Bmc Proxy Expert Validation

---
name: bmc-proxy-expert-validation
description: "Finds people who professionally interact with your target customer's Jobs, Pains, and Gains every day — salespeople, support staff, brokers, consultants adjacent to your category — and interviews them as a fast, cheap, pattern-rich validation source before or alongside direct customer interviews."
---

# BMC Proxy Expert Validation

## Purpose

Direct customer interviews are essential but slow and limited in number
— a handful of conversations gives one data point each. Some
professionals talk to dozens or hundreds of people in the target
segment as part of their actual job, and have already done the pattern
recognition across all of them. Interviewing one of these adjacent
experts can sharpen a hypothesis faster and cheaper than several direct
customer interviews, before those direct interviews even happen. Use
this early, alongside `opportunity-recognition/opportunity-intake-elicitation`,
as a hypothesis-sharpening step before committing to the direct customer
research plan.

## Anchored in research

Grounded in the established customer-development interview tradition:
Steve Blank's customer development methodology (talk to people close to
the problem before building), and Rob Fitzpatrick's *The Mom Test*
principle of talking to people who already live the problem rather than
people who will be polite about your idea. The specific practice of
using an ADJACENT professional (someone who sells, supports, or advises
in a related category, rather than a target customer directly) as a
fast proxy source is this pack's own applied technique — a reasonable
extension of that broader tradition, not a direct citation to a single
named source for this exact framing.

## Method

1. **Identify the adjacent role**, not the target customer directly:
   someone whose job is to sell, support, or advise people in your
   target segment about a RELATED but not identical problem. Examples:
   a salesperson for a product that serves the same buyer but solves a
   different problem; a customer support representative for a similar
   category; a broker or consultant who serves the same segment across
   many companies; a specialist recruiter for the segment's industry; a
   former employee of a competitor.
2. **Understand why this works before doing it.** The adjacent
   professional's job is to listen to Jobs, Pains, and Gains all day,
   across many customers — their aggregate pattern recognition is often
   richer, and faster to access, than a handful of direct interviews of
   your own. This doesn't replace direct customer research; it sharpens
   the hypotheses that direct research will later test.
3. **Design the interview around THEIR pattern, not your idea.** Ask
   about what they see across many customers — "what do people usually
   push back on when this kind of thing is pitched to them?", "what
   makes someone say no?", "what's the objection you hear most often
   that never actually gets addressed?" — rather than pitching your
   specific concept and asking for a reaction. This is discovery, not
   validation-by-flattery; a specific pitch invites politeness, a
   pattern question invites real information.
4. **Use a low-friction access approach.** This isn't a formal research
   engagement with a budget — a short call, a coffee, or a genuine
   professional favor is usually enough, and is often easier to get than
   people expect, because most professionals are willing to talk about
   patterns they already know well. The point is speed and low cost, not
   rigor.
5. **Cast the net wider than the obvious role.** Don't limit the search
   to "a salesperson" literally — any adjacent-role professional who has
   real, repeated exposure to the segment's Jobs/Pains/Gains works
   equally well, and some of the best sources are non-obvious (a trade
   association contact, a specialist recruiter, a competitor's former
   employee).
6. **Treat findings as directional, and feed them forward explicitly.**
   Use what's learned to refine the hypotheses that get tested with real
   target customers next — via
   `bmc-experiment-method-selection/SKILL.md` — rather than treating the
   proxy interview itself as sufficient evidence to act on. This is a
   hypothesis-sharpening source, not a substitute for direct customer
   validation.

## What this skill does NOT do

- Doesn't replace direct interviews with real target customers — proxy
  interviews sharpen what gets tested directly, they don't substitute
  for it, especially for a major or hard-to-reverse decision.
- Doesn't work well if the "adjacent" role chosen is actually too
  distant from the segment — the value depends on genuine, repeated,
  professional exposure to people in the target segment, not just
  general industry familiarity.
- Doesn't provide statistically representative evidence — one adjacent
  professional's pattern recognition is still one source's view; use
  more than one where the decision's stakes justify it.

## Refinement notes

- Which adjacent roles have produced your best signal in practice, and
  which have turned out to be less useful than expected?
- What's your own best opening question for this kind of interview —
  the one that reliably gets past politeness into real pattern
  information?
- How do you typically get access to these interviews — what's worked
  best for a low-friction ask?

## Continue from here

- Use alongside: `../../../../opportunity-recognition/skills/opportunity-intake-elicitation/SKILL.md`
  as an early, cheap hypothesis-sharpening step.
- Feeds into: `bmc-experiment-method-selection/SKILL.md` — findings here
  refine what gets tested directly with real customers next.
- This pack's shared guardrails: `../../CLAUDE.md`

## References

- `../../references/bmc-source-material-notes.md` — source material background
- `../../references/bmc-resilience-heuristics-research.md` — selection and grounding notes for this skill and its siblings
- `../../CLAUDE.md` — this pack's shared guardrails