The future looked different when I was a child.

Beaming from place to place seemed easy, understanding and speaking any language, not a problem – well, we have basically already solved that one.

I did not imagine that there would be AI girlfriends, virtual Gucci handbags and people spending real money to decorate avatars and befriend people they will never actually meet.

This is simply my observation, no judgement intended.

Meanwhile, we are trying to work out whether the article we just read, the image we just saw or the person we are talking to was created by a human, an AI or a combination of both – it’s becoming harder to tell.

What is easy to see is that we’re drowning in abundance.

If I want entertainment, advice, validation, companionship, distraction or a lesson on ancient Rome delivered by a man dressed as a pirate, I can probably find it.

For decades, retail has been built on the idea that people want more. More choice, more products, and more experiences.

But what if the next generation grows up feeling they already have access to almost everything?

Maybe not physically, but emotionally and psychologically. Need excitement? Open an app. Need connection? Open another one. Need a new identity? There are entire digital worlds built around that idea.

The question isn’t whether people stop consuming. Human beings are exceptionally talented consumers.

The question is whether they start valuing different things.

If everything is available, all the time, then scarcity moves elsewhere.

Not into products or information, but into decisions. The harder problem is no longer finding an answer. The harder problem is knowing which answer to act on.

Which brings me to B2B.

People often talk about B2B and B2C as though they involve different species.

They don’t.

The person signing off a software purchase, selecting an asset manager or choosing a consulting partner is dealing with exactly the same digital overload as everyone else. They go home and scroll. They get targeted. They feel overwhelmed by too much information and not enough certainty.

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that future B2B marketing is about creating more content.

There is already more than enough

The opportunity may be helping people make sense of things again, helping them focus and decide.

In the past, value came from access to information.

If you knew something others didn’t know, you had an advantage. A consultant, journalist, analyst, marketer or asset manager could create value simply by having expertise, data or insights that were difficult to obtain.

AI changes that equation.

Information is becoming cheap. Analysis is becoming cheap. Content is becoming almost free. You can ask ChatGPT for a market overview, a positioning framework, a SWOT analysis or a first draft of a strategy document in seconds.

The scarcity is no longer information. The scarcity becomes judgement: knowing what is relevant, what deserves action and what only sounds or looks like it does. The more information becomes abundant, the more valuable clarity becomes.

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Introduction & Background:

Could you start by introducing yourself and your role at Grndworx?
I’m a founding partner at Grndworx. My focus is growth strategy — helping B2B leadership teams identify what’s actually stalling growth, and then helping them make the decisions that unblock it. In practice, that means working at the crossroads between client insight, positioning, marketing strategy and activation. I help organisations to clarify what value they create when they meet their clients’ needs, and how do this in a way that is unique. This has the effect of helping businesses to reconnect with their clients.

You bring experience as a strategic marketing leader, how has your background shaped the vision behind Grndworx?
I’ve spent much of my career working with sales and marketing teams to identify the barriers to growth and building strategies to diminish those barriers and open up growth opportunities. Recently, I have observed marketing teams exceeding their targets, and all the while, not receiving recognition for the impact that they have on business outcomes. More technology, more data, more granular segmentation seems to lead to more dilution of effort, less focus on business impact and a very real risk that marketing teams market to their KPIs rather than to their clients. Their impressions, click-throughs, Marketing Qualified Leads — the metrics look fine. But the connection to market share, price resilience, and long-term growth is missing. In effect the biggest barrier to growth has become the obsession with vanity metrics rather, client insights and true value creation. When we decided to set up Grndworx we wanted to fix that by reconnecting marketing teams with customer needs and relevant business outcomes.

About Grndworx – Vision & Positioning:

For those who may not yet be familiar, how would you describe Grndworx and its core mission?
Marketing in B2B companies has become synonymous with marketing communications. The original mandate of marketing was to enable firms to charge a higher price for their products by connecting and engaging with client needs. That has been lost. Most marketing teams in B2B industries don’t come within a mile of price and don’t even track pricing evolution and its impact on profitability. However, with the rise of AI and the trend to lookalike strategies and pattern-based messaging, there is a rapidly growing need for businesses to re-connect with their clients more strategically, not just through sales. This means that marketing needs to rediscover the original mandate, and this starts with the client. Grndworx restores the influence that marketing is meant to have on business outcomes. We work with mid-market B2B companies where the commercial ambition is clear but marketing isn’t yet contributing to where the business goes. Using the knowledge and expertise that already exists within the firm, we rebuild the relationship between marketing and leadership, marketing and sales, and between marketing and the client by focusing marketing initiative on the things that drive customer value and growth.

Grndworx positions itself as a strategic marketing partner for B2B, what does that mean in practice for your clients?
Our organizing principle is to connect marketing with business outcomes through a better insight into client needs and value. This starts with surfacing the insights and knowledge about clients that is held collectively with the firm, knowledge that is scattered across functions and never consolidated. Working across business development, sales, customer services, technical services, and R&D we identify what value a firm generates when it meets clients’ needs and how it does this in a unique and differentiating way. The resulting value proposition is founded upon a common understanding and a common language, and it reconnects marketing to the other functions across the business. With the client in focus, the discussion is no longer about impressions, clicks, downloads or time on page. It’s about client value strategies, the company’s position in a market, pricing, market share, customer loyalty, new market opportunities — and then we help to make it happen.

Your team emphasizes helping clients focus on what truly drives business growth—how do you translate that into measurable impact?
Understanding how and when your firm generates client value is fundamental to driving business growth. Without it, companies and sales teams default to talking product features and service deadlines because they don’t have the insights to know what else to say. The feature list is safe because it requires no client insight. Grndworx brings customer value into focus as a central organising principle providing firms with customer a strategic filter for decision making, and a central pivot for evaluating pricing, innovation, customer services, distribution and promotional activities: the elements that drive revenue, net income and shareholder value.

