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Customer research earns its cost when it changes a decision. For climate and science-led companies, the research should study four things. They are the pressure the person is under, what they want to make easier or safer, the doubts that could stop them and the moment the decision becomes real.
A polished persona that nobody in the company recognises from a real conversation changes nothing. The method below keeps research close to real decisions and ends with four choices the company can act on.
Start with the decision, then the demographics
Age, job title and company size help with segmentation. They rarely explain why someone says yes. A procurement director and a sustainability lead in the same company face different risks even when both shape the same purchase. Two people with the same title act differently when one is fixing an urgent compliance issue and the other is exploring a future opportunity.
Clayton Christensen and colleagues made the same argument in their work on jobs to be done. People buy a product to make progress in a particular circumstance, and customer attributes alone explain little of that choice. Climate tech research works best when it gets that close to the circumstance and the decision.
Pressure, the force behind the purchase
Pressure can come from regulation, customer demand, cost, supply limits, board expectations, technical performance, reporting rules or a failing incumbent solution. Separate general industry concern from the pressure this specific person feels. "Biodiversity is becoming important" is a trend. "We have to set a baseline across these sites before the next reporting cycle, and our current method is too slow" is a decision context. That level of detail changes the product story.
Pressure also sets the tone of the message. A buyer under deadline wants speed and certainty. A buyer exploring an option wants evidence that the category is real. Research that records which pressure applies saves the sales team from pitching urgency to someone who is still browsing.
Desire, what better looks like
Ask what the person could do if the problem were solved. They might decide faster, reduce exposure, qualify a supplier, secure capacity, drop manual work, report with more confidence, meet a specification, raise yield or make a project financeable. Each answer gives the message an outcome that belongs to the customer.
The gap between company language and customer language often shows up here. A company may say it wants to "transform environmental intelligence". Its customer may want to know whether a planned intervention changed biological conditions at one site. The second version gives the product somewhere to land. Gaia AI gives foresters a backpack and an app that turn a walk through the forest into inventory data. When it came to us, its website described the tool in general terms and said little to the people who buy it. We rewrote the page for forest managers, opening on their problem in their terms.
Doubt, what makes a sensible person decline
Useful research gets uncomfortable at this stage. Ask what feels risky, which proof is missing, which internal team might object and what would make the product hard to integrate. Ask whether the buyer trusts the category, whether budget exists, whether the problem matters enough right now and whether the incumbent solution is good enough.
Treat objections as information. Some are language problems that clearer copy can fix. Others point to a real product, evidence, economic or operational constraint, and those tell the company where to work before it tells the market anything.
Eeden shows objections turned into material. Eeden turns textile waste into new raw materials for fibre, and it needed brands to commit to future capacity while it was still scaling. The people who would sign sat across several functions in a brand, from sustainability to business development. They carried questions about the chemicals in the process, the source of the material, the company's ability to scale and who else was involved. We wrote personas for those signers, and their fears and objections became the pitch's frequently asked questions, almost line for line. Eeden reports that the pitch helped it sign a major Letter of Intent with a global brand. Our account of how Eeden's pitch supported that Letter of Intent sets out the sequence.
The decision moment and the existing alternative
People can like an idea for months without facing a decision. Find the moment when interest turns into action. A regulation takes effect, a procurement cycle opens, a plant reaches a design milestone, a board asks for a number, a contract expires, a funding round starts, a pilot result arrives or a new facility needs a supplier. This is often where "why now" becomes concrete. A market can be structurally attractive and still offer this particular person no decision this year.
Research the existing alternative as closely as any named competitor. The real rival is often doing nothing, an internal spreadsheet, a consulting process, an incumbent supplier, a manual field method, a cheaper and weaker product or a different budget priority. Ask what the customer does today, why they have kept doing it and what it does well enough to survive. Then define how much better a new product must be to justify switching. Positioning becomes grounded here, and our guide to positioning climate tech takes it further.
From research to recognition and language
The Story System, our framework for the core stories a company tells, includes a Customer Story built around recognition. Before the product appears, show that you understand the customer's current situation, the pressure they are under, what coping with it costs them and why they cannot easily get out of it. This earns the right to offer a solution, and the product explanation then answers a problem that already feels real to the reader.
Research improves language too. Note the exact nouns and verbs customers use for the problem. Technical teams tend to speak in terms of mechanism, while buyers speak in terms of responsibility and consequence. Copy customer language with care, and pay attention when the same phrase comes up across several interviews. It often reveals the mental category the product needs to enter.
Aspyre Foods shows a story moving from the company's framing to the buyer's. Aspyre grows duckweed to produce functional proteins for food producers, starting with casein and Rubisco. Its early decks opened on cheese and a climate problem. Interest from food producers then moved towards Rubisco, and we moved the story to food producers who need functional proteins they can rely on, which put the buyer's working problem at the front.
Look for behaviour over compliments
Research conversations are polite. Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test makes the case for asking about past behaviour and current problems, because people are polite about ideas and precise about their own week. "Interesting" is a courtesy. Behaviour tells you more, and the signals below run roughly from weakest to strongest.
- The buyer shares internal data.
- The buyer introduces the relevant decision-maker.
- The buyer agrees a defined pilot.
- The buyer allocates budget.
- The buyer signs a letter of intent.
- The buyer negotiates commercial terms.
- The buyer places an order.
- The buyer renews or expands.
Keep each signal in its own row and avoid collapsing them into one word such as traction. Eeden's Letter of Intent is a real signal and sits several steps short of an order. One enthusiastic conversation falls well short of a market. Look for repeated evidence across relevant buyers and increasingly costly forms of commitment. The threshold depends on the product. A multi-million-pound industrial project cannot be validated with the same number or type of signals as a low-cost software subscription.
Make the first step survivable
Some products ask the customer to make too large a first move. A feasibility study, paid assessment, small pilot, sample, trial volume or staged agreement can produce useful information while limiting the buyer's exposure. Eeden's close asked for a Letter of Intent that reserved pilot capacity and converted into a pilot contract.
The first commitment should be large enough to generate evidence and small enough for the buyer to defend internally. That argues against making every engagement free. A free pilot can produce weak demand evidence when the customer's cost of taking part is close to zero, because nobody had to argue for it inside their organisation.
If people understand the proposition and still do not move, look beyond the message. Check economics, product readiness, regulation, authority, timing, switching costs, evidence, integration and internal incentives. A rational no is valuable information, and more persuasive copy will not change it.
Turn research into four decisions
A long research report that ends the project wastes the interviews. Close the work by making four decisions in writing.
- Primary audience. The group that matters first for the next commercial goal.
- Core pressure. The problem or change that makes the offer relevant now.
- Offer. The clearest first thing this person can buy, test or commit to, which our piece on offer architecture helps define.
- Proof. The evidence that would make the next step defensible for the buyer.
Then take those decisions back into the market and test them. Customer research is a cycle that swaps assumptions for better questions and steadily stronger evidence. Its real output is a company that decides well because it also understands the person who has to decide.
When a team brings its interview notes and needs those four decisions in writing, our climate tech positioning work settles the primary audience, core pressure, offer and proof with the leadership team.
Sources and further reading
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