In a roundtable recently, I asked the question “What's the last thing a customer told you that genuinely surprised you?"

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The replies that came back surprised me.

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Not the answers themselves. What struck me was how many people said it had been a while. Some couldn't name anything recent at all.

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These aren't founders who don't care. Most of them care a lot. But there's a gap between caring and actually knowing. And that gap has a quiet cost.

The assumption doing most of the damage

A lot of the businesses I work with reach a point where they feel like they should already have this.

They've been talking to customers for years. They have sales calls. They have NPS scores and churn data and a CRM full of notes nobody reads. So when a decision comes up that needs real insight to answer properly, there's a pull towards acting like they already know. Because asking again feels like admitting they should have been paying closer attention all along.

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The research doesn't happen. The decision gets made on instinct. And the gap widens without anyone naming it.

When the data was there the whole time

One founder I've worked with for about a year had built a clear picture of who their best customers were. Job title, company size, industry. The personas were detailed. Positioning had been built around them.

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When we went back and actually spoke to those customers about why they'd bought, something different kept coming up. Nothing to do with the positioning at all. Something closer to a fear they'd had before signing. A risk they were trying to manage.

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The product solved the fear. The website described a different problem entirely.

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Their best customers had been telling them something for two years. The documentation just wasn't built to capture it.

When decisions wait for data that never arrives

The other version is the team that knows they're missing the insight and waits too long to go looking.

"We should probably do a customer survey." Months pass. "We need to be more rigorous about this." The decision that triggered the conversation gets made anyway, on instinct, because there's no time left to wait.

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I've sat in a lot of rooms where "we'll look at this properly later" is doing very heavy lifting.

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Later is almost never. And the decision still gets made. Just without the thing you said you'd go and find.

The pattern underneath

Both versions have the same root. Insight work gets treated like a project. Something you commission, complete, and reference. The businesses that stay close to their customers treat it more like a habit. Small, regular, built into the rhythm.

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Anna, our Head of Insights, maps this in the first couple of weeks with every new client. Five sources, all publicly available, no budget required. G2 and Capterra reviews, Reddit threads, the comments on competitor content, community forums, your own sales call recordings.

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You're not looking for volume. You're looking for the same sentence appearing in different mouths. That's the insight. The rest is just confirmation.

The one thing to do this week

Pick one decision your business is currently sitting on. Something that's been discussed but not resolved.

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Write down the assumption underneath it. The thing you're taking as given about what your customers want, fear, or care about.

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Then ask yourself honestly: when did you last hear that assumption confirmed by an actual customer?

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• If the answer is recent, you're probably fine
• If it makes you a bit uncomfortable, that's useful information

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Drop me a line and tell me what you found. The pattern across these tells me more about where growth actually stalls than almost anything else.

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PS. Sales call recordings are one of the gems businesses use for customer listening and also the most underused. If you want a short breakdown of how we use them in week one with a new client, just drop me a line and I'll send it over.‍