Services & Client Impact:

Grndworx offers services ranging from strategy development to execution, including thought leadership, digital presence, and events—how do these elements come together to create value for clients?
At Grndworx, strategy and execution are inseparable by design. Consultancies help leadership think about transformation, promise you the world and hand you a deck of PowerPoint slides. Creative agencies execute campaigns and channels. They measure success through awards and media spend. Neither solution addresses the work of ensuring that strategic decisions actually change how a company competes in the real world of the competitive marketplace. That is the gap in that we fill. Partnering with clients across strategy and execution ensures our interests are fully aligned. Furthermore, coherence matters. Most B2B organisations don’t have a storytelling problem — they have a positioning problem that their content makes visible. A whitepaper, a website, and an event will all pull in different directions if the underlying decision about what you compete on hasn’t been made. We address that before we touch the content.

Expertise & Differentiation:

What sets Grndworx apart from more traditional marketing or advisory agencies?
Most consultancies stop at recommendations and leave you with the challenge of implementation. Creative agencies optimise the creative execution, their value, by definition measured in terms of their creativity. On the other hand, Grndworx is engaged by clients looking for help to cut through complexity and clutter before key decisions are made. We then remain accountable for how those decisions shape execution and concrete business outcomes. We commit deeply to a small number of clients rather than spreading ourselves across dozens of accounts. That’s a different model, for clients who are looking for a deeper form partnership. It’s what we were looking for when we were client-side, and struggled to find – so we set up Grndworx to do it.

Your team highlights firsthand experience in managing complex projects, how does that shape the way you work with clients?
The Grndworx team is composed of senior practitioners across the full cycle — from diagnosis through to execution. That breaks the common dynamic where senior people win the work and junior teams deliver it. We’ve operated both client-side under real commercial pressure and agency-side within delivery environments. That combination means we understand not just what should be done, but what will actually get done – and what tends to break along the way. Strategy and execution stay with the same senior team throughout the assignment. No handoffs. No dilution. Just experienced people, accountable for the outcome.

NBCC Membership & Collaboration:

What motivated Grndworx to join NBCC, and what excites you most about being part of this network?
Grndworx operates internationally. We are based in NL but our working language – due to a very diverse and international team – is English. NBCC connects organisations that navigate the Dutch and UK market. That’s a very relevant context for us — and for the clients we work with, many of whom are building or extending their cross-border commercial presence.

How do you see Grndworx contributing to the UK–NL business community, particularly in helping companies grow and communicate more effectively?
By being direct about where growth stalls. Many companies expanding across both markets have a strong proposition at home that loses definition when it crosses a border. The positioning decision that was implicit becomes a liability. We help sharpen that early – through clearer narratives, aligned messaging, and decisions about what not to say – so companies don’t just translate their offering, but make it land commercially in a new context. In doing so, we help UK-NL businesses grow with more focus, and communicate with the kind of clarity that builds trust across markets, not confusion.

What types of collaborations or partnerships are you hoping to build through NBCC?
We’re very keen to hold conversations with B2B industry, financial or professional services firms, who are looking to evaluate their marketing or are seeing commercial underperformance in their clients where positioning and lack of client understanding is the root cause. We are seeking to build deep, long-term partnerships with a view to generating long-term growth, commercial advantage and, ultimately, increased value for their clients. That’s a shared problem worth addressing together.

Looking Ahead:

What are your ambitions for Grndworx over the next few years?
We’re building a body of proprietary thinking on B2B positioning and the relationship between marketing and growth outcomes. The ambition is to be the firm that mid-market B2B organisations reach for when they know their commercial model is right but their market position isn’t delivering on it.

How do you see the role of strategic marketing evolving, and how is Grndworx preparing for that future?
Marketing has more tools, more channels, and more data than ever. It is also, in most organisations, further from the decisions that matter. That’s the problem. The firms that get this right will be the ones where marketing shapes the business’s position in a market — not where it reports on how campaigns performed. Grndworx is built on that premise. We’re not preparing for that future. We’re already working in it.

Source: Member in the Spotlight | Patrick Ide, Founder & Managing Partner of Grndworx – NBCC

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This article makes the affirmative case. Customer insight should sit with marketing. Not because marketing claims the territory, but because of six structural advantages that no other function shares. Before making that case, however, there is a prior problem worth naming honestly — because in many B2B organisations, marketing has already moved away from the capability that would justify the claim.

What marketing is actually for

Before the structural argument, the foundational one.

The core purpose of marketing is to generate loyal, profitable customers. Not to produce campaigns, not to fill pipelines with leads, not to build brand awareness as an end in itself. Those are instruments. The purpose is customers — customers who return, who grow, who refer, and who do so because the organisation understood them well enough to create genuine value for them.

That understanding is not incidental to marketing’s function. It is the foundation of it. The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Every word in that definition is deliberate. Identifying — not assuming. Anticipating — not reacting. Satisfying — not just communicating. Profitably — connected to commercial outcomes, not activity metrics.

Generating loyal, profitable customers from a deep understanding of their challenges, opportunities, needs, opinions, and behaviours: that is what marketing exists to do. Customer insight is not an add-on to that purpose. It is the prerequisite for it. And that is precisely what makes marketing the natural strategic owner — not by assertion, but by definition.

The repositioning problem

The argument runs into an immediate practical obstacle. In many B2B organisations, marketing has been repositioned — gradually, and often without an explicit decision — into a comms and demand generation function. Brand governance, content production, campaign management, MQL targets, performance dashboards. These are legitimate and necessary activities. But they describe a narrower mandate, and one that has quietly displaced the deeper strategic work that marketing’s core purpose requires.

The reorientation has happened for understandable reasons. Measurement frameworks reward activity visibility. Business pressure favours short-term pipeline contribution. And as we established in the first article, the political cost of claiming strategic authority over customer insight is real — it creates friction with sales, with product, with leadership teams accustomed to acting on assumption. Retreating into execution is, in its own way, the same convenient solution that defaulting to sales represents. It avoids the uncomfortable conversation.

But the cost is significant. When marketing is defined by its outputs rather than its strategic contribution, it loses the credibility — and the organisational expectation — to own something as consequential as customer understanding. The capability case for marketing as insight owner is strong. In many organisations, the current operating reality has already moved in the opposite direction.

Six structural advantages

The structural case nonetheless holds, and it is worth making clearly.

Marketing is the only function with visibility across the full customer journey. As DemandLab’s analysis states directly, marketing touches customers first, interacts with them more frequently, and supports them across a longer stretch of the journey than sales, product, or support. That breadth is not a marginal advantage. It is the foundation for the kind of pattern recognition — across segments, across buying stages, across the competitive landscape — that produces genuine strategic insight rather than deal-level intelligence.

