A lot of channel failures are ICP failures that took six months and a budget to surface. Before you spend against a buyer definition, it is worth testing whether that buyer exists, holds the budget, and is anywhere near the place you plan to reach them. We interview people who recently bought in your category, including the ones who bought from a competitor and the ones who decided to do nothing.
Timeline
3 to 5 weeks
Pricing
Quoted per scope
Commitment
Per project, no retainer
01/
Who We Ask
Sourcing and screening
+Buyers in your target segment who bought in this category in the last year
+Buyers who evaluated and chose a competitor, or chose nobody at all
+Former sales leaders at competitors, on who signed versus who merely took the meeting
+Operators who repositioned mid-flight and can describe the ICP they abandoned and why
Every expert is at least six months removed from any company they are asked to discuss. No material non-public information may be requested or shared, calls are monitored, and the audit trail is kept for seven years under the FieldSignal compliance framework.
02/
When To Run It
6 trigger moments
+Channels are underperforming and targeting keeps taking the blame
+Deals stall at the same stage and nobody can name the missing approver
+You are moving up or down market and the old buyer definition is being carried over untested
+Two teams inside the company describe the customer differently
+The ICP was written by the founders three years ago and has never been retested
+You sell to two sides of a marketplace and one side is being neglected by default
03/
Questions We Put To Them
6 examples
Q.01
What was happening in your business the week you decided to solve this?
Q.02
Who else had to say yes, and who could have killed it on their own?
Q.03
Where were you looking, and what did you type or ask when you started?
Q.04
What nearly stopped you buying, and what did the vendor do that helped?
Q.05
Which vendors did you rule out before speaking to anyone, and why?
Q.06
Six months on, would you buy it again?
04/
What You Get
Deliverables
+A buyer definition grounded in interviews, with the segments that did not survive named explicitly
+The buying committee: who evaluates, who blocks, who signs, and who can kill it alone
+Trigger events: what was happening in the business the week the buyer started looking
+Where the buyer was before they bought, which is the part that makes any of this usable for channel work
+Verbatim quotes, with consent, that you can put in front of your own team
05/
What We Need From You
Before the kick-off
+Your current ICP, however informal. Testing an existing definition is faster and cheaper than building one from nothing
+Introductions to lost deals if you have them. Buyers who chose someone else are the most useful and hardest to reach
+Your CRM stage definitions, so we can see where deals actually die rather than where they are recorded as dying
+Tolerance for an answer you will not enjoy. This engagement regularly contradicts the plan
06/
Buyers To Stop Chasing
Segments that do not survive contact
06.1
The enthusiastic non-buyer
Takes every meeting, gives excellent feedback, holds no budget. Entire pipelines get built on this person because the activity metrics look healthy right up until the quarter closes.
06.2
The user who is not the purchaser
Targeting the person who will use the product when a different function signs the contract produces high engagement and low revenue. It is common in tools sold into operations, and it usually shows up as a stalled stage rather than a lost deal.
06.3
Segments that only close with heroic sales effort
They do close, so nobody questions them. They also consume several times the sales cost of an adjacent segment, which only becomes visible when someone measures cost to acquire per segment instead of in aggregate.
06.4
The aspirational logo tier
Large accounts that appear in the plan because they would look good on the website. Usually a different product, a different cycle length and, honestly, a different company.
06.5
The side of the marketplace nobody owns
In two-sided businesses one side tends to get the budget and the other gets hope. In the live-lessons engagement, demand and supply needed completely different channels, and only one of them was being funded.
06.6
The buyer you inherited from the pitch deck
Fundraising narratives calcify. A definition written to make a market look big is not the same as one written to make targeting work, and the two drift apart quietly.
07/
A Worked Example
Anonymised, published in full
07.0
A marketplace for live lessons
The situation
The company ran a marketplace for booking live lessons and masterclasses from experts. It had two sides: learners who buy and creators who teach. Growth spend was going out with no clear read on returns.
What we did
We split the research by side, measuring the demand side to completed bookings rather than clicks or views, and reading creator acquisition on teachers who actually published and stayed active.
What came back
Learners searched for the specific skill they wanted, so search converted and paid social filled the funnel cheaply without closing bookings. Supply behaved completely differently: active teachers introduced other experts far more cheaply than paid acquisition ever did. The two sides needed separate channels and separate budgets.
Every research method has a boundary. Here is where this one sits, so you can decide before you commission it rather than find out at the read-out.
08.1
Buyers reconstruct their reasoning
People rationalise after the fact. We ask about sequence and specific events rather than motivation, because what someone did in a given week is far more reliable than why they say they did it.
08.2
Lost deals are hard to reach
Buyers who chose a competitor are the most valuable interviews and the least willing. We get them more often than not, and we tell you the achieved split rather than quietly filling the gap with easier interviews.
08.3
It will not size your market
This tells you who buys and why. How many of them exist is a different question, and /use-cases/market-sizing is the engagement for it.
08.4
Redefining the ICP is the easy part
Acting on it means changing targeting, messaging, comp plans and sometimes the roadmap. We can tell you what the buyer research says. Whether the organisation will accept it is not something research decides.
09/
Where We Have Run This
2 anonymised studies
GTM-07
SOCIAL REWARDS APP · CHANNEL TEST
Consumer app · social + shop-to-earn rewards
A consumer social-rewards app tested five channels to find which drove installs and which built the partner side.
GTM-05
LIVE-LESSONS MARKETPLACE · CHANNEL TEST
Marketplace · live expert lessons
A live-lessons marketplace tested five channels to find which converted learners and which brought creators.
10/
Questions
5 answers
01How is this different from talking to our own customers?
Your customers already chose you, so they can only explain why the current motion works. This deliberately includes buyers who chose a competitor and buyers who chose nothing, because that is where the positioning and channel problems are visible.
02Do you produce personas?
No. Personas are a summary format that tends to outlive the evidence underneath them. You get the buyer definition, the committee, the triggers, the segments we ruled out, and the interviews they came from.
03We already have an ICP. Can you just test it?
Yes, and it is the faster and cheaper version. Send us the definition and we will interview against it, then report which parts held, which did not, and how confident we are in each.
04How many interviews does this take?
Usually fifteen to thirty, split across current buyers, competitor buyers and no-decision buyers. Below about twelve you cannot separate a pattern from a personality.
05Will you talk to our existing customers?
If you want us to, yes, and it is often worth including a few for contrast. We would not build the engagement on them, for the reason above.
11/
Related Engagements
3 suggestions
02
CHANNEL DISCOVERY
Timeline · 5 to 8 weeks
Five channels tested against one qualified bar. You get a ranking, the reasoning, and a budget plan.
01
GROWTH OPERATOR INTERVIEWS
Timeline · 3 to 5 days to first call
Calls with the VPs of Marketing and Heads of Growth who already ran your motion somewhere else.
05
GTM BENCHMARKS
Timeline · 3 to 6 weeks
Acquisition cost, conversion, cycle length and team shape from companies genuinely like yours.
Brief us on ICP research.
Response under 4 hours, Mon–Fri. First call in 3 to 5 business days.