Why Marketing Teams Get Customer Focus Wrong

Episode Transcript

When was the last time that your team made, like, a really meaningful, creative, or strategic decision based on something a customer actually said? Recently?

Not last quarter's NPS digest, not from a persona document that somebody did maybe, like, two years ago based on a couple of sales calls, not on anecdotal feedback from that one customer who always replies to your emails.

I'm talking about real, recent customer signal, something that could materially change what you're working on right now. For most marketing teams, the honest answer to this question is not recently? enough.

But here's the thing, most of us know that. We feel this gap.

We know that we're building campaigns based on assumptions we have not validated in months, quarters, years.

We write messaging that's based on pain points we identified before the last major market shift. We ship content out into the void and pretend like, our click-through rate is some kind of revelatory insight. But I don't wanna be too hard on us because this is not laziness.

This is a structural problem. Most marketing teams just don't have a system for continually integrating customer signal, into their work. They might have projects like periodic research initiatives or an annual survey, or maybe even a customer advisory board that produce a document that gets referenced less and less and less the older it gets.

But to be honest with ourselves, that's not customer focus. It's not customer centricity.

That's customer archeology. So today, we're gonna talk about the difference between those things and what it actually takes to build continuous customer feedback into your iteration cycles as a rhythm, not a one-off project.

And we're gonna look at what the best product teams, figured out years ago that. marketing is still trying to catch up on.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome driven marketing.

Every week we dig into the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing. From building high velocity workflows and cutting waste to measuring what actually matters and scaling success across teams.

In the Agile marketing operating system, the customer sits at the intersection of who and what, who your work serves and what you choose to prioritize.

So it is not a nice to have element. It is supposed to be the gravitational center of everything. But for a lot of teams, customer focus is aspirational language, and your actual work doesn't reflect it. Today's episode is gonna try to change that, or at least give you a very clear picture of what change would look like and how to get started. So let's strap on those virtual hiking boots and get going.

Here's a number I wanna start off with putting front and center, 87%. That is the percentage of Agile marketers in our ninth annual State of Agile Marketing report who say they often use customer insights or data to guide what they work on. Compare that to the non-agile marketers at 72%.

Now, you might think to yourself, "That's not really a huge gap, 15 percentage points." And really  72% isn't terrible, but I want you to hold on with that conclusion because it gets more interesting when we dig into the rarely or never using customer insights end of the scale.

6% of non-agile marketers say they rarely or never use customer insights to guide their work. For Agile marketers, the number is 1%.

So this is not like a rounding error. That is a fundamentally different operating mode.

But because this is what we do on this podcast, I wanna push back on the data just a little, including on ourselves, because frequency of use of data and quality of use are not the same thing. So using customer insights could mean anything from running a quarterly survey to a weekly customer interview cadence that's baked into every sprint, and those are wildly different things that would technically both check the same box. So for me, the question isn't whether your team uses customer data at all. The question is, how fresh is it? How specific is it, and how directly does it connect to what your team is actually building right now?Most marketing teams would not love the real honest answers to any of those questions.

So let's talk about what extremely successful Agile looks like and why, in those cases, customer focus is at the top of their list.

So every year in our State of Agile Marketing Report, we ask our respondents to rate the success of their Agile implementation.

And every year we look at what separates those teams who are at the top, the ones who say their implementation has been extremely successful, from everybody else. And this year, the number one benefit reported by our extremely successful Agile teams was, drum roll please, increased focus on customers.

52% of the extremely successful Agile marketers called that out as a benefit, and that's compared to just 30% for the rest of the Agile marketing respondents.

So think about that. That is not a tiny couple point difference. 22 percentage point spread between Agile teams who have really cracked this, who are really seeing increased customer centricity as a byproduct of their ways of working, and those who are maybe still just going through the motions of trying to stay in touch with their customers, but it's not really working.

So this is gonna tell us something really important, in my opinion. It tells us that when Agile is working the way it's supposed to inside of marketing, we are not just seeing teams that are faster or more organized. It is changing the orientation of extremely successful Agile teams. It shifts where they are pointed because they are talking to customers more. And here's why I think this is happening. Agile practices create these natural forcing functions for customer engagement.

So we've got short iteration cycles like sprints, which means you have to make prioritization decisions frequently. And if you are making those decisions frequently like you're supposed to, you feel it very intensely and acutely when you do not have a strong customer signal to guide those prioritization decisions. Because you're trying to figure out what to do, what to build, what to release next week, not hypothetically next quarter. It's immediate. Your needs are immediate.