Marketing owns the analytical infrastructure for systematic customer research. Voice-of-customer programmes, buyer persona development, market research, competitive intelligence, journey mapping — these are marketing methodologies. The martech stack that marketing functions have built and invested in provides the infrastructure to collect, analyse, and activate insight at scale. Directive Consulting’s model positions marketing operations at the centre of insight distribution, with revenue operations owning the definitions and schemas that make that distribution consistent. The capability base exists. The question is whether it is being applied to strategic intelligence or to campaign optimisation.

Marketing Week’s 2024 survey of 600 B2B marketers found customer insight rated as the single most critical skill for future marketing success at 54.4% — ahead of commercial focus, creativity, and collaboration. The profession’s own senior practitioners understand what the foundation of effective marketing requires. The gap is between that understanding and what many organisations actually resource and expect from their marketing functions.

The CMO is uniquely positioned as the organisational voice of the customer at senior level. Ricky Abbott of Transmission Agency argues that marketing is the only function that can truly own the customer — having the widest and deepest insight, while noting that sales own customer conversations but from a smaller universe that sometimes skews insights to fit their own needs. Forrester is equally direct, calling on B2B CMOs to become custodians of customer insight — transitioning teams from list managers and campaign number-crunchers to strategic insight generators.

And the performance data from Jason Ball’s B2B Effectiveness Engine research, across more than 1,000 senior marketers, is unambiguous: strategy, differentiation, and customer insight are upstream foundational factors with significant impact on everything downstream (Considered Content). Not supporting factors. Upstream determinants. Organisations that build this capability systematically outperform those that don’t — and the gap is measurable.

The structural model varies by scale

How marketing owns customer insight will look different depending on organisational size and complexity. For SMBs, centralising insight within marketing is the practical and effective model. For mid-market companies, a hub-and-spoke approach — with marketing as the strategic hub — provides the balance between rigour and business proximity. BCG’s benchmarking indicates that a hub-and-spoke model requires a minimum of seven to nine full-time employees to function effectively. For large enterprises, a Centre of Excellence that sets standards and enables organisation-wide capability, with marketing as the primary strategic owner and distributor of insight, represents current best practice — a model that Forrester’s research associates with the highest levels of customer insight maturity. In B2B SaaS specifically, product marketing has emerged as the natural home for this capability, with the Product Marketing Alliance’s 2025 data showing 78.7% of product marketers now owning sales enablement, with customer research as a foundational responsibility.

The structural model matters less than whether the three conditions for any model to work are genuinely in place.

Three conditions — and the seat at the table that has to be earned

The first condition is executive sponsorship. BCG is explicit: organisations whose CEOs are not committed to a fundamentally different customer insight operating model should not attempt a transformation. Without it, the insight function — wherever it sits — produces reports that accumulate unread and recommendations that do not reach the decisions they should be informing.

This leads directly to a point that is often stated as an assumption but should be treated as a prerequisite. The CMO’s seat at the executive table is not guaranteed. In many B2B organisations, marketing does not have a permanent voice in the decisions that matter most — pricing, product direction, go-to-market strategy, resource allocation. That seat has to be earned, and it is earned through the quality and strategic relevance of the insight marketing brings to those conversations. A marketing function that reports on campaign metrics and pipeline contribution is not building the case for a seat at the senior table. A marketing function that owns the authoritative understanding of what the market values, where growth is coming from, and what is blocking it — that function earns the right to be in the room. The CMO’s influence in the business is, in this sense, a consequence of insight ownership, not a precondition for it. Getting there requires demonstrating the value of strategic customer intelligence before the formal authority to own it is granted.

Budget control is the second condition. The insight function must own its research budget, not depend on business units to fund work that may challenge their own assumptions. When insight is funded by the functions it is supposed to challenge, it is not insight. It is validation.

Decision rights are the third condition, and the one most commonly absent. Insight must be wired into specific business decisions — proposition development, pricing reviews, go-to-market strategy, product roadmap — with clear accountability for what happens when the evidence contradicts current direction. Dashboards that update continuously but sit outside any decision process are a reporting capability, not a strategic insight function.

A deep change — and a structural competitive advantage

It is worth being clear about what resolving this properly requires. For most B2B organisations, this is not a marginal adjustment to the operating model. It is a fundamental shift in how the business thinks about customer understanding — who owns it, what it is for, and what authority it carries in strategic decisions.

That is a significant ask. It requires marketing to reclaim a mandate that in many organisations has already been ceded. It requires CEOs to sponsor a capability that, as we established in the first article, redistributes organisational influence in uncomfortable ways. It requires sales, product, and other functions to accept that their claims about customers will be tested against evidence they did not generate. None of that is straightforward, and none of it happens through structural diagrams alone.

But the organisations that are willing to make that change, and to sustain it with the conditions required, gain something that is genuinely difficult to replicate. Systematic customer insight — owned clearly, resourced properly, connected to decisions — is a structural competitive advantage. It compounds over time. The deeper the organisation’s understanding of what its customers value, the more precisely it can build propositions, allocate resources, and identify where the next growth opportunity lies before competitors do. Bain’s research shows that B2B loyalty leaders — companies that have built genuine customer understanding into their operating model — grow four to eight percentage points above market annual growth rates. That gap does not close quickly. It widens.

Most B2B organisations are competing on execution. They are optimising campaigns, refining targeting, testing channels, and measuring clicks. The organisations that invest in resolving the upstream question — who owns the deep, systematic understanding of what our customers actually value — are competing on a different basis entirely. Not louder. Not faster. Fundamentally better informed.

That is the opportunity that the consultancy frameworks, the maturity data, and the performance research all point toward. Not a solved problem with a clear consensus answer — as the first article established, it is anything but. But a genuine and durable source of competitive advantage for the organisations willing to do the hard work of claiming it.

This article draws on Grndworx’s research report: Who Should Own Customer Insight in B2B? Strategic Ownership and Organisational Models. Download: Whitepaper: Who should own customer content in B2B.

