In today’s competitive landscape, many businesses find themselves stuck in a cycle of slowed, inconsistent growth despite having access to huge amounts of data. You might be seeing crappy conversion rates, relying on generic customer profiles, and launching marketing campaigns that simply fall flat. This isn’t just a minor hiccup; it’s a symptom of a significant underlying issue: customer blind spots.
So, what’s really sabotaging your marketing and product growth efforts? Here are some “shitty realities” that might be holding you back.
Reality #1: The Market Doesn’t Care How Awesome Your Product Is
You probably have an incredible product, solving a critical problem for your customers with solid user experience. But the harsh truth is, the market doesn’t give a damn how awesome your product is. Attracting and retaining new customers is incredibly tough in saturated markets, especially with the explosion of marketing technologies.
Throwing more money at ads isn’t a growth strategy
It often leads to diminishing returns and wasted effort if your core messaging isn’t nailed down. Imagine generating 600% more qualified traffic, only for it to be completely wasted because positioning and messaging weren’t locked in. This is like “paying for the privilege of filling a leaky bucket”.
Growth comes from better customer fit, not just more marketing
Instead of constantly chasing new leads, focus on doing more with the traffic and sign-ups you’re already getting. For example, one social media tool company with flat revenue growth didn’t double down on ads or content. Instead, they deeply understood their existing customers and discovered a “second group” of users who activated on their own, didn’t need discounts, and had a higher long-term value (LTV). By simply updating three website pages (homepage, features, pricing) to resonate with this better-fit customer, they increased sign-ups by 89% and trial-to-pay conversion by 40% – without spending a single cent more on marketing.
Retention is a profit powerhouse
A 5% increase in retention can boost profits by 95%. SaaS companies with a net revenue retention of 100% or more grow twice as fast as those that don’t. This highlights the immense opportunity in optimizing your post-acquisition experience.
Reality #2: Your Team Is Guessing
Many tech companies aren’t founded by individuals with marketing backgrounds, leading to an inherent conflict. Founders often pressure marketers for “more traffic, more leads,” setting unfairly high expectations on individuals who might be inexperienced or mid-career. This often results in disappointment and a lack of company-wide alignment around customers.
- Studies show that only 45% of teams deliver a consistent customer experience across departments. This misalignment, coupled with goal clarity issues and an inability to meet customer expectations, fosters dysfunction.
- The current tech environment, marked by layoffs and stress, often leads to short-term thinking. Teams are scared to be wrong, desperate to prove their worth, and focused on immediate results, which further hinders holistic customer understanding.
- Product Marketing can be the solution. This function, which is recovering better than other marketing roles in 2024, is crucial for gaining clarity and confidence in growth strategies. Product marketers are adept at thinking holistically and strategically about the customer experience, getting close to customers, and bringing insights back to the team to foster alignment. They empower teams to see how their efforts deliver value for customers and revenue for the company.
Reality #3: Your Data Is Lying to You
While data is important, we often over-rely on it. It’s tempting to lean on numbers because they’re hard to argue with and can even act as a “Get Out of Jail Free” card when things go wrong. However, this leads to making decisions in a vacuum, without sufficient context and nuance about customers.
A/B testing and experimentation without real customer understanding are a massive waste of time.
The popularity of product-led growth (PLG) has exacerbated this, but even data-driven experts agree that understanding customers must come first.
Data can’t tell you who your best customers are or what matters to them.
An invoicing tool company, for example, was a “self-professed data factory” with tons of experimentation, yet their free-to-paid conversion rate wasn’t budging. They discovered two distinct customer groups: one that activated quickly and had high NPS, and another that was more discerning but ultimately had higher LTV. Their data had been “lying” because they were over-optimizing for the “poorer fit customer” based on initial metrics like NPS, instead of long-term value.
You can’t trust numbers unless you have a foundational understanding of who you are serving.
This foundational understanding comes from asking “why” questions: What was the old way? What problems were they struggling with? Why did they choose you? What impact did your solution have on their lives? What’s their next job to be done?
Once you understand customers at this deep level (their thoughts, feelings, and actions) you can define meaningful KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), or “leading indicators of success,” that genuinely reflect customer goals. This allows your team to tie being customer-led to being data-informed, ultimately achieving the “Holy Grail”: the right message, to the right person, at the right time. For instance, SparkToro doubled their free-to-paid conversion rate by identifying a valuable product feature that was being introduced too late and moving it earlier in the customer journey, based on insights from their happiest customers.
Reality #4: There Are No Shortcuts (But This Is The Fastest Path)
Many leaders avoid deep customer research, viewing it as a hard, lengthy, and expensive process that often yields little actionable results or “dies on a shelf”. This leads to needless guessing, relying on best practices from other markets, or trusting channel experts without a deep understanding of your specific customers.
- However, deep customer understanding is the fastest path to growth. It is the true “shortcut”.
- Instead of “fumbling around and guessing,” imagine getting inside your best customers’ heads through focused conversations, like 10-12 “Jobs to be Done” interviews. This allows you to map and measure their experience, identify where your current customer experience is out of alignment, and discover where you’re “dropping the ball”.
- This approach is not just anecdotal; studies show it leads to 54% greater return on marketing investment, 18 times faster sales cycles, and 10x improvement in customer service.
The Path Forward: Centre Your View Around the Customer
The pivotal mindset shift is this: When we prioritize and optimize our customers reaching their goals, we achieve ours. This transforms how you measure success, benchmark, prioritize projects, and coordinate team handoffs. It creates a shared understanding and language about your customers across departments, fostering vital alignment between marketing, product, and sales.
Even in B2B SaaS with complex decision-making units, focusing on the “champion” – the person tasked with solving the problem – is paramount. By enabling them to be successful and providing them with the necessary information to gain internal buy-in, you pave the way for broader adoption.
Your product is likely awesome. And you absolutely can have an awesome go-to-market strategy. It all begins with deep, foundational customer insight. This is the key to unlocking consistent, scalable growth and finally moving past those customer blind spots.
This article draws on excerpts from Georgiana Laudi‘s talk, “Data-Rich, Insight-Poor – The Real Reason Your Growth Is Stalled“, at Business of Software Conference.