What is The Voice of the Buyer?
You may be familiar with the term Voice of the Customer, but the Voice of the Buyer is subtly different. Whereas the Voice of the Customer is about understanding your customer - the Voice of the Buyer is about understanding your target buyer, your future customers.
It’s a strategic research approach that gives businesses real, unfiltered feedback from their potential customers—helping them refine their sales strategy, improve messaging, and uncover new opportunities. Business leaders invest heavily in sales and marketing, yet many struggle to truly understand how their potential buyers see them:
Do buyers know their brand?
Have they considered their solutions before?
What concerns or barriers prevent engagement?
What challenges are they facing?
Who makes the decision to buy the product or service?
Why is the Voice of the Buyer Important?
Many sales and marketing teams make assumptions about their ideal buyers. They assume they know them and then build messaging plans to communicate with them. Often, they have not worked in the industry, have not had a role in a buying company, and know little about the buyer group other than limited interactions. The Voice of the Buyer helps them to build sales and marketing plans on facts rather than assumptions, and fine-tune messaging and positioning to resonate with their target audience.
Without real data, sales and marketing teams risk:
❌ Targeting the wrong buyer personas.
❌ Wasting budget on ineffective campaigns.
❌ Misunderstanding what truly drives a purchasing decision.
The Voice of the Buyer helps businesses build sales and marketing plans on facts rather than assumptions. By gathering firsthand insights from decision-makers, businesses can:
✔ Fine-tune their messaging and positioning to resonate with buyers.
✔ Address objections before they arise, improving sales conversion rates.
✔ Uncover gaps in the market that competitors may not be meeting.
✔ Create stronger go-to-market strategies based on actual buyer behaviours.
What Services Sit in the Voice of the Customer Area?
Viewpoint Analysis acts as a Technology Matchmaker - sitting in between the buyers and sellers of enterprise technology. For us, the Voice of the Buyer is really critical to helping IT vendors to understand their target customers. Indeed, we believe that we are uniquely positioned to help with this challenge. Within our Voice of the Buyer area, we offer the following services.
Voice of the Buyer Panel
The Voice of the Buyer Panel, also known as the Buyer Group Panel, is a curated group of IT executives hand-picked for specific vendor requirements. It is an opportunity to gain real-time, unfiltered feedback about any subject that the marketing and sales team might want to know about.
Where else can you pose challenging questions to the people that matter - your buyer group roles?
Delivered remotely, the panel consists of 4 to 6 participants and has an agenda built by the vendor team. The agenda might be to learn more about the buyer community and what matters to them, introduce a new product, or test feedback. Everything and anything is possible.
Buyer Group Research
Buyer Group Research is designed to help the marketing and sales team understand the buyer group for their specific product or service. Once they know this - they can research their target accounts and find the right contacts. It's the foundation before any selling or marketing plans can be established. It also changes over time and needs to be regularly revisited.
Viewpoint Analysis combines several techniques to confirm the buyer group. Our interview approach is at the heart of the research - we speak to customers, product management, sales, and marketing staff across the business and the wider sector to gain a full and definitive buyer group. We then write this up in a comprehensive report that is easy to understand, but full of detail.
Voice of the Buyer Interviews
What do you want to know about your buyer group? Our Voice of Buyer Interview service involves interviewing several executives in a specific buyer group so that we can understand their roles and how they view the market. You may want to know if they know of your brand, how they buy, and what's important to them. Or maybe it's about communications—how best to approach them or where they hang out.
The Voice of the Buyer Interview is a great way to learn more about a specific buyer or group of buyers before the marketing team starts to communicate messaging. It's different from the Voice of the Buyer Panel in that we can cast the net wider and run all the interviews separately and without vendor engagement.
Win Loss Interviews
It is often said that you learn more about your product or service when you lose a deal. The same can be said about when you win a deal, too. That's where our Voice of the Buyer Win Loss Interviews come in.
Both are a gold mine of opportunity for the sales, marketing, and product management teams. They can learn firsthand why a customer chose to go one way or the other, what resonated with them, and how to ensure more wins than losses in the future!
The secret sauce that Viewpoint Analysis brings to the table is our independent perspective. We can ask the searching and tough questions and get an honest answer - something that vendors would not hear if they interviewed the customer themselves.
How the Voice of the Buyer Impacts Business Strategy
1. Improving Sales & Marketing Effectiveness
By understanding exactly how buyers think and evaluate vendors, marketing teams can craft stronger messaging while sales teams can anticipate and address buyer concerns. This reduces friction in the sales process and leads to higher win rates.
2. Strengthening Competitive Positioning
Many IT vendors operate in crowded markets where differentiation is difficult. The Voice of the Buyer helps businesses:
Identify how they compare to competitors.
Uncover unique strengths to emphasize.
Address weaknesses that impact buying decisions.
3. Guiding Product Development
By learning what buyers want but aren’t getting, product teams can prioritize the right features and improvements, ensuring that solutions align with actual market demand.
4. Supporting Account-Based Marketing (ABM) & Personalization
In an ABM strategy, understanding specific buyer needs is critical to tailored outreach. The Voice of the Buyer enables businesses to:
Personalize messaging for key accounts.
Develop content that speaks directly to buyer pain points.
Create engagement strategies that resonate at different stages of the buying journey.
Conclusion: Why The Voice of the Buyer is a Game-Changer
The Voice of the Buyer is more than just market research—it’s the missing link that connects IT vendors to their future customers.
🚀 It turns guesswork into strategy.
🚀 It reveals the truth about how buyers perceive your brand.
🚀 It gives sales and marketing teams the clarity they need to win more deals.
At Viewpoint Analysis, we specialize in helping IT vendors uncover deep buyer insights that drive smarter decisions, better engagement, and stronger sales performance. Learn more about our Voice of the Buyer and contact us for more information.
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