Sources

• Chartered Institute of Marketing: official definition of marketing
• DemandLab: The Marketing-Led Customer Experience: Why It’s the Future of B2B
• Directive Consulting: The Modern Guide to B2B Customer Analytics and Buyer Insights
• Transmission Agency: The B2B CMO Journey to the Board — Ricky Abbott
• Forrester: Turning Customer Information Into Actionable Insight: B2B’s Date With Big Data?
• Marketing Week: Gaining Customer Insight ‘Most Critical’ Skill for B2B Marketers (2024)
• Considered Content: The B2B Effectiveness Blueprint: Technology Edition — Jason Ball
• BCG: Building Better Customer Insight Capabilities (2016); Rewiring Customer Insight to Generate Growth
• Forrester: You Need a Customer Insights Center of Excellence
• Product Marketing Alliance: What is Product Marketing? The 2026 Guide
• Bain & Company: Do Your B2B Customers Promote Your Business?

The post Client Insight and the Case for Marketing — The Evidence, the Gap, and What Closing It Requires appeared first on grndworx.

Marketing dashboards often look healthy and the numbers being reported — impressions, clicks, downloads, engagement, marketing qualified leads — are all moving in the right direction.

And yet, when the conversation shifts to market share, pricing power, client loyalty, profitability or long-term growth, the connection can become much less clear. Even worse, executive teams are increasingly chasing the fallacy of perfect attribution: the ability to trace every sale directly back to a marketing euro spent, even when the buying journey is complex, multi-stakeholder and may unfold over a three-year sales cycle.

This is one of the biggest challenges facing B2B marketing today.

But what if it is actually one of the biggest opportunities?

I would argue that marketing has become too closely associated with marketing communications, campaign delivery and channel performance. The focus is often on communication, while the other levers of marketing — proposition, pricing, positioning, distribution, client value and commercial strategy — receive far less attention.

Communication matters, of course. But communication is not the same as business impact. The risk is that marketing teams become very good at marketing to their KPIs, while losing sight of the client and the business outcomes the company needs to achieve.

Growth in B2B is becoming a tougher battle.

Competition has intensified to levels many firms have not experienced before. Growth is harder across sectors. Clients are more selective, better informed and less tolerant of generic propositions. At the same time, AI and automation are making it easier for companies to produce marketing output, but harder for them to sound genuinely different.

Many firms are now using similar tools, similar data signals and similar content structures. The result is more efficiency, but not always more growth.

If every company becomes better at producing more content, more campaigns and more messaging, then volume and efficiency are no longer sustainable sources of advantage. Sustainable advantage needs to be built on something much harder to copy: relevance, clarity and client understanding. The ability to connect what a company does with what its clients need, value and are willing to pay a higher price for.

This is where marketing has a powerful opportunity to reframe its purpose.

Marketing can help the business move beyond activity and towards focus. It can help leadership understand where growth will come from, which clients matter most, which needs are most valuable, and where the company has the strongest right to win.

It can help the organisation sharpen its positioning, clarify its value, and build the commercial confidence needed to accelerate towards its targets.

But marketing cannot do that in isolation.

B2B firms cannot afford disconnected commercial functions. They cannot afford fragmented messaging, isolated campaigns or internally driven propositions that do not reflect the reality of the client.

Sales and marketing need to work from the same understanding of the client, the same view of value, and the same picture of what is slowing growth. Without that shared understanding, both functions default to what feels safest: product features, service descriptions, technical capabilities and internal language. These may be accurate, but they rarely create preference on their own.

Clients do not choose a firm because the firm has described itself well.

They choose because they understand the value the firm creates for them. This is the growth opportunity for marketing: to return to its original mandate and partner with sales to build sustainable growth.

At its best, marketing helps the business create, communicate and capture value. It helps the firm understand the market, understand the client, clarify its position and compete with greater confidence.

That is a far more strategic role than campaign delivery alone. It is a role focused on growth. And it is the role marketing teams now have the opportunity to reconquer. For companies looking to accelerate growth, now is the time to reframe marketing as a strategic growth enabler — one that uses deep client insight to sharpen focus, align commercial teams, and drive measurable business outcomes.

The post The Growth Opportunity for Marketing: From Campaign Performance to Business Impact appeared first on grndworx.

The most common way is to hand the problem to sales.

Sales already talks to customers every day. Sales knows the accounts, reads the room, hears objections in real time. Assigning customer understanding to sales requires no structural change, no new budget, no uncomfortable conversation about which function gains authority over which decisions. It is the path of least organisational resistance — and it is precisely that quality, rather than any evidence of effectiveness, that explains its prevalence.

The problem is not that sales lacks intelligence or customer proximity. It is that sales-sourced insight suffers from five systematic biases that make it unreliable as the primary basis for strategic decisions. And in organisations that have not recognised those biases, decisions about propositions, positioning, product strategy, and resource allocation are being made on a foundation that is structurally compromised before the first analysis begins.

Two types of knowledge

Sales holds irreplaceable relationship-level knowledge. Salespeople understand individual accounts intimately — the political dynamics within buying committees, the personal priorities of key contacts, the real-time signals about competitor activity and shifting budgets. That knowledge is genuine, valuable, and cannot be replicated by any research programme. It must flow into any serious customer insight function.

But it is not strategic insight. The distinction matters because relationship-level knowledge and pattern-level intelligence answer fundamentally different questions. Sales answers: what does this account need right now, and how do we win this deal? Pattern-level insight answers: what is changing across our entire market, why do we win and lose systematically, what do buyers value that we are not yet delivering, and where is our next growth opportunity?

Those are the questions that inform proposition development, pricing, positioning, product strategy, and resource allocation. Sales cannot answer them — not because salespeople lack intelligence, but because their structural position makes it impossible. And when organisations rely on sales as their primary source of customer understanding, they inherit five systematic biases that distort every strategic decision downstream.

The five biases

Anecdotal bias is the most obvious. Sales reports individual deal stories rather than patterns across the market. The last lost deal shapes the narrative. The loudest client becomes the representative client. Strategic decisions get made on a sample of one.

Recency bias compounds this. The most recent conversation dominates the sales team’s view of the market, regardless of whether that conversation is representative. A single difficult renewal or a competitor mention on three consecutive calls can trigger strategic responses that the broader data would not support.

