And why they never meet until someone puts them side by side.
Average sales growth for our customers
Completed project
Internationalisation project in the Nordic countries and Europe
A library always accumulates in the basement of the study. I don’t mean fiction. I mean those thick plastic folders that say “McKinsey 2018, Customer Segmentation”. “Bain 2020, sales model”. “Local consultancy 2022, strategy package”. They have big numbers on the front page, beautiful diagrams and good thinking.
They didn’t change anything.
This is the biggest secret of client insight, the one that keeps the consultancy industry going but that few people say out loud: a report is not the answer. A report is a report. And the difference between the two is bigger than most people think.
Here’s what we do instead of delivering a report.
In practice, when a company talks about a customer, there are always three different voices in the room. Three different worlds that don’t match.
The first voice is leadership. They see through the lens of your strategy. They remember last year’s deals and that one big tender. Their version of the customer is built on monthly reports and occasional lunches.
The second voice is the authors. Salespeople, account managers, product development, customer service. They have a visual link to the customer’s daily life. They hear the things that are not recorded in the CRM, the casual “yes, it is, but…” phrases.
The third voice is the customer themselves. The person who pays or who didn’t pay, even though they should have. He has his own order and his own rationality, which seems irrational from the outside.
When we start a project, we assume one thing: these three views are different. Always. Over lunch meetings.
The most common comment in the management team when three views are put side by side on the same film is literally, “This can’t be true.”
It’s true. And that’s where change begins.
Our method is not a secret science. More than 200 projects have honed it to precision.
Step 1: Getting started with management. We write down management’s version of the truth: where sales are struggling, what the strategy requires, what has already been tried. This is not a diagnosis but a documentation of the hypothesis so that we can later compare it with the other two versions. We ask: what are your three biggest obstacles to growth? Who are your customers really? What decisions are you making right now? And: what are you afraid of finding?
The answer to the last question is usually the most interesting.
Step 2: interviews with the authors. We interview those who meet the client every week. We ask the same basic questions as the management, but in a different way. And we get different answers. Always. At what point does a deal typically fall through? What are the recurring questions customers ask? These people know more than their bosses think they do. They’re also more frustrated than their bosses know. Their frustration is a map.
Step 3: interviews with customers. Only now do we go to the customer. The rule of thumb: seven existing key customers and five lost or missed customers. Seven is enough to find recurring patterns. Five lost ones reveal what the fan club never tells you: the reasons why someone didn’t buy. The interviews last about an hour. We ask the customer about their work, not our product. We don’t sell anything during the interview. If we sell, we’ve failed.
After twelve interviews, a third view emerges. It never matches the first two.
This is where most consultancies lose the game.
When you have three views of the same reality and none of them match, you can make three mistakes. You can present them separately and the management will choose theirs. You can average them, and you get a compromise that no one gets excited about. Or you can present only the voice of the customer, in which case management feels under attack.
All three are wrong.
Instead, we use a three-part narrative: situation, conflict, solution. In the consulting world, the framework is known as the SCR model. It works because people only remember the stories of the three things.
The situation: how things are, in three lines. This is how management sees the situation. This is how the authors see it. This is how customers see it. Three sentences on the same subject. They are rarely coherent.
Contradiction: what you see between sentences. Management believes it is selling technical superiority. Salespeople know the customer doesn’t understand the technology. The customer buys because he knows the salesman’s father. This is not a made-up example, but a fact from one of our industrial customers. Three different stories from the same store produce three different strategies. Only one is based on truth.
Solution: what to do. And here we do the second thing that most consultancies refuse to do: we limit the answer to three.
Each customer insight round results in prioritised development paths, on average three for us. Why three? Three reasons.
The first is memory. The human working memory carries three to five things at a time. It is one of the most established findings in memory research. The team can work on three priorities. Eight priorities are not eight priorities but zero, because no one remembers them all.
