How Reserv Discovered Their Customers Are Afraid of Making Another Mistake

How Reserv Discovered Their Customers Are Afraid of Making Another Mistake

Most B2B companies think they understand their customers because they know what problems their product solves. But surface-level understanding misses the psychology that actually drives buying decisions. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Martha Dreiling, Co-Founder & President of Reserv, shared how deep customer research revealed something that transformed their entire go-to-market approach: their buyers weren’t just looking for better software—they were terrified of making another catastrophic technology mistake.

The Research That Changed Everything

When Reserv decided to refocus on enterprise after shutting down their self-service product, they faced a fundamental problem: years of optimizing for the wrong customer had left them unclear about who they actually served and what truly motivated those buyers.

The team went back to basics, conducting comprehensive research across every available data source. “We pulled every single piece of research we’d done in the last three years and sort of created a synthesis of like, who are our customers and what are they looking for?” Martha explains.

The synthesis revealed patterns in historical deals, customer feedback, and sales conversations that pointed to something deeper than typical buyer personas. Their customers weren’t primarily concerned with features, pricing, or even capabilities. They were making decisions from a place of deep anxiety about technology choices.

“These are people who have been burned in the past by technology,” Martha states. “They’ve made decisions that haven’t worked out. They’re super anxious about making the wrong decision again.”

This wasn’t just a minor insight about buyer behavior—it was a complete reframing of what Reserv was actually selling. The product was a digital experience platform, but what buyers were really purchasing was risk mitigation and the confidence that they wouldn’t suffer through another painful implementation failure.

Understanding the Trauma

The psychology of burned buyers runs deeper than simple caution. When someone has experienced a major technology failure—blown budgets, missed deadlines, internal political damage, career consequences—it fundamentally changes how they evaluate future purchases.

These buyers approach new technology decisions with a specific set of fears. They worry about hidden complexity that won’t surface until after the contract is signed. They’re concerned about vendor promises that won’t match reality. They’re anxious about implementation challenges that will consume months and budgets. Most of all, they’re terrified of being the person responsible for another expensive failure.

This trauma manifests in specific behaviors during the sales process. These buyers ask more questions, require more proof points, involve more stakeholders, extend evaluation timelines, and scrutinize references with unusual intensity. Traditional sales approaches that focus on exciting features or efficiency gains miss what these buyers actually need: reassurance that this decision won’t blow up in their face.

Understanding this psychology gave Reserv a completely different lens for evaluating their market position. “We’re really focused on complex digital experiences for organizations that have a lot of sites or really complicated sites,” Martha explains. These aren’t just technical characteristics—they’re the exact scenarios where technology implementations most commonly fail and create the trauma that shapes future buying behavior.

How the Insight Changed Messaging

Once Reserv understood they were selling to anxious, previously-burned buyers, everything about their messaging had to change. Generic positioning about being “all-in-one” or having comprehensive features suddenly looked tone-deaf.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Martha says about the all-in-one positioning they’d been using. Worse, it potentially triggered anxiety for buyers who’d heard similar promises before watching implementations collapse under the weight of complexity.

The new messaging needed to directly address buyer psychology. Instead of leading with capabilities, they needed to lead with understanding of complexity and proven ability to handle it. Instead of promising easy solutions, they needed to acknowledge that complex digital experiences are genuinely hard and require serious expertise.

This shift required completely rethinking content strategy. “I was like, we have so much interesting stuff to say. We’ve been in this market for 25 years. We should really focus on high quality thought leadership,” Martha states. The goal wasn’t to generate leads through SEO-optimized blog posts—it was to demonstrate depth of experience that could reassure anxious buyers.

Martha made an unconventional hiring decision to execute this vision. “I hired a content strategist who was a journalist,” she explains. “Her whole background is in journalism. And she knows how to ask really good questions and how to pull out interesting stories from people.”

This choice reflected the insight about buyer psychology. Anxious buyers don’t need more marketing content promising easy solutions. They need evidence that the vendor has genuine expertise navigating complexity—the kind of nuanced understanding that comes through in well-crafted stories about solving real problems.