And so a two-year-old persona document is just not gonna cut it. And honestly, that is not accidental. Agile ways of working have this customer focus built into their DNA. This is a structural, deliberate component of Agile ways of working. The cadence creates the need for customer conversation, which means that teams without this kind of frequent cadence can go long stretches of time, months, quarters, uh, years, without feeling the pressure of the lack of customer knowledge. And they will keep going this way until a campaign completely crashes and burns because it missed the mark for where their customers are, and then everybody's pointing fingers and wondering, "Why didn't we do more customer insight work sooner?" So let's shift focus just a little bit here and think about our friends over in product.

I wanna borrow a bit of a lens here because product teams, especially if we're looking at like B2B SaaS, have been grappling with this problem for a really long time. And some of them have come up with some pretty good answers for how to bake in customer exploration into their processes. We do not have to reinvent the wheel here.

So first, there's Marty Cagan, who is just about as well-regarded in product circles as anybody, and he talks about customer discovery.

The idea that understanding and discovering and exploring your customer is not a separate phase of work that you somehow do before you build something. It's a continuous phase that doesn't end. It doesn't have a stop and end.

It's ongoing because you're never done discovering your customer, especially now. Because your customer and their context and their preferred channels and their buying behavior, all of that is gonna keep changing.

And a great way to maintain the right focus in our marketing work is to do another borrow, which is the jobs to be done framework. This was developed by Clayton Christensen and popularized by people like Bob Moesta, but it's making the same point in a lot of ways, just from a different angle.

So the premise of jobs to be done is that customers, users, people are not going to buy a product or open an email or engage with a piece of content because of their demographic profileOr their psychographic profile, or their firmographic profile, none of that.

They're gonna hire solutions to a job that needs doing in their life, personal life, professional life, whatever it is. And of course, those jobs shift.

The context of what job they need done and why and for whom and when, that's gonna shift. The priorities of the jobs are gonna shift. The job that seemed like a nice to have 18 months, ago is must do right now. And we have to be moving and changing and evolving our marketing messages and our content and our socials. All of that' needs to shift. at the same rate that the jobs our customers and prospects want our work to do for them is shifting. We have to keep up.

So what a lot of great product teams have operationalized, and what most marketing teams just have not quite gotten hold of yet, is this continuous feedback loop that is built directly into their delivery cycle. It is not a quarterly research project.

It's not the annual survey. It's a regular, this part is important, lightweight cadence of customer conversations, win-loss reviews, or some form of usage signal analysis that's then getting fed back into every single short planning cycle. And you may be thinking to yourself, "Who has time for that?"

And yeah, this is a very valid question. I totally get it. I do. Uh, I run a marketing team. It is hard to find the time to stop and look around and think about what your customers are actually telling you through their behavior, through conversations, through feedback.

But I'm gonna flip that "who has time for that" question a little bit, because who has the time or the budget or the political capital to keep building campaigns and content based on stale assumptions and then wondering why your performance keeps being terrible?

'Cause the real cost here is not the time it takes to do continuous discovery. The real cost is the compounding rework that you have to go back and do when you eventually find out that you have been solving the wrong problem. trying to get people to hire your content for a job that they don't care about anymore. That actually takes a lot more time and energy and capacity than doing the continuous integration of customer feedback.

Okay. Let's come back now to the Agile marketing operating system, because this is where Agile's structural advantage is gonna be the most visible. So looking at our same set of data, we realize that the customer insight gap that we were talking about is also showing us a plan update gap.

So the same teams that are not keeping their customer data fresh are also not keeping their plans up to date.

So we found out this year that 89% of Agile marketers update or adjust their plans at least monthly, maybe faster, but at the longest time horizon, time horizon, we're talking four weeks.

For non-agile marketers, that number drops to 66%. And quarterly or less, meaning they are going three months plus between meaningful plan adjustments, that's 34% of non-agile teams.

I mean, yikes, y'all. In 2026, we're going months without adjusting our plans? This is terrifying information. And then think about what quarterly planning means in the context of customer feedback. If you are only revisiting priorities every 90 days or longer, then your customer signal can have a 90-day shelf life. And in most markets right now, with buyer behavior shifting, competitive landscapes getting upended, AI tools utterly rewriting the way that people buy and research and shop, 90-day-old data is archeology.

You are unearthing fossils here. This is not meaningful real-time information. But Agile teams, remember, by contrast to those quarterly cycles, they are making prioritization decisions every two to four weeks. And so they need fresh customer signal to feel confident they are making those decisions well. And that need, that structural requirement that is baked into their ways of working, that's what's really driving this need for higher rates of customer insight. That's the mechanism, right? So that's why 87% of Agile marketers are frequently using customer data, while only 72% of non-Agile marketers are doing the same. It's not that Agile marketers innately care more about their customers, it's that the cadence that they're running on' creates accountability creates a pull for having current information. You cannot walk into a sprint planning meeting and say, "Hey, let's keep doing that thing that we talked about three months ago."

That decision needs to survive contact with what happened in the last sprint, which was only two weeks ago.

