Find the pain that has a budget
Find the pain that has a budget
Not all pain is equal, and the most common research mistake is mistaking a complaint for a buying signal. Customers will happily list a dozen annoyances when you ask. Almost none of those annoyances are worth money to them. Your job in research is to find the small number of problems that are painful enough that someone has already been told to fix them, or has budget waiting to.
The signal you are hunting for is movement. Has the buyer tried to solve this before? Have they cobbled together a workaround, hired someone, bought a competing tool, built a spreadsheet that someone maintains? Pain that has produced action is pain with a budget behind it. Pain that produces only a sigh when you mention it is a nice-to-have, and nice-to-haves do not fund a company.
In B2B specifically, the pain that pays is pain tied to a number the business cares about. Revenue not closing, costs running away, a regulatory deadline, a team drowning and about to need another expensive hire. When a buyer can connect your problem to one of those, the purchase justifies itself internally. When they cannot, you are asking them to spend a budget that does not exist for a problem nobody is measured on.
So in every interview, chase the consequence. They mention a problem, you ask what it costs them. What happens if it stays unsolved for another year? Who else in the business feels it? Has anyone above you noticed? You are testing whether the pain has weight, or whether it is a passing irritation that will never become a line item.
The hard discipline is to listen for the painful truth rather than the flattering one. Buyers are polite. They will tell you your idea is interesting, that they would "definitely consider it". Interest is not a budget. Push past the politeness to find the one or two problems they are genuinely, expensively stuck on, and build the business there.
INTERVIEW EWOUD: Give an example of a problem that sounded big in interviews but had no budget behind it, and one that sounded small but clearly did. How did you tell them apart at the time?