Article 03
Purchase friction patterns in B2B decisions
Stalls, workarounds, and silent drop-offs are not noise. They are the raw material klitflempot clusters before any positioning claim is written.
Name the friction before you brand it
Teams often jump from a painful anecdote to a campaign theme. klitflempot insists on an intermediate step: classify friction. Is it cognitive (unclear difference), procedural (security questionnaire), social (champion lacks cover), or economic (budget owner never entered the thread)? Classification prevents overclaiming one interview as a market truth.
Visible stalls
Explicit delays: “waiting on legal,” “need another demo,” “POC never scheduled.” Log owner and date. Cross-check with decision-maker maps.
Silent drop-offs
Threads that die without a no. Observation often finds the real reason — a rival already embedded, or a champion left the company. See market observation.
Workarounds
Spreadsheets, shadow tools, manual exports. Workarounds reveal the job-to-be-done better than feature wish lists from interviews.
Language collapse
When buyers cannot repeat your value in their own words, friction is semantic. That feeds directly into positioning synthesis.
Comparison: anecdote vs. pattern
| Signal | Anecdote (keep raw) | Pattern (act later) |
|---|---|---|
| Security review | One CISO asked for a custom DPA mid-POC. | Three accounts stalled at vendor risk before pricing talks. |
| Champion cover | A VP said they “need ammo for finance.” | Champions repeatedly ask for one-page cost-of-delay narratives. |
| Demo comprehension | Buyer misnamed a module. | Buyers invent nicknames because product names do not stick. |
The claude research cadence moves items from the anecdote column to the pattern column only when multiple sources — interviews, observation, lost-deal notes — converge. klitflempot still refuses to convert those patterns into ROI promises or “representative” percentages.
Static Q&A
How many examples make a pattern?
klitflempot favors qualitative saturation over magic numbers: when new stories stop adding new mechanisms, you likely have a usable cluster. That is not a sample-size claim.
Can friction patterns drive roadmap?
Yes — as hypotheses. Pair them with product evidence. Marketing should not invent features from one painful call. See insight patterns.
Synthesize positioning from friction, not slogans
Claims should be checkable against observed buying pain.