Relationship bias is subtler but more damaging. Salespeople see accounts through the lens of their personal contacts — typically the buyers they already know. Research from LinkedIn and Bain found that over 40% of B2B deals fail specifically because hidden stakeholders in legal, procurement, and finance raise concerns that the sales team never anticipated (Marketing Week). The people salespeople talk to are not the full buying committee. The insight derived from those conversations reflects only part of the decision-making reality.

Selection bias follows directly. Sales talks to existing contacts — active prospects, current customers, recent churners who agreed to an exit conversation. The silent churners, the non-customers who evaluated and rejected, the potential buyers who never entered the funnel: these are precisely the populations whose perspectives would most challenge existing assumptions. They are also the populations that sales-sourced insight systematically excludes.

Agenda bias is the final limitation. Sales conversations serve deal-specific purposes. They are not designed for open-ended discovery. The questions that would surface strategic insight — what would have to change for you to buy more, what is your biggest operational challenge that no supplier is addressing, what do you actually value that we have never asked about — are not the questions that close deals. Sales is not paid to ask them, and the context rarely supports it.

Alan Hale, who has led more than 250 B2B voice-of-customer projects over four decades, captures the problem directly (CX Pilots). Systematic research should surface the voice of the customer, not the voice of the sales representative. Sales-filtered input introduces bias that distorts strategic decisions — not occasionally, but structurally.

What the consequences look like in practice

The consequences are not hypothetical. Isoline Communications documented a technology brand whose sales and marketing teams were convinced their value proposition lay in differentiated products. Customers, when asked directly, felt that most global brands provided comparable products. The actual differentiator was the company’s organisational culture. Sales-filtered insight had fundamentally misidentified what the market valued — and the business had been building its go-to-market strategy on that misidentification.

This type of error is more common than organisations typically recognise, because sales-filtered insight rarely gets tested against external reality. The belief that the organisation understands its customers persists precisely because no systematic process exists to challenge it. And crucially, no function has the mandate or the political standing to do so — which is why the default to sales is self-reinforcing. It produces enough surface-level customer knowledge to make the question feel answered, while leaving the deeper strategic gaps permanently unexamined.

The performance data is unambiguous. Jason Ball’s B2B Effectiveness Engine research, drawn from more than 1,000 senior B2B marketers, found that the most effective B2B marketers are 50% more likely to invest in systematic customer research than their less effective peers (Considered Content). Strategy, differentiation, and customer insight are identified as upstream foundational factors — the elements that determine whether execution will perform. Organisations that rely on sales anecdote rather than systematic research are weakening their strategic foundations before their campaigns and programmes even launch.

The 95% that sales never sees

There is a final dimension that makes the limitations of sales-sourced insight particularly consequential in B2B. The LinkedIn B2B Institute’s 95-5 research, based on work by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, demonstrates that at any given time, 95% of potential buyers are not in an active buying cycle. Sales, by definition, only engages with the 5% who are.

Understanding why and when the other 95% will enter the market — what is changing in their business environment, what problems are building, what would trigger a decision — is inherently a strategic research capability. It requires systematic pattern recognition across a market, not relationship management within active accounts. Organisations that rely on sales for customer understanding are operating with visibility into 5% of their potential market and making decisions as though that sample is representative.

This is not a criticism of sales. It is a structural observation. Sales does what it is designed and incentivised to do, and it does it well. The problem is when organisations treat the absence of conflict around sales-led insight — the fact that it doesn’t upset anyone, doesn’t challenge existing assumptions, doesn’t concentrate authority in an uncomfortable place — as evidence that it is sufficient. It is not sufficient. It is simply convenient.

And in B2B, convenient and strategically sound are rarely the same thing.

The next article addresses where strategic insight should live, who is structurally positioned to own it, and — honestly — why the function best placed to do so has in many organisations already moved away from the capability that would justify the claim.

This article draws on Grndworx’s research report: Who Should Own Customer Insight in B2B? Strategic Ownership and Organisational Models. Download the full report at the following link: WHO SHOULD OWN CUSTOMER INSIGHT IN B2B?

Sources

• BCG: Building Better Customer Insight Capabilities (2016)
• Marketing Week: LinkedIn Marketing VP: Understanding ‘Complexity’ of B2B Buyers is Key to Growth (citing LinkedIn/Bain research)
• CX Pilots: B2B Voice of Customer: Why Most VoC Programs Fail — Alan Hale
• Isoline Communications: B2B Customer Insights: Why Tech Companies Need to Get Serious
• Considered Content: The B2B Effectiveness Blueprint: Technology Edition — Jason Ball
• LinkedIn B2B Institute: The 95-5 Rule (based on Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research)

The post Client Insight and the Sales Default — Why the Easy Answer Is the Wrong One appeared first on grndworx.

This is the first in a three-part series drawing on Grndworx’s latest research report, Who Should Own Customer Insight in B2B? Each article addresses a distinct dimension of the same core problem: that customer insight in B2B is widely valued in principle, rarely owned in practice, and almost never structured in a way that translates into genuine competitive advantage.

The belief-versus-reality gap

Ask any B2B leadership team whether customer understanding matters to their growth strategy. More than 75% of CEOs say it is critical, according to BCG’s benchmarking of nearly 650 respondents across 90+ enterprises. The conviction is near-universal.

The capability to act on it is not. BCG’s same research found that only 20% of customer insight functions operate at a strategic or competitive-advantage level. Bain’s independent research arrives at a similar figure: roughly 22% of B2B organisations have mature, actionable customer insight capabilities. The other 78–80% are making strategic decisions on something thinner — a combination of sales anecdote, periodic surveys, and accumulated assumption.

McKinsey’s data adds a different angle. B2B customer experience index ratings average less than 50%, compared to 65–85% for B2C companies. The organisations that struggle most to understand their customers are, by definition, the ones operating in the most complex buying environments — multiple stakeholders, long sales cycles, significant switching costs. The complexity that makes insight most valuable is the same complexity that makes it hardest to generate.

Six of the world’s leading consultancies looked at this problem. They couldn’t agree on the answer.

BCG, Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, Bain, and Deloitte have all published substantive frameworks on customer insight ownership. Six firms. Decades of combined B2B research. Hundreds of client engagements across every major industry.

