The customer's voice was in the room, not in person but the client had invested in expensive surveys and interviews. We had captured the words buyers used themselves, mapped them against what the business wanted to build. The findings left little to argue with.
Buyers wanted community, they wanted their own work seen and celebrated. They wanted to feel part of something that mattered.
Their customers also wanted to get to know the people behind lab coats, celebrate the field application specialists that make workflows work for the customers. Everyone in the strategy session agreed. We had found the right things.
Then the plan met the organisation.
Everyone agreed on the plan
The strategy had three prongs, and each one traced straight back to the research:
- Give buyers a place to belong.
- Publicly celebrate their work and results in front of the people they wanted to impress.
- Celebrate the unsung company employees that contribute to their success.
It was the kind of plan that makes a room nod, because nobody could point to a piece of it the evidence did not support. I left that session believing we were about to change how customers felt about the company.
Then it hit reality
The three prongs did not survive contact. One by one, the ideas that would have moved how buyers saw the company ran into something and lost. Budget questions. Ownership questions. The quiet pull of what the organisation already knew how to do. What began as a plan to make customers feel part of something bigger shrank, meeting by meeting, into a social media play.
The buyer we had captured so carefully was the first thing to be forgotten.
I blamed the wrong things
For a long time I thought the fault was mine. I assumed we had pitched too low, spoken to the wrong team, walked into a company that was unusually stuck. That is a fair read. Sometimes you are in the wrong room, and the fix is to find a better one.
But I kept watching the same thing happen. Different companies. Different sizes. Different people around the table, all of them capable, all of them well intentioned. The research would be strong, the agreement would be real, and the plan would still slide back towards whatever the organisation already found comfortable. It did not seem to matter how big the company was, but rather how enabled the teams were to act on what the buyer had actually told them.
It is a physics problem
So I stopped treating it as a failure of people and started treating it as a force. I call it organisational gravity: the structural pull that drags commercial decisions back towards the organisation and away from the buyer. There is no villain in it. The people are usually good and the intent is usually real. It is the ordinary weight of budgets, remits, habits and internal comfort, and it acts on every plan whether you notice it or not.
Once you name it, you see it everywhere. The positioning that gets softened until it is no longer a position, just a damp squib. The campaign that ends up describing the product the company wanted to sell rather than the problem the buyer wanted solved.
The research deck everyone praises and nobody acts on. Good evidence goes in. Gravity decides what comes out. And the one thing that changes the outcome is not a better deck. It is whether the team is enabled to keep the buyer present at the exact moments the pull is strongest.
The buyer left first
Which brings me back to that room, and the buyers we had worked so hard to bring into it. We had their words, their needs, their own language on the wall. And they were the first thing the organisation let go.
That is the haunting. The buyer is there at the start, when you are still listening. By the launch, they have quietly left the building. The work is learning to keep them in the room the whole way through.
I wrote a whole book about this phenomenon, and I cannot wait for you to read it.
Pre-order the book
That is what The Buyer in the Loop is about. It is the book I wish I had when I was blaming myself for a strategy that gravity was always going to bend. I cannot wait to put it in your hands.
Kindle pre-orders are open now, and paperback pre-orders follow shortly, you can pre-order The Buyer in the Loop here
