Companies spend millions trying to stand out. New categories (*groan*). Flashy rebrands (*eek*). "Disruptive" messaging strategies (really?). But the real opportunity, your durable advantage, is usually sitting right under your nose.
It's your customers.
Not just the logos. Not just the revenue. The real insights your customers hold: the problems they're trying to solve, what they love (and don't) about your product, the reasons they almost didn't buy, and the phrases they use when describing you to someone else. All of that is gold if you know how to mine it (and, more importantly, apply it).
But most companies don't. They gather feedback and call it insight. They run surveys and call it research. Then, they park it in a shared folder, review it once in a team meeting, and carry on doing what they were already doing. Not because they don't care, but because no one's ever shown them how to translate that insight into action.
The Illusion of "Knowing Your Customer"
Walk into most strategy sessions, and someone will say, "We know who our customer is." A persona slide usually backs it, or maybe an anecdote from a sales call two months ago. But when it's time to make decisions about messaging, product priorities, or where to allocate budget, those decisions rarely reflect actual customer behavior.
I once worked with a SaaS company that had three distinct buyer types. Their messaging was built entirely around what they assumed the primary decision-maker cared about: scalability, integrations, and time-to-value. But when we interviewed their actual customers (not just buyers, but champions and users), the recurring theme wasn't technical. It was emotional. People bought them because their team was responsive and low-drama. In a category full of overcomplicated platforms and slow support, speed and simplicity (not price, as they initially assumed) were their real competitive edges.
That insight completely reshaped their positioning. They stopped trying to sound like the most innovative platform in the room and leaned into being the fastest to get started. That clarity didn't come from internal brainstorms. It came from their customers.
You Already Have the Raw Materials. You're Just Not Using Them.
Most of the insight you need is already flowing through your business. It's just not being routed anywhere useful. Sales calls are getting recorded. Support tickets are captured. Survey responses are piling up. But no one's connecting the dots.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Support tickets are a front-row seat to real user problems (not just "bugs," but gaps in onboarding, misunderstandings caused by unclear messaging, and repetitive friction points that the product team never hears about).
- Sales calls are a goldmine of direct buying signals: what buyers care about, what confuses them, and what nearly lost the deal. One client of mine started tracking objections and quickly realized that 60% of lost deals stemmed from one feature misunderstanding. They fixed a single page on their site and watched conversions jump.
- Customer interviews (even a small handful) surface the kind of phrasing, framing, and themes that no marketer could invent. These are the lines that end up in hero copy, pitch decks, and ads that actually attract attention and support conversion rates.
- Advisory boards often get treated as ceremonial and precious, but they're ideal for pressure-testing assumptions. Bring early positioning concepts to the table. Ask what's missing, what doesn't feel true, and what would make them recommend you more. Your best customers want to help you win if you ask.
Most teams don't ignore customer insights on purpose. They just don't have a system for making it actionable. Which means most of it gets lost and gathers dust.
Turning Insight Into Action
This is the point where the real work begins. And it's where most teams get stuck. Insight isn't valuable until it changes something (your strategy, your messaging, your priorities).
Start by synthesizing qualitative themes. Tag them, apply commonalities, and (critically) quantify them. If you've run 10 interviews and 7 people say onboarding felt bumpy, that's not just an anecdote. That's a pattern. And if those same users say they struggled to understand the ROI of their purchase in month one, that becomes a message gap and a customer success opportunity.
Next, map those insights to your buyer journey. But skip the generic funnel. Build a journey matrix that reflects how your customers actually think. What do they need to know when they discover your solution? When evaluating whether to add you to the consideration set? What objections show up once they're comparing options? What makes them hesitate right before signing? You should have specific insight (from real humans, not generic AI slop from Chat GPT) at each inflection point.
Then, translate those insights into messaging that fits both the mindset and the channel. If your prospects hang out in community Slack groups and value peer validation, an email drip campaign isn't going to cut it. If most deals stall during procurement, maybe the message isn't the problem; your sales deck is. This isn't about being everywhere. It's about being precise.
And finally, tie it all back to the business. Don't just share insights with marketing. Share them with product, sales, and customer success. We're great at communicating outwards to prospects and clients, but not so good when it comes to internal marketing insights and discoveries.
The fastest-growing companies I've worked with build insight-sharing into their operations and work hard to bypass silos. They treat customer insights like they treat revenue data, something that informs every major decision.
Why This Matters (And What It Changes)
Everything gets sharper when customer insight isn't just a research project but a company-wide muscle.
Your messaging stops sounding like a committee wrote it.
- Your campaigns land faster because you're not waiting to guess what will work.
- Sales cycles shrink because you're already answering the right questions.
- Retention improves because you're solving the problems that actually cause churn.
I had a B2B client that used customer interviews to reshape their onboarding strategy. They discovered that first-week "wins" mattered more than feature depth. So they cut their onboarding flow in half, surfaced one high-value action on day one, and immediately saw a lift in activation, downstream that increased trial-to-paid conversions by nearly 20%. Not from new features. Not from more marketing. Just from better application of customer insight.
That's what makes insight a growth lever. Not just a research output.
Why Most Teams Still Struggle With This
Applying insights is messy. There's no guidebook or instruction manual for doing it right the first time. It doesn't slot neatly into a quarterly OKR. It forces people to change how they work (to slow down and listen before they build). And in most organizations, no one owns it, so it's hard to justify the time spent.
Insight work often falls into a void between product, marketing, and customer success. Everyone agrees it's valuable. No one owns the end-to-end responsibility of gathering, analyzing, and (most importantly) applying it. This means the few insights that do surface often die in a PowerPoint no one opens.
If that's you, you're not alone. But it's fixable.
You don't need to build a full research function. You just need a repeatable way to gather insight, distill it, and apply it to the business in ways that drive real decisions. That's how you turn "we kind of know our customers" into "we make better decisions than our competitors because we know our customers better."
If there’s one throughline here, it’s this:
Customer insight isn’t a research task. It’s a strategic advantage if you actually apply it.
The teams that move faster and grow smarter aren’t the ones with the flashiest tactics. They’re the ones who know their customers better than anyone else and use that knowledge to make sharper decisions, earlier.
If you want help shortcutting that process and turning your customer insights into a clearer growth plan, take a look at the Customer Growth Sprint. It’s a fast, focused way to get the clarity most teams are missing — and start applying what you already have.
No fluff. Just insight you can act on.