Their recommendations do not converge.

BCG argues for a dedicated centralised function with its own leadership and budget, operating as a peer to marketing — not within it. Gartner’s 2023 guidance recommends consolidating fragmented insight teams under the CMO. Forrester places ownership with portfolio marketing, but with insight consumed and operationalised by sales and product teams. McKinsey declines to name a functional owner at all, arguing that without CEO-led cross-functional commitment, any structural assignment is cosmetic. Bain recommends embedding insight into the operating model through a universal metric. Deloitte frames it as an enterprise-wide capability — data, talent, and culture — with no single functional home.

This is not a nuanced debate between closely aligned positions. These are fundamentally different structural prescriptions from organisations with access to the same evidence base.

The easy interpretation is that the problem is technically complex, with no single right answer. That is partially true. But it obscures something more uncomfortable.

Customer insight, properly resourced and structurally empowered, is one of the most politically consequential capabilities an organisation can build. A function that owns the authoritative understanding of what customers actually value, what is driving decisions, where the business is losing and why — that function shapes product strategy, challenges sales narratives, overrides internal assumptions, and has a direct line to the most important decisions the business makes. Done properly, it does not sit quietly downstream of other functions. It sits upstream of all of them.

That is precisely why it is so difficult to assign. Whoever owns customer insight — genuinely owns it, with budget, mandate, and decision rights — gains a form of organisational authority that threatens the existing balance of influence. Sales loses its monopoly on the customer voice. Product loses the ability to build from internal assumptions unchallenged. Leadership loses the comfort of acting on anecdote dressed as intelligence. The function that owns insight owns the evidence base against which every other function’s claims get tested.

Organisations sense this, even when they do not articulate it. The resistance to resolving ownership clearly is not primarily analytical — it is political. And the consultancy frameworks, for all their rigour, cannot resolve a political problem with a structural recommendation. Each model they propose can be technically defensible and organisationally unworkable at the same time, because the obstacle is not the org chart. It is the unwillingness of organisations to let any single function accumulate that much strategic authority.

This is what the persistent failure to resolve the ownership question actually reflects. BCG finds 80% of organisations stuck in the earliest maturity stages. Forrester’s customer obsession research found just 27 companies across their entire sample that met the criteria for being genuinely customer-obsessed (Digital Commerce 360, 2024). Qualtrics XM Institute’s 2024 survey of B2B organisations shows 70% of firms remain in early maturity despite real structural investment — and 41% now run centralised customer experience teams of ten or more full-time employees, up from 31% in 2022. These organisations have not failed to understand the problem. Many have invested substantially in attempting to solve it. The reason the maturity data barely moves is that the structural solutions keep running into the same organisational resistance — the resistance of functions that stand to lose influence the moment insight ownership becomes genuinely clear.

That persistent failure across so many organisations, despite sustained attention from the best-resourced consultancies in the world, is not primarily a capability problem. It is a power problem. And that makes it significantly harder to solve than the frameworks suggest.

The question that doesn’t get asked clearly enough

Who is actually responsible for customer understanding in your organisation?

Not nominally. Not in the job description of someone who also owns four other mandates. Accountable — with the budget, the decision rights, and the organisational expectation to produce strategic intelligence rather than reports.

That question is more consequential than it sounds. Without a clear answer, insight becomes everyone’s responsibility in theory and nobody’s in practice. It accumulates — in CRM notes, survey platforms, sales call recordings, customer success logs — without anyone owning the synthesis. Patterns that could inform strategic decisions go unrecognised. Propositions get built on internal assumptions rather than external reality. The business operates with a version of customer understanding that feels complete because the data exists, but functions as guesswork because no one has the mandate to turn it into something actionable.

This is not an edge case. CustomerGauge data shows 32% of B2B companies have no formal team responsible for customer sentiment, and 42% set no goals for their customer experience programmes at all. Nearly half of organisations cite siloed data as their primary obstacle to gaining customer insight — and 97% of executives acknowledge that silos damage operations (CMSWire; Madison Logic). These are not small or unsophisticated businesses. They are organisations that have acknowledged the importance of customer understanding and have still not resolved who owns it.

The consultancy disagreement matters here in a specific way. When the structural answer is contested at the highest level of B2B thinking — not because the evidence is thin, but because the politics of clear ownership are genuinely uncomfortable — individual organisations face a decision that cannot be resolved by buying the right framework. It has to be decided internally, with clarity about what the organisation actually needs from customer insight, and the willingness to let one function accumulate the authority to deliver it.

 What the data means for how organisations should respond

The pattern across this research is consistent. The organisations that generate competitive advantage from customer insight are not simply the ones that invest more in research. They are the ones that have resolved the ownership question — with executive commitment, clear mandate, and accountability for decisions rather than deliverables.

The next two articles in this series address the most important dimensions of that question. The first is the case against the most common default: that sales already covers customer understanding, so no further structural investment is needed. The second is the affirmative case for marketing as the strategic owner — along with an honest assessment of why many marketing functions have already moved away from that role, and what reclaiming it actually requires.

The evidence on the scale of the problem is unambiguous. What remains contested — and consequential — is whether organisations are willing to resolve the question that the consultancies have not.

This article draws on Grndworx’s research report: Who Should Own Customer Insight in B2B? Strategic Ownership and Organisational Models. Download our full research report here.

 Sources

• BCG: Building Better Customer Insight Capabilities (2016); How Customer Insight Can Be a Powerful Business Partner (2017); Rewiring Customer Insight to Generate Growth
• Bain & Company: Do Your B2B Customers Promote Your Business?
• McKinsey & Company: Improving the Business-to-Business Customer Experience
• Gartner: Quick Answer: How CMOs Structure an Insights Team (2023)
• Forrester/SiriusDecisions: Align Your Revenue Generating Ecosystem; You Need a Customer Insights Center of Excellence
• Digital Commerce 360: Forrester: Customer Obsession is Key to B2B Revenue and Profits (October 2024)
• Deloitte Insights: The Insight-Driven Organization
• Qualtrics XM Institute: The State of B2B Customer Experience Management (2024)
• CustomerGauge: Why B2B Customer Experience Programs Fail; 16 Modern Voice of Customer Best Practices
• CMSWire: Your Customer Signals Aren’t the Problem. Your Operating Model Is.

