9,000 to 25,000 dollars, 12 to 25 interviews Runs 4 to 6 weeks. Twelve interviews sits at the bottom of the band. Twenty-five, with two roles inside key accounts or two roles inside a distributor, sits at the top. Lost-quote and channel recruits cost more than current customers because they are harder to get.
What you get. Five objects: how each role decides, the language they use when nobody is selling to them, the proof they trust, what you should stop saying, and a short brief somebody can act on without a translator. Not a 40 page deck. A short brief and the verbatim appendix behind it.
Why this sits after CHI
The Channel Health Index tells you which distributor, which role, and which dimension is off. It cannot tell you why.
Unusual scores are the trigger. High ease and dead internal promotion. An owner who describes a partner and an inside sales team that will not lead with you. A protect-list distributor that is not growing. A dimension that collapsed in 3 branches and nowhere else. Those patterns are as far as the instrument goes. Past that point there is no extra item you can add to the wave that will produce the underlying data. The next step is a conversation with the people who produced the score.
That conversation is this project. Voice of Customer when the oddity sits in the account. Voice of the Channel when the oddity sits in the distributor. Often both, because a weak promotion score is sometimes a specification story the customer never told you and sometimes a stocking story the branch will not put on a questionnaire.
Two slants, one method
Voice of Customer. Current accounts and lost quotes. Where an account allows it, one engineer and one buyer inside the same company. They do not agree with each other, and the disagreement is usually the finding.
Voice of the Channel. Principals, outside sales, and inside sales at named distributors, usually the distributors CHI already flagged. Same interviewer, same second-question rule. This is not a second CHI. It is the why behind a card you already hold.
If the only question is whether a distributor will pull the line, stop at CHI. If the card is strange and you need the cause, do not field another wave. Interview.
How it is run
The same interviewer on every call. A second question is required on every answer, because the first answer is the one people have already said out loud to somebody else. No moderator team, no rented discussion guide, no junior running the back half of the sample.
You provide the list. For customer work that includes the losses, which is the part most companies do not have assembled. For channel work that includes the distributors and roles CHI already named. We do the asking. Nobody from your sales organization sits on a call. The clock starts when the list is usable, not when the purchase order is signed. Lost-quote and inside sales recruiting is what slips the 4 to 6 weeks if that list is thin.
How candor works
Names stay inside the study. Quotes are cleared individually before they are attributed to anything. Your sales organization does not receive the raw recordings or the transcript. A customer or an inside salesperson who thinks the tape is going to their salesperson gives you the version they have already given their salesperson.
When it is worth buying
When a CHI or SHI result has produced an argument instead of an action. When quotes are lost at a competitive price and the score does not explain it. When a distributor looks loyal on 4 dimensions and will not promote you on the fifth. When a new offer or a spec sheet has to survive first contact with the person who specifies it, or with the person who stocks it.
When it is not
Not an insights subscription, an annual tracker, or a study with no decision attached. Research with no decision behind it produces a document that gets read once.
Not a second index wave. If you already know the pattern and only need more numbers, re-run CHI.
Not a focus group. Eight to 10 people watching each other produce a conversation rather than an answer, at 15,000 to 30,000 dollars. Where a campaign actually needs a group reaction, we run a 6 to 8 person expert panel remotely rather than a two-way mirror.