The State of Customer Insight in B2B – What the Evidence Actually Shows

Most B2B organisations believe they understand their customers. The research suggests otherwise – and the gap between belief and reality is larger than most leadership teams would be comfortable acknowledging.

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