Madison Logic: Break Down Data Silos for Better B2B Marketing Insights

The post The State of Customer Insight in B2B – What the Evidence Actually Shows appeared first on grndworx.

Executive summary

• AI search is the new front door for search — shaping visibility, credibility, and discovery across B2B markets. If you’re not cited, you’re not seen. 
• Quality drives visibility — only authoritative, relevant, and well-structured content earns a place in AI results. 
• Integration fuels growth — when tied to marketing and sales, AI search insights turn visibility into measurable business outcomes. 

AI search is quickly becoming unavoidable for B2B businesses, emerging as the first step in searches for RFPs, competitive analysis, and research. This shift presents a critical challenge: if you’re not cited, you’re not seen. 

That makes AI search more than just another digital tool. It’s a vital driver of visibility, ensuring your company and services are discoverable. Applied strategically, it becomes a powerful lever for engagement, growth, and customer insight. 

For brands navigating today’s digital landscape, the question isn’t “Should we use AI search?”—it’s “How do we use it to create real, measurable value for our customers and business?” 

THE RISE OF AI SEARCH: REAL CHANGE, REAL OPPORTUNITY

AI search is reshaping how people find, evaluate, and act on information. Instead of simply providing a list of links, AI-driven search engines and conversational tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity now deliver context-aware answers, personalised insights, and actionable recommendations.

• Weekly average users of ChatGPT reached 700 million in July 2025, up from 100 million just 20 months earlier (OpenAI, 2025) 
• Globally, 78% of organisations now use AI in at least one business function (McKinsey, 2025). 
• Generative AI is becoming the go-to for research: 68% of users say they rely on it to research, gather, or summarize information (Bain, 2025). 
• Users click less when an AI summary is present. In a US-wide study, Google users were less likely to click links on results pages with AI summaries; they rarely clicked cited sources (Pew Research Center, 2025). 

Organizations’ use of AI has accelerated markedly in the past year, after years of little meaningful change.

Organizations that use AI in at least 1 business function,¹ % of respondents

Actively managing AI visibility does more than boost exposure: it provides sharper insight into customer expectations and builds stronger engagement, higher conversion, and long-term loyalty. 

THE VALUE OF AI SEARCH FOR CLIENTS AND COMPANIES

AI has made clients more discerning. They no longer seek just answers-they want solutions, clarity, and guidance. This shift carries major implications for marketing communications: 

• Immediate relevance: Customers expect fast, accurate responses.
• Quality content: To appear in AI search results, firms must deliver content that is authoritative, credible, and well-structured.
• Personalised guidance: Clients want insights tailored to their specific context. 

AI search is valuable not only for clients but also for firms. By actively managing their presence in AI results, companies gain a unique window into customer intent-revealing exactly what prospects are asking. This creates an opportunity to present expertise at the right moment, shape the conversation with potential clients, and build smarter, more targeted marketing strategies.

THE SITUATION — AI SEARCH & BUSINESS IMPACT

• AI leaders outperform financially. Over the past 3 years, companies leading in AI saw 1.5× faster revenue growth and 1.6× higher total shareholder returns than peers. (BCG, Where’s the Value in AI?)
• AI answers affect visibility: When Google’s AI Overviews appear, clicks on the #1 organic result drop by ~34%. (Ahrefs / DCN, 2025)
• AI Share of Voice (SoV) is emerging: “AI Share of Voice” — how often your brand is cited in AI answers vs competitors — is becoming a new benchmark for visibility. (Exposure Ninja, 2025)  

These numbers illustrate that AI search can do more than influence clicks – it can directly drive business outcomes embedded within a strategic growth framework. 

HOW AI SEARCH FITS INTO A GROWTH STRATEGY

AI search delivers the greatest impact when embedded in a broader, outcomes-focused growth framework. On its own, it can improve visibility and insights. Integrated with wider marketing, sales and PR strategies, it becomes a catalyst for sustainable growth. 

• From signals to strategy: AI queries reveal precise customer intent and pain points. When fed into campaign design, product positioning, and sales strategies, they become actionable drivers of growth.
• From content to connection: To win in AI search, brands must publish authoritative, trustworthy content. Linked with earned media and customer experience, that content builds credibility and strengthens client relationships across the full journey.
• From insights to outcomes: Success should be measured by tangible business results—share of voice, conversions, revenue, or retention—not by rankings alone. Efforts that don’t contribute to these outcomes are deprioritised.

The future of marketing is data-driven, insight-led, and outcome-focused. AI search is one of the most powerful levers in that evolution—but only when used as part of a wider, integrated growth strategy.

The post AI SEARCH: BEYOND THE HYPE – DRIVING REAL BUSINESS OUTCOMES AND GROWTH  appeared first on grndworx.

Executive Summary

• Benchmarking as a baseline, not a goal: While benchmarking identifies inefficiencies and improvement opportunities, it often promotes conformity rather than innovation, leading companies to settle for “good enough.”
• Innovation over imitation: Businesses should redefine success by prioritizing customer needs, creating unique value, and setting forward-thinking goals that push beyond industry norms.
• Growth through agility and creativity: True competitive advantage comes from continuous learning, calculated risk-taking, and fostering a culture that values originality over replication.

Is benchmarking the secret to better performance or simply a way to ensure you don’t fall behind? For many businesses, comparing their processes and performance to industry standards feels like a smart move – an opportunity to identify any gaps and improve. However, benchmarking often stops short of real progress.

Rather than driving innovation, it can create a comfort zone of “matching” rather than “surpassing”. This cycle of conformity leaves little room for new thinking and, more importantly, misses opportunities to surprise and delight customers with truly innovative solutions (= corporate punk).

Here are some pros and cons of benchmarking and understanding its limitations.

BENCHMARKING MATTERS BUT HAS ITS LIMITATIONS!  

At it’s best, benchmarking serves as a baseline. It highlights opportunities to improve operations, optimize resources, and fix inefficiencies. But the drawbacks are:

• Backward-looking: Benchmarking is essentially reactive, drawing from the past performance metrics of others.
• Limited differentiation: By aligning with industry standards, businesses risk blending in rather than standing out.
• Potential for complacency: Meeting benchmarks can feel like an achievement, even if it means settling for “good enough”.

