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A CRO’s Biggest Blind Spot Today Isn’t Strategy — It’s Reality

 

Most B2B CROs don’t lack experience. They don’t lack current, unbiased transaction data. They don’t lack effort. They are highly skilled and strategic. What they lack — and often don’t realize it — is unfiltered visibility into customer reality and perceptions. The CRO’s biggest blind spot is there for the asking if they know where to look.

 

Current customer reality and perceptions are the CRO’s biggest blind spot in revenue leadership today.

 

I hear people saying, “How can this be?” Mark, didn’t you share in a post not long ago how we have more information than at any other time in history, and leaders are suffering from decision fatigue?

Yes, CROs and everyone in leadership roles have more data than ever. Some CROs spend so much time reviewing data that they rarely speak with customers or sales managers today.

I discovered, however, that the biggest CRO’s blind spot isn’t strategy; after all, talented CROs know how to develop sales growth strategies. The biggest CRO blind spot that impacts the effectiveness of their strategies is why strategies and SKO sales launch meetings fail to produce the desired growth.

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Voice of Customer Insights is your Blind Spot warning light, helping you make strategic course corrections and pivots before a revenue and profit crash.

What does research say about understanding the customers’ and leadership blind spots that executives have?

The research validates what we have experienced in conducting voice-of-customer research: Leaders think they understand their customers, but often don’t.

Let’s quickly share a more common example of blind spots and warnings.

Just yesterday, I was driving, let’s say, at a comfortable 10 miles over the posted speed limit, and I saw a road sign ahead that said my current lane was closed. So, I quickly looked in my rearview mirror, and I assumed if anyone was on my left, I would have seen them. However, very quickly, a car was coming up on my left that was not there even seconds before and was likely going 30 miles over the speed limit. My lane-change warning light quickly alerted me to a car in my blind spot, and I changed lanes after the car passed, averting an accident.

This post is about an early warning system that every CRO has, and too few use when making strategic business growth lane changes. When CROs use my secret sauce to scale businesses, they drive explosive year-over-year growth.

What is the biggest Blind Spot CRO’s has today?

The biggest blind spot for B2B CROs is believing they understand customers because information flows upward — when, in reality, the truth is filtered, distorted, delayed, diluted, and sometimes removed at every layer.

Let’s break down the flow of customer and market information to the CRO.
Sales regularly talks to customers and prospects.
Sales should enter customer insights data into the CRM, some sell around the CRM, and some edit it
Sales managers have sales meetings talking about numbers and deals
Sales managers run reports and have a CRM dashboard to gain sales team insights
The sales manager runs an AI for the Sales summary report
Sales managers talk to the sales VPs
The sales VPs run an AI for a sales summary report from their VPs’ reports
The sales VPs talk to the CRO (often in an email)
CRO’s talk to executives.
Executives talk to other executives.
C-Suite, often the CEO and CFO talk to owners, the board, and or investors
Somewhere in that chain, reality gets replaced by interpretation.

 

It reminds me of the party game where you whisper something to the person next to you, then they whisper it to the person next to them, and the process continues until someone whispers in your ear. Guess what the story changed, often dramatically!

Often in that information exchange, politically incorrect data is removed.
Personal biases and beliefs are added.
The front-line salespeople listen to validate what they expect, not to learn.
Statements added as facts to support the gut and intuition of a leader.

 

Why Do Senior Executives Develop Blind Spots?

 

Blind spots aren’t created by incompetence. They’re created by success, scale, and structure.

Senior leaders started in much lower roles in the organization, often close to customers. As their careers advance, they move farther and farther away from the direct voice of the customer and rely on sales and sales managers to communicate customer satisfaction, buying criteria, and buying process shifts, customer challenges, market outlook, and constraints.

 

Here’s why even the best CROs develop blind spots:

  1. Distance from the Customer Grows with Seniority

As leaders rise, their time shifts:

  • Fewer customer conversations
  • More internal meetings
  • More decision-making under pressure
  • More cross-functional leader meetings ( and they have opinions about sales)
  • Meetings with the CEO, the board, and PE investors replace customer lunches

The result?

Executives lead customers through proxies and perception, not conversations.

  1. Information Gets Filtered to Be “Helpful”

No one wakes up planning to distort the customer truth. However, your team knows what you believe and wants to be loyal and support you. They unconsciously or consciously edit customer feedback to support a belief they know you have.

Here’s the challenge with filtered data:
  • Sales softens bad news to protect deals
  • Sales fails to share negative feedback for fear that the organization will shoot the messenger
  • Customer service does not share the customer comments about service and quality
  • Filtered feedback is placed, if you are lucky in the CRM
  • Managers summarize transaction data and CRM insights to save time
  • Product reframes feedback to fit roadmaps
  • Teams that lack psychological safety hide customer feedback that does not align with what the CRO and CEO believe to be true

Each step, each conversation is well-intentioned.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: The cumulative effect of filtered data erodes enterprise value.

