# Evidence



Evidence is the input to [Campaign Agents](/platform/campaign-agents/overview).
Before anything is written, you pick the *claim*: something your buyers actually
said, with the source it came from.

<Info>
  **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](https://www.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.
</Info>

## Sources [#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](/concepts#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.                                        |

<Note>
  The [Vault](/platform/vault/overview)'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.
</Note>

## What a Claim Looks Like [#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 [#reading-claims-well]

**The strongest claim is rarely the useful one.*&#x2A; It is already on your
homepage. The opportunity is the middling claim you did not know about:
&#x2A;"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 [#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](/platform/vault/overview) rather than in the claim.

[Content agent →](/platform/campaign-agents/content-agent)