Ask the buyer, not your rep

Ask your sales team why you lost that deal. Then ask the buyer. You will get two different accounts of what happened, and they will not just differ in tone.

Research shows that sellers and buyers cite different reasons for a lost deal 50 to 70 percent of the time. 

So, is your content strategy being built on the wrong half of that gap? 

This month I interviewed 10+ marketing directors and managers, gathering feedback for a service we are rolling out. I wanted to understand if they perform market research and how they understand the wants and needs of their audience (after all, most marketers state this is what their strategy is built on). 

I expected some variation in how mature their audience research was. What I got instead was the same answer, almost word for word, from every single one of them. Their read on the customer and audience comes from their sales and account teams. That is the whole system.

Why the account team is the wrong source

This isn't a knock on sales or account managers. When a rep re-engages an existing customer for feedback, ahead of a renewal, a QBR, a case study request, they're asking someone who already has a relationship with them and usually depends on that relationship continuing. A customer is not going to tell the account manager who handles their contract that onboarding was painful, that support has been slow, or that the product didn't live up to expectations and they've started looking at a competitor. After all, most scientists are usually pretty reserved and certainly polite!

So the account team hears the polite version, and marketing builds a content strategy on top of it. Nobody is lying. Everybody is working from a filtered picture, that produce campaigns that feel plausible in the planning meeting and underperform the moment they meet a real scientific audience.

The other trap: mistaking performance for insight

The second answer I heard almost as often was some version of "we look at what content has performed well", as a proxy for what the customer needs and wants.

A blog ranking on page one for the right keyword feels like proof you understand your audience. It is not. It tells you the algorithm liked your structure and your backlinks. It tells you nothing about what that reader was actually worried about before they clicked, or whether the piece changed their mind about anything.

SEO performance is a lagging, mechanical signal. Audience psychology is neither of those things. You can win the ranking and still have no idea why the reader bounced after ninety seconds, or what would have kept them reading, or what question they came in with that your article never actually answered.

The story that changed how I think about this

Last year a major, publicly listed life sciences company that we've worked with routinely for several years came to us with a problem that had nothing to do with our writing services. They were launching a new product and could not find lab scientists to give them honest feedback on it. They had tried the usual internal channels and kept getting careful, diplomatic, faintly useless responses.

They knew our team is close to ten PhD scientists, and they asked, completely separate from any writing project, whether our people would just give their real opinions as (previously) working scientists. We said yes and gave our honest feedback. It was their first time getting opinions from external people, who werent self-validating the company opinions and own egos. It was not people whose bonus depended on the launch going well. It was scientists talking the way scientists actually talk to each other. Honest feedback, that was hugely valuable to the company.

What to actually do about it

I know it sounds old school, but go and speak to your audience directly, independent of your sales pipeline and independent of anyone who has a stake in the relationship. The person asking the questions matters as much as the questions themselves. A customer will always edit the truth for someone they know, someone who sold them the product, manages their account, or would take criticism personally. Bring in someone impartial, even external, with no relationship to protect and no reason to get defensive on the company's behalf, and the same person will tell that impartial stranger things they would never say to their own account manager.

You do not need a hundred interviews. Ten honest conversations, run by someone with nothing to lose from an honest answer, will tell you more about what your content and your campaigns are missing than a year of dashboard reports and account team anecdotes combined.

If your last three campaigns underperformed for reasons nobody in the building can quite explain, then perhaps you need to look at what insights they are built upon. You may be strategising off secondhand impressions when the primary source was reachable the entire time.