  1. Success Creates Confirmation Bias

What worked before becomes “what customers want.” As someone who helps business owners and CROs, I often see an over-reliance on what worked before will work now… we have an execution and accountability problem. They may be right to a degree, but often what worked when they were account managers no longer works today.

Senior leaders often:
  • Overweight past wins
  • Underweight new signals
  • Dismiss outlier feedback that challenges assumptions
  • Believe in them and motivate them and will the business to success
  • Feedback that does not align with their beliefs is quickly dismissed

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Markets change faster than memory.

  1. Dashboards and AI for Sales Replace Dialogue

We have more data than most leaders know what to do with. In an effort to be thorough, leaders are using AI for sales to gather and summarize data into actionable insights. On the surface, this sounds like a great use of AI for sales; however, at the risk of sounding old school, AI is often wrong, and human-to-human conversations, critical thinking, and brainstorming trump any AI.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Metrics tell you what is happening, but customers tell you why.

Most CROs have dashboards.

Very few have direct, recurring exposure to customer language.

In terms of data speak, we have all heard the saying “garbage in, garbage out.”

Could it be that this year’s sales growth strategy was built on garbage?

The shame is that many sales growth strategies were built on garbage data and opinions, and fail to deliver the promised sales and profit growth.

  1. Power Changes What People Say

CROs often have one or two sales managers, often those they grew up with through the organization, whom they rely on to give them the truth. Some, because of a strong relationship, do share the customer and market reality of today. However, many will filter their feedback on the sales growth strategy and the market realities they know you wrote about.

Could your once peers, now employees, be telling you what they know you want to hear?
The more senior the leader:
  • The less likely people are to deliver the uncomfortable truth
  • The more feedback gets framed, not voiced
  • The more the company’s growth vision filters the feedback they receive
  • Customers, they once called on, now edit their responses based on the CRO’s position
No-Smoke-And Mirrors Insight: Customers and employees alike edit themselves.

 

What Are The Costs of CROs’ Blind Spots?

Blind spots don’t show up immediately. They show up as:
  • Slower deal velocity
  • Longer sales cycles
  • “Surprising” losses
  • Rising churn
  • Feature investments that don’t move revenue
  • Competitors successfully launching a new product or service, and investors and CEOs asking, “How did we miss that?”

By the time numbers confirm the problem, it’s already expensive. SKOs are often delivered in January through March, and teams have lost 90 days of sales execution. Some salespeople keep doing what they have always done while they wait for the new SKO marching orders, while others just wait. What if what they waited for is wrong?

The CRO, several members of the senior leadership team, and PE investors deliver this year’s vision based on the information available to them and the goals the investors expect.

If the CRO’s vision and plan shared at the SKO are not rooted in customer and market reality, the sales team will smile, clap, and, in 48 hours, keep doing what they have always done. Or the new salespeople try to execute this year’s growth vision, face brick walls, lose motivation, and resort to what they did last year. (when the team missed the sales growth targets…again)

CROs will feel the impact of their blind spot when revenue and profits fail to meet plan, and, in some cases, CEOs, owners, and PE investors doubt their abilities.

 

What Can CROs Do to Find Blind Spots?

The solution isn’t more reports; it’s shortening the distance between customer truth and executive belief.

One of the activities I encourage my Scaling UP clients to do is call customers. Yes, leaders call 3 to 5 customers each month to interview them. On a specific date, all managers share what they learned and decide whether to update the growth strategic plan. The goal stays the same, but how we will get there may change based on customer and market insights.

Other steps we encourage CROs to take include:

  1. Replace Anecdotes with Patterned Truth

One customer story is noise. Twenty unbiased interviews reveal a signal.

CROs need pattern-level insight, not deal reviews.

I have seen salespeople for the past 40 years come into meetings and share this “huge issue their company has, but the data is based on the last meeting.

  1. Install Independent Voice of the Customer

Sales will always filter — unintentionally. (sometimes intentionally)

Voice of Customer is one of the books I’ve read, and it’s been my secret sauce for helping companies drive explosive growth. We strategically interview large and small customers, new customers, and customers who have not bought in the last six months. We interview targeted new customers quoted but not won.

Independent VoC interviews:

  • Remove internal bias
  • Surface uncomfortable truths
  • Capture customer language exactly as spoken
  • Deliver customer responses to each question that can be used for business development
  • Uncover detractors, customers so unhappy that they are preparing to leave
  • Information about your customer’s revenue growth
  • Customer market outlook this year
  • What share of the customer’s wallet do we have
  • Why do customers buy from you
  • Why don’t customers buy everything they could from you
  • Current challenges
  • Current business constraints
  • After several interviews, market trends

 

This is how CROs see what they’re currently missing.

