I have seen that happen in very different environments over the past twenty years. Sometimes it appeared as a pricing problem, sometimes as a product decision, sometimes as a marketing issue or a question of sales execution. What made these situations difficult was that the internal reasoning was rarely foolish. In most cases, experienced people were making sensible decisions based on the information in front of them.

The problem was that the information was incomplete.

A particularly clear example came when I took responsibility for Intel at Tech Data. Our market share was around 17%, and price appeared to be the obvious problem. Customers regularly asked for better conditions, so we negotiated harder and sharpened the offer. Yet the expected improvement in sales did not follow. Customers still bought elsewhere.

Eventually, I stopped focusing on the price itself and called several of our larger customers to ask why they were not buying from us when our offer was competitive.

Their answer had very little to do with Intel.

A processor was only one part of what they needed. If they bought the CPU from Tech Data, they still had to source the motherboard, chassis, memory and other components elsewhere. That meant additional suppliers, separate deliveries, more administration and higher shipping costs. We had been concentrating on making one product more attractive while the customer was evaluating the inconvenience of the whole purchase.

The distinction sounds obvious once somebody points it out. It was much less obvious when we were inside the problem.

Customers really were asking for lower prices, so there was evidence supporting the original conclusion. What we had failed to distinguish was the difference between something customers negotiated and something that actually determined where they placed the order.

That experience stayed with me because it illustrates how easily an organisation can become convinced by its own interpretation of the market.

As companies grow, they become increasingly dependent on systems that translate external reality into something the organisation can manage. Customer conversations become CRM data. Market behaviour becomes research. Sales activity becomes pipeline reporting. Product feedback becomes prioritised requirements. Marketing performance becomes dashboards and campaign metrics.

All of those tools are necessary. The difficulty begins when the representation starts carrying more weight than the reality it was supposed to represent.

The risk is particularly high because internal information is tidy. It arrives in agreed formats, at scheduled meetings, with numbers that can be compared and responsibilities that can be assigned. Customers are much less cooperative. They contradict one another, change their minds, behave differently from what they say and often explain symptoms rather than causes.

That makes it tempting to treat the internal version as the more reliable one.

A different version of the same issue appeared when I joined Samsung. The objective was ambitious: double the B2B business. The local structure supporting that ambition was still very lean, with one highly experienced salesperson and limited local marketing infrastructure.

One of my first conversations with him was not about the growth strategy. I simply asked what he needed most from Product.

His answer was a proper local product catalogue.

That request was useful precisely because of how ordinary it sounded. The organisation had a significant growth ambition, but the salesperson responsible for turning that ambition into customer conversations lacked something basic he could use in the field. We built the catalogue together in Dutch and French, kept it current, and I started joining customer visits so that I could understand how the products were actually being discussed. That in turn gave Marketing access to local cases and better proof, while Product received feedback directly from real customer conversations.

The value was not in producing another piece of collateral. The request revealed where the organisation was disconnected.

Product knew the offer. Sales knew the conversations. Marketing could turn what both were learning into material that made those conversations stronger. Until those perspectives were connected, each function could do good work and still leave the commercial system weaker than it needed to be.

That is why I have become wary of discussions about alignment that remain entirely internal. Teams can agree with one another and still agree on the wrong thing.

Customer reality provides a different reference point. It gives Product, Marketing and Sales something outside their own priorities against which their assumptions can be tested.

This does not mean Sales is automatically right because it speaks with customers. A salesperson can overreact to one large account just as easily as a product team can become too attached to a roadmap. Nor does it mean customers should determine every strategic choice. Customers are good at describing problems, behaviour and priorities, but they cannot always describe the solution a company should build.

What matters is that external evidence remains capable of changing the internal conversation.

I encountered the same principle again at DS Smith, this time in a much larger international environment. The company had gone through a broader strategic and brand transformation and had selected Showpad as a sales-enablement platform. The technical implementation mattered, but the harder question was whether Sales would find enough value inside the platform to use it in real customer situations.

That meant rebuilding the content around commercial use rather than simply transferring existing material into a new system. Around 95 sales pitches were reworked with business stakeholders so that they were shorter, more visual and better suited to actual conversations.

The moments that told us whether the work was succeeding did not happen in internal review meetings. One senior account director used the material from her phone during a customer dinner because it was relevant to the discussion she was having there and then. In another case, after presenting to a buying committee, the platform showed that the people repeatedly reopening the proposal were not the same people who had asked the most questions during the meeting. That gave her a different view of where influence in the account might actually sit.

Those examples matter because they show the difference between something being approved and something being useful.

Large organisations can become very good at approval. A project gains executive sponsorship, a budget is released, the brand team signs off, the platform launches and the programme appears on the transformation roadmap. Every step can be completed successfully while the customer experiences very little improvement.

The same problem exists at functional level. Marketing can produce work that looks strong internally but does little to help Sales. Product can prioritise features that make perfect sense within the roadmap but fail to influence buying behaviour. Sales can argue for discounts because customers ask for them even when price is not the deciding factor.

None of this requires bad intentions. People naturally respond to the systems in which they operate. They protect budgets, meet targets, defend decisions and try to demonstrate progress. Over time, those internal motivations can become powerful enough to compete with the original reason the business exists: creating something customers value enough to choose.

The commercial consequence is easy to underestimate because a company does not need to deteriorate visibly in order to lose ground.

Markets are relative.

If a competitor makes its offer easier to understand while yours stays the same, yours has become harder to understand by comparison. If its customer experience improves while yours remains unchanged, your position has weakened. If competitors learn faster from customers while your organisation becomes increasingly effective at defending its existing assumptions, internal stability can coexist with external decline.

Standing still therefore does not mean standing still.

That is why I return so often to what I think of as customer truth. Not because every customer statement should be treated as fact, and certainly not because customer research can replace judgement. The value lies in forcing internal thinking to come back into contact with external behaviour often enough that the organisation cannot become too comfortable with its own explanations.

The interesting questions are usually not whether the company calls itself customer-centric or whether it runs customer surveys. They are more practical.

When customer behaviour contradicts the plan, does anybody investigate why? When Sales keeps rebuilding Marketing's material, does somebody ask what is missing? When price reductions fail to change buying behaviour, does the organisation reconsider the diagnosis? When local teams repeatedly rewrite a central proposition, is that treated as a discipline problem or as evidence that the proposition may not travel well enough?

Those are the points where useful information often enters the system.

They are also the points where organisations can choose to ignore it.

Over the years, I have become less interested in whether an internal argument sounds convincing and more interested in what happens when that argument meets the customer. That is where assumptions become evidence, where functional opinions acquire context and where apparently sensible decisions are sometimes revealed to be solving the wrong problem.

The organisation does not need to surrender its judgement to the market. It does, however, need to remain close enough to the market for its judgement to be challenged.

When that stops happening, the business can continue moving, spending and reporting progress for quite some time.

It may simply be moving in the wrong direction.

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