While it can offer valuable insights, it’s important to remember that benchmarking represents the start line, not the finish line.

SHIFTING THE FOCUS: FROM COMPARISON TO INNOVATION 

Instead of focusing purely on benchmarking, businesses should aim to refine what success looks like. Here’s how:

1. Put the customer first: Use customer feedback, needs, and preferences as your primary guide. Provide solutions that solve their problems in innovative ways, even if they challenge industry norms.
2. Create unique value propositions: Benchmarking can show you the competition ranks, but it’s your unique value that sets you apart. Focus on creating products ad services that surprise, delight, and resonate with your audience.
3. Adopt a forward-thinking mindset: Don’t stop at catching up to competitors. Set ambitious, future-orientated goals that drive bold action and groundbreaking ideas.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS FOR SUCCESS BEYOND BENCHMARKING 

• Stay agile: The business landscape evolves quickly, so it’s vital to regularly revisit at your strategies to make sure they stay relevant to both customers and market dynamics.
• Take calculated risks: True growth often requires dipping your toes into new territory. Be willing to take considered risks in pursuit of long-term gains.
• Invest in continuous learning: Stay informed about customer behaviors, emerging trends, and new technologies. Proactively use these insights to drive your strategy.
• Encourage a culture of creativity: Create an environment where employees feel empowered to think outside of the box and contribute original ideas.

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF OVER-RELIANCE ON BENCHMARKS 

Benchmarking can reveal unknown performance gaps, but over-reliance on it can unintentionally hinder growth by:

Missing emerging opportunities, struggling to differentiate, and losing sight of the core mission for the chase of external validation.

By challenging the status quo and focusing on creating and delivering new value, your business can achieve more than just “good enough”. It can lead the way. #CorporatePunk

THE DEFINITION OF CORPORATE PUNK

Corporate Punk
Most companies try to fit in.
They smooth the edges, polish every word, and end up looking just like everyone else.

Corporate Punk is what happens when you stop doing that.
It’s about being honest, bold, and a little rebellious.
It’s about saying what you really think and showing what makes you different. Corporate Punk is nonconformity with purpose—the spark that electrifies your brand and makes people stop, notice, and remember.

Because standing out isn’t a risk — pretending to be like everyone else is.

The post Benchmarking vs. Corporate Punk appeared first on grndworx.

Executive Summary

• Over half of B2B marketers prioritize short-term tactics, with only 16% focused on long-term brand building.
• Main barriers include lack of vision, limited budgets, and insufficient leadership support for brand investment.
• The article urges companies to rebalance their strategies and invest in long-term growth to remain competitive.

It seems that B2B marketers are at a crossroads and success lies in finding the right balance between short-term wins and long-term investments. They understand the importance of building a brand but face significant obstacles, including budget constraints, leadership priorities, and economic pressures.

THE SHORT-TERM TRAP: WHY B2B MARKETERS STRUGGLE TO INVEST IN LONG-TERM GROWTH  

Marketing Week explored the State of B2B Marketing survey which gathered responses from 600 B2B marketers; we are sharing some (concerning) highlights:

• Over 50% prioritize short-term tactics (more than one-third stating this as their main focus, another fifth showing a slight preference but only 16% favour long-term initiatives!)
• Company size does not matter: the concern lies with immediate results rather than long-term brand building. Over 50% report that brand building is not a budget priority.

The reasons for this mind-set are:

• Lack of long-term vision within their business (43,5%)
• Lack of budget (41,7%)
• The company does not value brand or consider it too costly
• SME have a resource challenge while in larger organisations it is leadership buy-in

In an increasingly competitive landscape, it’s essential for companies to rethink their marketing strategies and allocate resources toward long-term growth, even if it means taking a risk by moving away from immediate performance metrics.

The post Are B2B Marketers Ditching Brand for Fast Cash? appeared first on grndworx.

Executive Summary

• AI increases efficiency but often raises expectations, leading to more complex and time-intensive tasks.
• Marketers must adapt by developing new skills in data, strategy, and technology while preserving creativity and brand authenticity.
• The real impact of AI lies in reshaping, not reducing, the nature of work.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work, especially in marketing, where automation and generative tools promise greater efficiency and smarter personalization. Yet, the reality is more complex — instead of reducing workload, AI often redefines it. As technology evolves, marketers are finding themselves balancing automation with creativity, strategy, and continuous learning to stay ahead.

AI AND THE WORKLOAD PARADOX: MORE EFFICIENT, NOT EASIER

While AI is revolutionizing many aspects of our work, it is not necessarily making our jobs easier or less time-consuming. Here is why:

• Efficiency vs. Time Savings: Technology offers efficiency and cost-saving benefits, but it often sets new standards rather than reducing workload. For instance, the introduction of email streamlined communication but also increased the volume of messages we handle daily.
• Generative AI in Marketing: AI tools like GenAI are used to create more targeted and personalized content, enhancing engagement and relevance. However, this often means more work for marketers – instead of crafting a single message, they now create and prove dozens of variations. Additionally, while initial implementation of these tools can be costly, the ongoing management and optimization require significant time and expertise.
• Automation Paradox: While AI can handle routine tasks, it often shifts human roles to more complex and strategic tasks, which can be equally demanding yet more intellectually stimulating. In customer service, for example, automated systems manage routine inquiries, allowing humans to focus on more challenging and rewarding issues which need more time to resolve.
• Skills and Adaptation: The integration of AI in marketing requires marketers to better define their brand voice and adapt to new roles focused on data, strategy, and martech expertise. This shift demands even more continuous learning and adaptation to stay competitive.
• Quality vs. Quantity: There is a concern that AI-generated content, while efficient, might not match the quality of human-created content. It’s crucial to remember that the quality of AI output is only as good as the input data and briefs. Marketers must balance the benefits of AI with maintaining authenticity and creativity in their work.

AI brings many benefits, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce the workload. Instead, it changes the nature of the work, requiring marketers to adapt and continuously improve their skills. At Grndworx, we believe in embracing technology while staying true to the core values of creativity and quality.

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