The second is resources. Three development paths can be implemented in parallel in six months without paralysing the organisation. No one can do ten.
The third is focus. When we choose three, we have to reject the others. Rejection is the decision from which growth is born. Everyone knows what to do. Few know what to stop doing.
Three paths are not all there is to do. They are the three that will have the greatest leverage in the first year.
Example 1: a trading company. A client came to us in a situation where five in-depth interviews had been done but no one knew what to do with them. The transcripts were there. Management looked at the 80-page bundle and asked the eternal question: okay, what’s next?
We built a report from the data, which followed a situation-crisis-solution formula: a two-page executive summary, five recurring themes, client-specific in-depths and a prioritised action plan. The most important choice, however, was linguistic. We wrote the entire report in layman’s terms, without consultant-speak, so that the CEO could send it to the whole house on Monday without explanation.
That decided whether the information ended up in the basement or on the front line.
Example 2: a large specialist house. Six major customers from different industries were interviewed and the data was decomposed into a 50-slide presentation with all of them. Literally everything: every quote, every theme, everything categorised.
Problem: The representation of a 50 film is the same as the representation of a zero film. No one goes through it in the management team and no one uses it to make decisions.
We condensed it into 21 slides and built a frame in which each major customer’s voice appears separately but juxtaposed so that repeating patterns stand out. We also produced a text summary that was one fifth of the original but contained all the relevant conclusions. Result: the manager can read it at the airport before meeting the customer, the sales manager gives it to the new salesperson during the induction.
The report was no longer a report. It was a tool.
Both repeat the same pattern: we did not do more research. We organised the information that already existed in a way that could move decisions.
Development paths are a starting point, not an end. This is where many consultants would drive home. We don’t.
Development paths only turn into results when they become routine. Routine is the seven-minute check-up that the sales manager holds every Monday. It’s the question a new product manager learns to ask before approving a development idea going forward. The metric that appears on the boardroom table at every meeting until no one thinks of it as a separate issue.
Our work usually continues for 3-6 months after the interviews. We sit with the client every two weeks, making sure routines are established, coaching the pre-persons and correcting direction when someone gets around to a new way of working.
This is everyday drudgery that doesn’t look good in a sales presentation. But this is where the growth we’re going to talk about comes from.
The averages of our projects are: first-year sales growth of around +32%, productivity improvements of around +15% and a return on investment of around ten times. These are figures from our own project analysis, not promises.
Nor are they guaranteed. There are projects where the results are greater: most often when a company has had a structural blind spot in a customer segment, the correction of which opens up a whole new market. And there are projects where the results are smaller: when the organisation is not ready to change, even though the information is on the table. Knowledge without the will to change is just another report for the shelf.
But a tenfold return is a figure few managers see in any other investment. It is achievable when three truths first meet in the same room.
Finally, four questions. Answer honestly, write down your answers on a piece of paper and put the paper where you will see it again next week.
One: when was the last time you heard the customer’s voice unfiltered, in their own words, not referenced by a salesperson or a report?
Two: if your manager, your agent and your main client were to describe the same customer situation, would the stories match? Are you sure?
Three: how many development priorities do you have right now? If the answer is more than five, the real answer is zero.
Four: who in your organisation owns listening to the customer as a routine, not a one-off project?
This series started with a story about a CEO who said: “We should have asked.” That sentence is the most expensive sentence in the history of Finnish business. It has been said in thousands of rooms where decisions had already been made, investments recorded and people fired.
It is also the only sentence you can avoid.
You can avoid that by starting to ask tomorrow. By inviting the customer for coffee. Putting it on the agenda of the management team at the next meeting. Or by finding a partner to bring that objective third voice that your organisation can’t produce itself.
The way is not important. What is important is that it happens before you are the CEO who says that sentence at your board meeting.
We’ll listen to your situation, tell you how to get three voices in the same room in your organisation and assess together whether customer insight work would be a sensible next step for you.
