Run sharper B2B customer discovery in your consulting projects

A client project involves three different perspectives.

Who · Their role in discovery

• Your consultancy: Structures the investigation, challenges assumptions, facilitates workshops and conducts research.
• Your client: Owns the product or service, brings business knowledge and makes product decisions.
• Your client’s customers: Experience the actual problems, workflows and decisions the project needs to understand.

These perspectives don’t always align.

Your client’s product team may believe customers want more automation. Their customers may be concerned about control, implementation effort or responsibilities between departments.

The challenge is identifying these possibilities without treating internal opinions as established customer needs.

Virtual Customer allows your consultancy to explore modeled perspectives of the client’s customers. The resulting questions can then be discussed with the client and investigated with actual customer participants.

Before a workshop, ask the client to describe the proposed offering, intended customers and assumptions behind the initiative.

Then separate what the client knows from what it believes.

Four areas are particularly useful:

The customer problem. What difficulty does the client believe it is solving? What evidence shows that customers experience it, and how important is it compared with other problems?

The customer roles. Who experiences the problem, who benefits from solving it, and who might influence adoption or approval?

The current approach. How do customers handle the situation today? Which workarounds or existing solutions would the proposed offering need to improve upon?

The proposed value. What would have to change in the customer’s work for the new product or service to become useful?

These questions help shift the workshop from discussing the proposed solution to examining the assumptions that justify it.

They also make it easier to distinguish a missing customer perspective from a genuine disagreement about the product.

Virtual Customer can support several moments in a consulting engagement.

Project stage · How to use simulated customer conversations

• Before the client workshop: Explore the proposed customer context, surface missing roles and prepare questions that challenge the client’s assumptions.
• During early discovery: Investigate possible customer problems, workflows and constraints while preparing the first round of actual customer research.
• Between interview rounds: Explore alternative interpretations of early findings, identify additional stakeholders and improve questions for the next research round.

A practical workflow starts with one specific client decision.

Define the customer company by industry, geographic market and size. Select the relevant customer roles and describe the client’s offering or hypothesis.

Run separate conversations with virtual customers representing those roles. Ask about their work before asking them to evaluate the proposed solution.

Compare the perspectives and capture possible objections, dependencies and missing information.

Then bring those findings into the client discussion as hypotheses to investigate, not conclusions about what customers actually want.

Illustrative scenario, not an actual consulting engagement or customer research result.

Imagine a digital product consultancy working with a European industrial equipment manufacturer.

The client wants to develop a digital service that helps its customers coordinate maintenance activities, access equipment information and follow up on service work.

The client’s initial assumption is that customers need a single digital interface for these activities.

The consultancy wants to investigate whether that assumption reflects a meaningful customer problem.

It uses Virtual Customer to explore several roles at mid-sized German manufacturing companies.

Customer perspective · Question to explore · What the consultancy needs to verify

• Maintenance manager: Question to explore: What makes maintenance coordination difficult today?; What the consultancy needs to verify: Which difficulties occur in actual maintenance work, and what are their consequences?
• Operations manager: Question to explore: How does maintenance coordination affect production planning?; What the consultancy needs to verify: Whether the proposed service addresses an important operational need.
• IT manager: Question to explore: What requirements would affect introduction and ongoing operation?; What the consultancy needs to verify: Actual integration, access and security requirements.
• Service coordinator: Question to explore: How is information exchanged with external service providers?; What the consultancy needs to verify: Where information is lost, delayed or difficult to use.

The virtual conversations might suggest several competing explanations.

Perhaps information is difficult to find. Perhaps responsibilities are unclear. Or perhaps the existing systems work well, but communication between organizations causes difficulties.

None of these possibilities establishes a customer finding.

Instead, the consultancy uses them to prepare a workshop that explores what the client already knows, what remains assumed and which customer perspectives require direct investigation.

A useful discovery deliverable should make the next step clear.

For the industrial service example, the consultancy could prepare a concise handoff containing:

• Stakeholder hypotheses: Which customer roles may experience, influence or constrain the proposed service?
• Problem hypotheses: What possible difficulties deserve investigation, including alternative explanations?
• Workshop questions: What does the client know, what evidence supports its assumptions and where does the team disagree?
• Interview plan: Which real customer roles to recruit, what situations to investigate and which open-ended questions to ask?
• Decision implications: Which findings could change the product concept, target customer or next development step?

Keep three types of information distinct in client-facing material.

A client assumption describes what the client believes. A simulated signal suggests what might need investigation. A customer finding comes from actual customer research and should retain its source and limitations.

This distinction matters when discoveries challenge the original brief. An apparently convincing simulated objection should not become a product requirement until it has been examined against suitable real-world evidence.

For sensitive client projects, use appropriately minimized or non-confidential descriptions unless the relevant information handling has been reviewed and approved.

Can Virtual Customer replace customer interviews in a client engagement?

No. It supports exploration and research preparation. Actual customer interviews, observation and other evidence remain necessary to establish customer needs and make consequential product decisions.

Can we use it when a project already has customer research?

Yes. Existing findings can help the team formulate more precise questions for further exploration. Simulated conversations may suggest alternative explanations or overlooked roles, which should be checked against the underlying research rather than treated as confirmation.

Is this only useful for new product innovation?

No. The same approach can support existing product improvements, service redesign, new customer segments and market expansion when the client needs to understand unfamiliar customer situations.