  1. Ask the Questions That Make People Uncomfortable to Remove CRO’s Blind Spots.

As an independent third party, our team does not have a relationship with your customers. We are not worried about asking a question and hurting our relationship like salespeople and sales managers often are. Customers do not have relationships with you and can share their views boldly without fear of hurting their relationship with your company or its leaders.

VoC interviews answer what we are seeking:
  • “Why do customers choose competitors over us?”
  • “What do customers tolerate — but not love?”
  • “What do buyers complain about after signing?”
  • “What assumptions do we make that customers don’t share?”
  • “What do our competitors do better than us?”
  • “What role do our sales and marketing play in your decisions to buy?”
  • “How has your buying process changed, if at all, in the last 12 months?”
  • “What do you wish we would start and stop doing?”
  • “What share of the spending budgets for this category do we have?”
  • “When you need to solve a new challenge for the business, where do you look?”
No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Blind spots hide behind polite questions.

What we have experienced, after helping B2B companies cale for over 35 years is this raw data, often uncomfortable to hear (and share sometimes) equips the CROs and other leaders with actionable insights from current customers and when coupled with transaction the information to make design and launch strategies for driving explosive growth. ( my first book)

  1. Create Direct Executive Exposure to Customers

Not curated reference calls.

Not sales-led meetings.

Real conversations about …
Lost deals.
Churned customers.
New customers onboarded.
Customers with sales increases.
Customers with sales decreases.
Inactive customers who have not bought in more than six months

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Hearing reality firsthand changes decision quality.

  1. Measure Feedback Loop Length

If it takes months for customer insight to influence your GTM strategy, we need a feedback loop to improve:

  • Product decisions
  • Messaging
  • Sales plays
No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: If your organization is learning slower than the market, you need a formal feedback process.

Gather data, discuss it, create your action plan, and measure what matters.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Blind spots thrive in long information and data loops.

 

How Can CROs Fix Blind Spots? (Permanently)

Finding blind spots once isn’t enough. CROs need systems.

How do CROs create customer and market feedback loops that eliminate CRO’s blind spots?

  1. Make Customer Truth a Standing Executive Input

The teams I help scale up make customer feedback from each senior leader the first item in their monthly meetings.

Customer insights should:
  • Appear in exec meetings
  • Influence strategy reviews
  • Be referenced in the decision rationale
  • Reward and praise sales managers, salespeople, and all customer-facing roles for sharing it
If customer feedback and insights are optional, they will be ignored.

  1. Rank Insights by Revenue Impact

As we share with our clients, you will learn and often validate many things. But the skill is in choosing and ranking the sights based on current and long-term impact on your enterprise value.

Not all feedback matters equally.
CROs should prioritize:
  • Deal-stopping friction
  • Buying hesitation
  • Value confusion
  • Churn drivers
  • Buying journey and criteria shifts
No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Revenue relevance sharpens focus.

  1. Track Assumptions — Then Kill Them

Most strategy is built on assumptions.

The best CROs:
  • Write assumptions down
  • Test them with customers first, we call this nail it before you scale it
  • Retire the ones that no longer hold

This is leadership maturity.

  1. Reward Truth, Not Optimism

I promise you, your entire team knows what is politically correct and not. Organizations mirror leadership behavior.

If leaders reward:
  • Candor
  • Evidence
  • Learning
  • Data-based insights
CROS Blind spots shrink.
If they reward:
  • Good news
  • Confidence without proof
  • Optomism with out data
CRO’s Blind spots grow.
No-Smoke-And -Mirrors Insight: Decide now, do you want to drive explosive growth in revenue, profits, and enterprise value, or do you want what a team that takes orders often marches off revenue cliffs, executing what they know is wrong? (and they desperately hope you figure it out before they fall off the payroll for poor performance against sales goals.)

The good news is that if you are the CRO or a CEO, you are the boss. You set the tone and growth vision for the company. If what you want is a sales team that follows orders and doesn’t share market and customer feedback with you, stop reading now.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: We all report to someone. It could be a PE partner, the owner and founder of the business. It could be private investors and your board. Or if you have a B2B business you own, you may not feel the need to adjust until you plan your transition out of the leadership role and find the business does not have the enterprise value you thought it would.

 

What Are The CRO Questions That Matter Most For Strategic Sales Growth?

CRO’s should ask:

“What do I believe about our customers that might no longer be true?”
“Could a dated belief be hurting our growth?”
If you can’t answer that clearly, your CRO’s blind spot is already forming.

 

 

Final Thought on CROs’ Blind Spots

Blind spots aren’t a leadership failure.

They’re a structural side effect of scale.

The best CROs don’t pretend they don’t have them. ( or pretend they know it all)

They design systems that expose reality early, before the market does.

Because in B2B growth today, the leaders who win aren’t the ones with the best answers.

They’re the CRO’s who find the truth faster.

These are the highly paid, sought-after CROs that make scaling look easy.

Let’s schedule a call to understand your customers’ current realities and challenges so you can drive explosive growth.

 

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

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