Touchpoints
Where the purchase is actually handled
A claude map is a sequence of handoffs, not a funnel drawn to flatter the vendor’s stages.
Buyers do not experience your category as awareness, consideration, and decision. They experience a colleague’s aside, a renewal date, a questionnaire, a lawyer, a week on a pilot line, and a meeting in which someone asks who will own the login after go-live. Touchpoint mapping names those contacts so later interviews have somewhere specific to stand. It does not rank them, and it does not assign conversion rates.
A path, not a pipeline
Start from a real case, the same rule as in decision-maker interviews. Ask which contacts occurred, in which order, and which one changed the file. Then go and watch one of them if you can, under the constraints in market observation. The map is finished when each contact has a listener’s question and an explicit refusal: the claim this contact cannot carry. Those refusals keep the map from being pasted into a board slide as if it were a study of the market.
Handoffs are where claude notes usually find the stall. The champion believes the pilot settled the question. Security believes the packet is incomplete. Legal is waiting on a data-processing term nobody briefed. Procurement is scoring vendors against a sheet written for the incumbent. None of these people is “the buyer.” The map makes the handoff visible so friction can be named as a structural pause rather than as a personality.
What to listen for
Use the right-hand column as a brake. If a sentence in your readout sounds like that column, delete it.
| Touchpoint | Listen for | Do not treat it as |
|---|---|---|
| Peer referral | Whose name is trusted, and in which job | A share of the market |
| Analyst or trade note | Which category label sticks inside the account | A mandate to buy |
| RFP or security form | Requirements copied from the incumbent | A ranked preference |
| Security review | The fear being managed, and by whom | A feature request |
| Legal redline | The clause where the file actually pauses | A pricing objection |
| Pilot | What “working” means on the floor that week | Proof of a financial return |
| Renewal | What would have to break before a switch | A loyalty score |
How a map is built from cases
Lay the contacts from four to eight cases in rows. Do not average them. Look for a contact that appears in several rows at the moment the file slows down. Look equally for a case that skips a contact everyone else treats as mandatory. That skip is a negative case, and it belongs in the pattern memo beside the repetition. A map that only shows the common path will later be mistaken for a rule of the category.
Name the owner of each handoff in the account, not in your org chart. “Sales engineer to solutions consultant” is your choreography. “Plant planner to IT security, with procurement copied” is theirs. Positioning that describes your choreography as if it were their path will not survive a second interview. When the map is stable enough to brief, it is still an input to positioning synthesis, not the line itself. The line has to say what job is being done at the handoff that matters, and what alternative already occupies it.
A worked fragment
Consider a composite, not a client: scheduling software for plant maintenance. In three recounted purchases the file moved quickly until a security questionnaire, then waited. In a fourth, there was no questionnaire because the tool never touched the plant network; planners kept a spreadsheet and emailed a PDF. A claude map records both. It does not declare that “security is the buying journey.” It says: when the tool is asked to sit on the network, this account’s packet becomes the stall; when it is not, a different alternative — the spreadsheet — remains the system of record. That is specific enough to change an interview guide. It is not a statistic.