Customer discovery interviews, and how many are enough
B2B customer discovery interviews: the sample size the research converges on, why your segments change that number, and the questions that get honest answers.
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BDGL / Insights / Entrepreneurship
Buyers pick from their Day One shortlist 95 percent of the time, and they first contact sellers 61 percent of the way through. The meeting where you would hand over a case study happens after the decision it was meant to influence.
The question is almost always asked backwards. "How do we win an enterprise deal without case studies" assumes the case study is a thing you produce during the sale, to overcome an objection somebody raises in a meeting. By the time anyone could raise that objection, the decision it would have affected has usually already been made.
That is not a figure of speech. It is the most useful finding in B2B buying research right now, and it reframes the whole problem.
6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, built on nearly 4,000 responses from buyers across North America, APAC and EMEA, measures the shape of the buying process rather than opinions about it. Three of its numbers matter here.
First, buyers now make contact with sellers about 61 percent of the way through their journey, down from 69 percent. Earlier than before, and still well past the middle.
Second, and this is the one to sit with: buyers choose from one of the four vendors on their Day One Shortlist 95 percent of the time, up from 85 percent the year before. The shortlist is assembled at the start, largely without you, and it almost always contains the winner.
Third, the Selection Phase winner is the final winner 77 percent of the time. The report also notes buyers evaluated 5.1 vendors on average, up from 4.5, and that average cycle length fell from 11.3 months to 10.1.
Put those together. The pitch where you would deploy a case study happens after the shortlist that decided the outcome. So the real question is not what to say instead of a case study in the meeting. It is how to get onto a list that is drawn up before the meeting exists, by people using whatever evidence they can find without talking to you.
Worth being precise about the job you are trying to replace, because "credibility" is too vague to act on. A case study does three separable things:
Only the second genuinely requires having done the thing. The first is about diagnosis and can be demonstrated directly. The third is about contract structure, not history. Most firms with no logos try to fake the second and neglect the other two, which is the worst available allocation of effort.
The cheapest replacement for "we did this before" is "we understand this better than the people with logos do". That is demonstrated in how you describe the problem, not in claims about yourself.
Concretely: a written diagnosis of the prospect's situation that names the failure modes, the sequence, the thing that usually goes wrong at month four. If you are right, it does the first job of a case study outright, because recognising the situation in that much detail is evidence you have been near it.
This is also the only substitute that works pre-contact, which given the Day One shortlist finding is the one that matters most. Published, findable, specific writing about the problem is how you get considered by people who have not met you. Our note on how to get meetings with enterprise clients covers the access side of this; the evidence side is what we are describing here.
A pilot converts the question from "have you done this before" to "can you do this here", which is a question you can answer at your own cost in weeks.
Make it paid. A free pilot signals that your time is the cheapest thing in the room and attracts buyers who were never going to proceed. Make it small enough that a mid-level sponsor can approve it without the committee that would have required references. And define the result before you start, in a sentence both sides would recognise as pass or fail.
The trap is the pilot that cannot end. If there is no written criterion, the pilot becomes an indefinite discount and the enterprise relationship never converts. Write down what happens on success, including the price, before the pilot begins.
You have less than you think and more than you are using. Individual track record from previous employers is real evidence even when the company is new, and it is yours to cite. So are named advisors, named partners, certifications and audits you have actually passed, and references from clients too small to impress who will nonetheless answer the phone.
The rule is that every borrowed item must be checkable and described as what it is. "Our head of delivery ran this function at X for six years" is strong. Implying X is a client is the kind of thing that ends a deal in procurement rather than in the room, and it ends it permanently.
The third job of a case study is risk transfer, and a contract does it better than a story does. A short initial term, a defined exit, a milestone-linked payment schedule, a service credit, a clear data and handover clause. These are more persuasive to the people who actually block new vendors than any slide, because they turn your lack of history into their reduced exposure.
Note what this does to the conversation: it stops being a debate about your credentials and becomes a negotiation about terms, which is a conversation you can win. And it does not require discounting. If you find yourself cutting price because you lack references, you have chosen the one concession that also signals the thing you are trying to disprove. The alternatives are in handling price objections without discounting.
The counterintuitive part. Without case studies your win rate on competitive, committee-run, procurement-heavy deals is genuinely poor, and the Day One shortlist number explains why: those are exactly the processes where a formal vendor list is assembled from reputation before anyone talks to anyone.
So the deals to chase are the ones where that machinery is not running: a new problem with no established vendor category, an urgent timeline that makes a long process impossible, a sponsor with discretionary budget, an incumbent who has just failed visibly. In each of those, the absence of precedent is less disqualifying because precedent is scarce for everyone.
This is a qualification discipline, not an attitude. Disqualifying a flattering, unwinnable enterprise logo early is the single highest-return habit available to a firm without references, because those processes consume quarters. A framework that survives scrutiny is in our B2B lead qualification framework, and the questions that surface the real process are in the eight discovery call questions that decide it.
Worth reading the mirror image, because it tells you what your buyer is doing while you are not in the room. Our colleagues at Rivl wrote a buyer's guide to choosing a software development company, and the criteria it recommends are instructive: what the buyer is told to examine is how a supplier scopes, what they ask before quoting, and how they handle the parts that go wrong. Not the logo wall.
That gap between what buyers are advised to evaluate and what shortlists actually get built on is the opening. The evaluation criteria favour a careful small firm. The shortlist mechanism does not. Your job is to survive the mechanism long enough to reach the criteria.
Some deals are not available to you yet, and no amount of framing changes that. A regulated buyer with a vendor risk policy requiring three comparable references is not applying a bias you can argue with; it is applying a rule, and the person you are talking to cannot waive it. Recognising those early and leaving is not defeatism, it is how you keep the quarters you would otherwise spend losing slowly.
The second limit is time. Everything above is a way of competing without a track record, not a way of never needing one. The point of the pilots and the small, winnable, unglamorous deals is that eighteen months from now they are the case studies, and the question stops being asked. Firms that refuse the small deals in pursuit of the logo tend to still be answering this question three years later.
And one thing we would not do: invent the case study. Anonymised composites, "a leading regional bank", results from work you advised on rather than did. Enterprise buyers check, procurement checks harder, and the discovery converts a winnable deal into a closed door at an account you can never approach again. The absence of references is a disadvantage. Being caught embellishing them is disqualifying.
Send us the opportunity, who the sponsor is, and whether a formal vendor list exists. We will tell you honestly whether it is winnable from where you stand, and if it is, which of the four substitutes to put the effort into first.
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