal narrative. You can find more information about the Voice of the Buyer 360 here.

Account Research

Account Research supports sales and marketing teams that are focused on named accounts, ABM, or strategic deal pursuit.

Rather than stopping at surface-level company information, we go deep into:

• What the organisation actually cares about right now

• The initiatives, pressures, and priorities shaping decision-making

• The individuals and functions that influence outcomes

• The language that resonates internally

We then apply our viewpoint on how sales and marketing should approach the account, helping teams engage with relevance, credibility, and intent. Learn how we conduct account research here.

Buyer Group Research

Most buying decisions are not made by a single role, even when procurement or IT appears to “own” the process. Buyer Group Research focuses on identifying:

• Which roles truly care about what you sell

• Who influences, who blocks, and who signs off

• How finance, procurement, security, and operations become involved

• Where alignment or misalignment typically occurs

By mapping the full buyer group, vendors can move away from narrow persona thinking and design sales and marketing strategies that reflect how decisions actually get made. Learn more about Buyer Group Research here.

Buyer Group Panels

Buyer Panels provide fast, direct access to informed market opinion. They are designed for vendors who want unfiltered feedback on:

• Brand perception

• Sales messaging

• Product direction

• New ideas or propositions

  
  

Rather than relying on internal debate, Buyer Panels allow teams to ask the people who matter most: buyers who look and think like their ideal customers. You can find out more about the Buyer Group Panels here.

From assumption to clarity

Helping vendors understand their buyers is not about adding more data. It is about replacing assumption with clarity.

When sales, marketing, and leadership teams genuinely understand who they are selling to, why buyers care, and how decisions are made, performance improves naturally. Messaging sharpens. Sales conversations change. Product decisions become more grounded.

This is why buyer understanding is one of the three pillars of Viewpoint Analysis, and why it sits at the core of our Technology Matchmaker services.

In future Service Spotlights, we will explore the other pillars and how they fit together to help vendors and buyers find the right partners in a crowded technology market.