# Buyer Interview Craft — getting the truth out of win/loss calls

The core problem: buyers are polite to vendors and kind to themselves. Every technique here exists to route around one of those two distortions.

## Setup decisions that determine everything
- **Who calls:** not the account's salesperson. Losses especially — buyers won't tell someone "your rep oversold" to that rep's face. A neutral third party or PM lifts candour dramatically.
- **When:** 2-6 weeks after the decision. Sooner = decision-justification mode; later = reconstructed memory that flatters the process they wish they'd run.
- **Wins are half the sample.** Teams interview only losses and learn only fear. Wins tell you what to *protect* — and win reasons are misattributed internally more often than loss reasons.

## Questions that work (and the polite lies they defeat)
- "Walk me through the day you decided you needed *something* — before any vendors." → gets the real trigger, defeats the retrofitted rational narrative.
- "Who else was in the room, and who was hardest to convince?" → surfaces the actual buying committee; the champion you knew is rarely the decider you didn't.
- "What almost made you go the other way?" → both directions, gold. Wins reveal your near-fatal weakness; losses reveal what you nearly won with.
- "If your colleague at another company were evaluating us, what would you warn them about?" → the advice frame licenses honesty that the feedback frame suppresses.
- "What did the winning option let you *stop worrying about*?" → decisions are made on anxiety relief more than feature lists; this finds the real currency.

## What NOT to do
- Never defend, correct, or explain your product on the call — one defensive sentence ends the honesty. You're an archaeologist, not a lawyer.
- Never ask "was it price?" Price is the polite no. Ask what the winner made feel *safe* — "too expensive" almost always decodes to "the value case wasn't believed."

## Coding the answers
Tag every claim by the buyer's role and confidence, and separate the **stated reason** from the **first-mentioned anxiety** — when they differ, the anxiety is the finding. Five interviews per quarter, coded consistently, beat twenty done once a year.
