Evidence
The cited buyer claims a campaign gets planned from: the four sources they are drawn from, and how to read a claim without over-reading it.
Evidence is the input to Campaign Agents. Before anything is written, you pick the claim: something your buyers actually said, with the source it came from.
This is a planning step, not a screen you will find in the app today. There is no Evidence tab in the product. What follows is how we describe the input to a campaign on withsurface.com/platform/content-campaigns, and how the planning gets done with you. Ask your FDE which of these sources is actually wired up for your environment before you plan around one.
Sources
| Source | What it is good for |
|---|---|
| Closed-won calls | The reason someone bought, in their words. The highest-signal source, and usually the most surprising. |
| CRM opportunities | Deal notes and stage history. Where deals stall, and what unblocked them. |
| ICP accounts | The segment you actually sell to, so a claim can be checked against the right population. |
| Support tickets | Friction after the sale, which is nearly always friction before it too. |
The Vault's Connections panel is where sources get attached, and it is the honest place to check what is reading. Competitor Monitoring and Content Analytics are live; HubSpot, Gong, Surface email and Surface forms are listed there as coming soon.
What a Claim Looks Like
Buyers compare us on routing reliability, not price. Strong · Closed-won calls · 18 citations
Three parts:
- The claim, phrased as something a buyer believes rather than something you sell.
- The source it came from, so you can weigh it against the population it describes.
- Citations: how many underlying passages sit behind it, so the claim is traceable back to the calls, notes or tickets rather than asserted.
Claims are labelled Strong or Medium. Treat that as a rough sort order, not
a score with a published formula behind it.
Reading Claims Well
The strongest claim is rarely the useful one. It is already on your homepage. The opportunity is the middling claim you did not know about: "champions need a one-pager to sell this internally" is a page nobody wrote.
Watch for claims that contradict your positioning. If closed-won calls say buyers compare on reliability and your site compares on price, that is the finding.
Mind the population. A claim drawn only from support tickets describes customers, not buyers. Cross-check it against opportunities.
A claim is a hypothesis, not a fact. One rep's note-writing habit can manufacture a pattern. If a claim does not survive you reading two of its citations, do not build a campaign on it.
When to Go Back to the Sources
Claims about a gap you fixed six months ago keep coming back until the sources stop containing them. Two moments usually earn a fresh pass: after a closed-won review, and after any positioning change.
If the same mis-reading keeps coming back (an adjacent product treated as a competitor, or a feature request treated as an objection), fix it in the Vault rather than in the claim.