So if your team does not have this kind of quick cadence, if you're planning quarterly and then executing and only going back and looking at things when something goes horribly awry, you're just not going to want to or need to invest in building strong, quick customer feedback loops. They're not gonna exist 'cause they don't need to exist.

There is no moment in your calendar that demands that you have up-to-date data in order to plan and prioritize effectively. So this is the structural thing that marketers need to fix before anything else. It is not the research methodology. It is not your customer interview template.

It's the planning cadence that creates the forcing function for ongoing, up-to-date, continuous customer discovery. So ultimately, this is not some separate research function. It is an operating habit. Now, before we get into our practical, tactical closing section, I do need to point out one more thing 'cause I see this mistake a lot. So when teams hear phrases like continuous customer feedback and discovery, they immediately think research. They think, "We need a professional researcher.

We need a budget for this. We need some kind of fancy research methodology. We need to stand up a formal customer feedback program."

And this kind of framing is exactly what kills the whole process before it even starts. Because continuous customer feedback, the kind that's actually going to be able to feed your sprint cycles well, is not a research program.

It is just an operating habit. And it's gonna look very different depending on your team's context. Who are you marketing to? What are you trying to sell them? And what level of access do you have? So it might be two customer calls a week, and you can just rotate that responsibility across your team.

Everybody who's responsible gets a card for this sprint, and the next sprint, somebody else gets a card to do the customer calls. It could be a standing Friday review of support tickets or churn notes from the sales team. Maybe it's 15 minutes during your retrospective or review at the end of every sprint where you specifically and deliberately surface what you heard verbatim from customers this cycle. Email replies, form fills, whatever you've got gets built into your existing operating cadence. It can even just be tagging marketing relevant signals in CRM behavior and then looking at that as a report before every backlog refinement session.

So none of these are massive lifts. None of them are gonna require a brand new research budget. That is not an excuse.

They do not need a dedicated researcher with a PhD. They just require you to make a decision about how to bring in continuous customer discovery and to put it into your process and onto your calendar in a place that will be protected.

The teams in our data this year who are extremely successful at Agile and who are disproportionately reporting increased customer focus as their top benefit, I guarantee you they are not running elaborate research programs. They have just woven customer signal into their operating rhythms. It's just gonna show up in planning conversations because they have made it structurally unavoidable.

And that is the difference between customer focus as an aspiration that we're gonna get to one day when we have some time and capacity and customer focus as infrastructure.

Okay, time for what we're gonna do with all this great information. And again, this is not a someday when we have time and capacity. These are things you can and should be doing this week. First, audit the freshness of what is driving your current work. Before you do anything else, sit down, put your honest hat on, and ask yourself, "What is the most recent customer insight your team acted on?" It's the question we started with. How old was that information? Was it a direct customer signal, something a customer actually said or did? Or was it a secondhand telephone game interpretation?

No judgment, just data. You gotta know your baseline for where you're starting from. That's your first action.

Second, find the handoff that you are not using because customer signal exists somewhere in your organization.

Sales has it. Customer success has it. Support has it. The gap isn't that nobody knows anything about your customers.

It's usually that marketing just hasn't gotten plugged in to the places where that information lives.So identify one owner in one of those functions that has your data and just set up a 30-minute sync. Maybe do it right before backlog refinement or sprint planning.

Monthly at a minimum, weekly or bi-weekly in cadence with your sprints if you can. This is going to be the fastest way to access existing signal without trying to build some fancy research program from scratch.

Third action, add a customer signal moment to your next planning cycle. So before you set priorities for your next sprint or whatever planning cadence you're on, ask the team, "What did we hear about our customers in the last two to four weeks that should be influencing what we do next?" If the answer is nothing, well, then that's the answer itself.

That's the gap that you need to work. on closing. But the act of asking the question every single planning cycle is what's going to start to change the team's behavior over time.They know this question is coming. They're going to be on the lookout for data to bring as an answer. Fourth action, pick one lightweight practice and run it for 60 days.

Whether it's that two customer calls a week that we talked about, a standing review of support notes, customer quote board that your team maintains, something small and manageable for 60 days.

Do not try to build this full customer continuous discovery infrastructure overnight. We don't do that. We limit our width and we find the MVP.

Pick one thing, and then after your 60 days, assess what it changed about how your team is making decisions. It's your experiment. That's how we start building the habit without burning everybody out on the initiative from day one.

Remember, we are not after some kind of research transformation. We just want to build the operating rhythm.

Okay, four pieces of homework for you to increase your customer focus and make it a part of your continuous delivery cadence. If, as per usual, that feels like a lot and you are not sure how you're going to do that alone, that is what a Sherpa is for. Our Agile Sherpas team is standing by to help. You can find more information and ways to contact us at agilesherpas.com.

Until next time, I'm Andrea Fryrear. And remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.