Most strategies are based on management’s assumptions about the customer, not the customer itself. This difference is often invisible until the results show it.
Average sales growth for our customers
Completed project
Internationalisation project in the Nordic countries and Europe
The conference room is full. Eight people around a table, one flipchart, three coffee cups. The management team is strategising.
The debate is lively. “Our customers appreciate flexibility.” “Our customer wants a partner, not a supplier.” “Our customer’s buying decision is based on technical quality.”
These sentences are written on transparencies. They will take weeks to formulate. They are used to build a value proposition and a strategy that will guide the company’s activities for the next three years.
One question remains unanswered: how do we know all this?
The answer is there, if you have the courage to look for it. Salespeople have feelings about what a customer is like. Product managers have assumptions about needs. The CEO has memories of last year’s trade fair. None of these have been tested by asking. No one has sat down with thirty customers and asked the same questions.
The strategy is therefore based on overlapping estimates of a group of people who have not been in the room. This is perhaps the single biggest reason why Finnish strategies are not delivering the growth they promise.
Research tells the same message year after year: customer-centric strategies deliver significantly better customer loyalty, higher profitability and faster growth than product- or competitor-centric ones. The numbers vary from study to study, the direction does not.
The reason is not that a customer-centric strategy is more customer-friendly. It’s because it does. An anecdote is one encounter that stuck in my mind. Knowledge is thirty encounters from which conclusions have been drawn. A strategy that relies on an anecdote thinks it knows. The one who relies on knowledge knows.
I said this to a client for the first time sometime in 2018. He was the CEO of a medium-sized company who had just spent two and a half months on strategy work with a consultancy. The report was ready, the management team had approved it, targets had been set.
I asked, “How many of your clients were interviewed during the process?”
He wondered. “Well, of course we know our customers well, we’ve been in the business for 30 years.”
“How many?”
“Well, not technically, but…”
“Zero.”
A moment of silence. Then: “Zero.”
Three months later, we conducted 12 customer interviews. On three key assumptions, pricing, service appreciation and product development priorities, customers disagreed with the management team. In the other two, customers said things that the management team had not even considered. The strategy was rebuilt. Two years later, the company was growing in an area where others were shrinking.
The management team was neither lazy nor inept. It had built its strategy on assumptions, not knowledge.
When I start strategy work with a client, I ask the management team to write down their five key assumptions about their client. We then go through the four categories of assumptions that are most typically wrong and that few processes test.
Assumption 1: The customer values the same things we do. The company prides itself on its technical superiority, the customer cares about security of supply. The company focuses on quality, the customer on price combined with predictability. The company believes its competitive advantage lies in product development, the customer feels it lies in the personal relationship with the seller. Identifying differences takes two hours of interviews per customer. Failure to do so takes a whole strategy period of misdirection.
Assumption 2: The customer knows us as we know ourselves. This is the first thing that comes up in interviews. The customer typically knows only a fraction of what the company offers. Even that image is born out of one-to-one encounters. This leads to three questions: what sales needs to say differently, what marketing is being wasted, and what value the company is really delivering at the customer’s scale.
Assumption 3: Our competitors are the other players in the industry. When you ask a customer “who did you compare us to last time”, the answer is often surprising. It could be a company in another industry, an internal decision or a decision to do nothing. Competition does not take place on the industry map, but in the customer’s budget choices. That map is different from what the management team thinks.
Assumption 4: The customer’s problem is permanent. The strategy is built around the problem of today and then lives for three years. In the meantime, the problem has time to change, sometimes completely. A customer that focused on cost savings in 2023 may focus on talent competition or artificial intelligence in 2026. Whoever tests the problem every year will be the first to notice the change. The one who assumes it will stay will only notice when the deal doesn’t go through.
These four are not written into the strategy because they are taken for granted. That’s why they are the most dangerous: the obvious is not tested, so it can be wrong for years before anyone notices.
A “customer-centric strategy” does not mean that the paper says “the customer is at the centre”. That phrase is in every third Finnish strategy, and it changes nothing. Nor does it mean an annual satisfaction survey that measures history. It means testing the key assumptions of the strategy by asking customers before writing them into the document.
Do you want to know in five minutes whether your strategy is truly customer-centric or just rhetorical? Three questions are enough.
First: when was the last time your strategy document contained a direct quote from a customer? Not an executive summary or research summary, but the client’s own words to justify the strategic choice. If the answer is “nowhere”, the strategy is built on management talk. Three direct quotes in a document is the most effective way to keep the strategy grounded.
Second: if I ask three of your clients what makes you different, do they describe the same thing? The client does not read the strategy document, but experiences it in every encounter. Test: call three key customers and ask them what they think sets you apart from other suppliers. The answers will tell you everything you need to know.
Third: what was the last decision you reversed based on customer feedback? Not a small adjustment, but a change of direction in product development, sales, pricing or service model. Genuine customer listening regularly leads to decisions that make the management team uncomfortable because they call into question previous commitments. If the strategy has not changed in any direction for two years because of customer feedback, the customer is not really driving it.
Write down your answers in the morning before the management team meeting. Ask the same questions at the meeting and compare. What is revealed is usually more than you want to see. That’s why it’s worth looking.
When a strategy is built on customer insight, its nature changes. It is no longer a presentation that is shown in January and forgotten in June, but a living document that is updated as the world of the customer evolves. It is not management’s private version of the truth, but a shared understanding across the organisation that every employee recognises in their own customer encounters.
The figures are improving, but they are not the most important thing. What matters is that the organisation knows where it is going and the customer knows that they are at the centre of that direction.
That’s the difference between strategy and guesswork.
If the strategy is built on customer insight, its nature changes. It is no longer a PowerPoint, presented in January and forgotten in June. It is a living document that is updated as the world of the customer evolves.
It is no longer management’s private version of the truth. It is a shared understanding of the customer by the whole organisation, one that every employee recognises in their own customer encounters and can say either “yes, this is true” or “this is not what I see”. Both responses are valuable.
And it’s no longer a competitive response. It is a systematic sharpening of one’s value proposition.
Together, these changes will deliver the 60 percent improvement in customer service, 33 percent improvement in customer satisfaction and 20 percent growth that the study promises. But the numbers are not the most important thing. What matters is that the organisation knows where it is going, and the customer knows they are at the centre of that direction.
That’s the difference between strategy and guesswork.
If you do this after reading one thing, I suggest this.
Invite five people from your team for a half-hour discussion: a salesperson, a customer service representative, a product manager, a finance representative and someone from operations. Ask one question, “If you had to name one thing that makes our most important customer choose us right now, what would it be?”
Listen and write down everyone’s answer.
If the five answers are about the same, your organisation shares a clear understanding of its value proposition. This is rare and valuable.
If there are five different answers, two saying price, one saying quality, one saying speed and one saying personal service, you are not sharing a common understanding of the customer. And if you don’t, how can the customer?
After this debate, you will know more about the real state of your strategy than most expensive reports. And most importantly, you’ll know where to start to fix it.
We help you build a strategy based on systematic customer interviews, not on the collective memory of your management team. 12-18 in-depth interviews, customer-tested value proposition and an implementation playbook.