Transforming the Sales Approach

The customer psychology insight also demanded changes in how Reserv approached sales conversations. Traditional enterprise sales often focuses on business value, ROI calculations, and competitive differentiation. But anxious buyers care less about maximizing upside than minimizing downside risk.

Sales conversations needed to create space for buyers to voice their concerns and past experiences. Rather than rushing to demonstrate product capabilities, the approach became about understanding what went wrong before and how this time would be different.

This meant longer discovery processes, more extensive proof-of-concept phases, and deeper engagement with references. For buyers with technology trauma, the extra diligence isn’t inefficiency—it’s a necessary part of building the confidence required to make a decision.

The emphasis on Reserv’s 25-year history in the market became more prominent. For anxious buyers, longevity signals stability and accumulated expertise in navigating the complexities that cause implementations to fail. “We’ve been in this market for 25 years,” Martha notes, and for the target customer, this isn’t just a differentiator—it’s a source of reassurance.

The Positioning Pivot

Understanding buyer psychology also clarified who Reserv should and shouldn’t target. Not every digital experience buyer is traumatized by past failures. Some are looking for the cheapest option, others want the flashiest features, still others prioritize ease of use above all else.

But Reserv’s ideal customers—organizations dealing with genuinely complex digital experiences where failure has significant consequences—are disproportionately likely to include buyers shaped by past technology trauma. “We’re really focused on complex digital experiences for organizations that have a lot of sites or really complicated sites,” Martha explains. This positioning naturally attracts the anxious buyers who know they need serious expertise.

Good positioning repels as many prospects as it attracts. By explicitly targeting complexity, Reserv filters out buyers looking for simple solutions and attracts those who’ve learned the hard way that their needs require sophisticated capabilities. These are precisely the buyers most influenced by past trauma.

Implications for Other B2B Companies

Reserv’s discovery has broader implications for B2B companies, particularly those selling complex enterprise solutions. Surface-level buyer personas that focus on demographics, titles, and stated needs miss the emotional drivers that actually shape purchase behavior.

The question to ask: what psychological factors influence how your buyers evaluate solutions? Are they risk-averse because of past failures? Are they under intense pressure to deliver results quickly? Are they concerned about internal political dynamics? Do they worry about their own career consequences if the decision goes wrong?

These psychological factors often matter more than rational feature comparisons. Two buyers with identical stated needs may make completely different decisions based on their emotional relationship to risk, past experiences, and anxieties about the future.

Understanding buyer psychology doesn’t just improve messaging—it should reshape product development, sales training, customer success strategies, and even pricing models. If your buyers are primarily motivated by risk mitigation, your product roadmap should prioritize reliability and proven patterns over innovation. Your sales process should create space for extensive due diligence. Your pricing should signal stability rather than optimize for land-and-expand.

The Research Process

How can other companies uncover similar insights about their buyers? Martha’s approach offers a template. “We pulled every single piece of research we’d done in the last three years and sort of created a synthesis,” she explains. This meant analyzing win/loss interviews, customer feedback, sales call recordings, and historical deal patterns looking for emotional themes beyond surface-level requirements.

The key is looking for patterns in what buyers say they’re worried about, what questions they repeatedly ask, what objections surface most often, and what factors influence final decisions. These patterns reveal the underlying psychology that drives behavior.

For Reserv, the synthesis revealed that their buyers shared a common experience of past technology failures and approached new decisions with corresponding anxiety. This insight didn’t come from a single customer interview—it emerged from looking across dozens of data points to identify the psychological thread connecting their best customers.

The Long-Term Advantage

Understanding that their customers are motivated by technology trauma gives Reserv a sustainable competitive advantage. This insight can’t be easily copied because it requires genuine depth of experience to credibly address these buyer concerns.

“You have to be just so buttoned up and really smart about how you spend your money and like what you say no to,” Martha states. Focusing resources on demonstrating expertise that reassures anxious buyers—rather than chasing every possible market segment—creates differentiation that compounds over time.

For B2B founders, the lesson is clear: deep understanding of buyer psychology isn’t a marketing nicety. It’s the foundation for positioning, messaging, product development, and sales strategy that actually resonates with how customers make decisions. The work to uncover these insights pays dividends across every aspect of go-to-market execution.