Why Voice of Customer Insights Fuel Revenue Growth—When It Actually Travels To Strategic Leaders

Is Your Team Dropping the Voice of Customer Insights Baton?… If so, it is costing you Millions. I read that Microsoft wants to better understand customers, and they restructured to facilitate actionable customer insights, moving up the leadership chain to drive more revenue faster. Most companies don’t lose customer insight because they don’t collect it. They lose it in the handoff. I recently shared one way for CROs to ensure sales growth: by understanding your customers’ current reality. Voice of Customer research interviews empower more than just CROs; they fuel explosive growth while competitors have flat or declining revenues and profits, believing they already know customers’ realities today.

Between what customers say, what sales hears, what leaders interpret, and what product ultimately builds—the baton gets dropped. Quietly. Repeatedly. Expensively.

Dropped voice of customer insights shows up later as:

• Slowing growth

• Missed product-market fit

• Longer sales cycles

• Higher churn

• “Alignment issues” no one can quite explain

• Missed new product launch ROI’s

Sales teams are closest to customers. They hear the objections, the workarounds, the unspoken frustrations, and the real reasons deals stall or close. We want and need to hear this.

I have found senior leadership teams confuse the difference between sales, conducting discovery, and voice of customer research quite often, from my experience

But in most organizations:

• That insight lives in CRM notes no one reads
• Phone call conversations with their sales manager that are never logged
• Or gets summarized, filtered, and softened as it moves up the org
• Or dies completely once it collides with internal roadmaps and politics

By the time “customer feedback” reaches product, or heaven forbid, your senior leaders or PE Investors, it’s no longer the customer’s voice, and it is dated.

It’s an echo.

Microsoft recently promoted four senior sales leaders to EVP roles. The headlines focused on the people.

Microsoft is making a strategic structural shift.

Meridiem Shared the following:

“By collapsing the feedback loop between customers and product, the company is repositioning its sales organization as a strategic asset rather than a revenue function.”

Microsoft has over 200,000 employees. ( I estimate after recent headcount reductions ) Yet they’re restructuring at the highest levels to compress the distance between customer reality and product decisions.

Why?

Here’s how Microsoft framed it: “Judson expanded the remits of his leadership team to free up more time to focus on Microsoft’s commercial product strategy and to keep the feedback loop between customers and product decisions as small as possible. This feedback loop is critical right now because AI is being adopted at an extraordinary speed, and our customers expect these capabilities to come to life in their business faster than ever before.”

What can other organizations learn from Microsoft’s Bold Restructure Moves to be Closer to customer Realities? 

Translation for CROs: The old model of customer feedback is dead today.

We have believed the below for years drove innovation…

Sales captures feedback → product reviews, it → roadmap updates → features ship 12–18 months later.

It worked in the 1990’s. The team I served at Alpha Enterprises actively expected sales leaders to identify unresolved market problems and share them with our engineering design team.

Many of those insights became market-leading products sold at above-market pricing because they solved customer challenges effectively and completely.

I believe that part of our culture, our CEO and CFO strategically threaded through our expectations, is why we were sold for a much larger multiple than other plastics manufacturers at the time.

However, having other division CROs interview customers, or having me do so, would be too slow today.

Customers won’t wait today.

Competitors won’t wait.

And your org structure can’t wait either.

Your culture can’t wait.

 

The Feedback Loop Problem in Most Sales Organizations

Here’s what usually happens in customer feedback:

• Reps hear exactly what customers say they need

• That insight gets buried in call notes or CRM fields

• Product builds based on internal assumptions, not external truth

• Customers feel unheard and look elsewhere

• Leadership calls it a “go-to-market alignment issue.”

• Sales did not qualify if this is a need or a symptom of a greater need

The loop is too long.

The signal degrades.

Deals die in the gap.

Salespeople listen to reply, not learn

Too many opportunities to drop key customer insights

 

What Microsoft Understands (That Many CROs Still Miss)

When you elevate sales leaders to EVP and give them direct influence over product strategy, you’re not just promoting people.

You’re redesigning the system.

Customer pain → Sales leadership → Product decision.

No six-month committee cycles.

No backlog purgatory.

No political information filtering through several layers of management

No translation loss.

That’s smart.

 

The sales structure change is still not the best possible model alone, in my opinion and experience.

 

Why Even A Sales Restructure Isn’t Enough To Conduct Voice of Customer Research Insight Interviews

Sales leaders—no matter how senior—still sit inside the organization.

That means:

• They carry quota pressure

• They filter feedback unconsciously

• They advocate for their segments, deals, or regions

• They are still part of the internal narrative

• They often lack the psychological safety to discuss data that contractors’ leadership believes

 

Which is why the most effective Voice of the Customer systems don’t rely solely on sales, product managers, or leadership.

The most effective Voice of Customer system is facilitated through an independent third party.

An example of sales failing to understand customer reality, drawn from voice of customer insights  interviews.

A B2B company asked for my help because their sales had stalled since Covid and their gross profit margins had slipped significantly.

We followed the process outlined in my book, Driving Explosive Growth, and conducted voice-of-customer interviews.

I asked the salespeople to share their insights and experience on how customers would answer the questions we prepared for their voice-of-customer interviews.

How satisfied are our customers on a scale of 0 to 100?

Sales: 90%-95%

Customers: 63% average, 13% dissatisfied, salespeople were not aware

What percentage of the customers’ purchasing dollars for their products do they have?

Sales: 70%, in some cases 100%

Customers: On average, 35%, but in sales defense, some customers only bought from their company, so 100% was accurate in a few cases.

The company made a several-million-dollar investment in a new process that gave them a distinctive competence over competitors the year prior.

Are the cutomers aware of it and do they value it?

Sales: Yes, customers are aware, but it hasn’t seemed to affect orders.

Customers: only 35% of customers were aware of this new process, and 60% wanted to learn more.

Concerning the quotes we lost, why did we lose the orders?

Sales: In most cases, it was price, or we could not deliver it when they needed it. ( their CRM entries confirmed this) “We lost the order to our competitor with a lower price”.

Customers: We heard several reasons, and price was on the list, but not the leading reason, as assumed. One of the leading comments was:

“The company has changed. I felt our business was important when the owner and founder called on me and visited, sharing their advice and industry best practices, but today I feel more like a number. The only time I hear from sales is when we order or when they need an order.”

The sales team was forced to use phone calls and virtual meetings due to the COVID pandemic, and over a year later, had not returned to field customer-facing visits like their competitors ( in most cases)

More concerning was how many orders sales thought they lost to competitors had actually not done anything yet, and several shared they planned to buy the product in the coming year.

We interview customers, and it’s typically a 15-minute interview unless they want to keep sharing. We capture everything.

We received several customer-actionable insights, and one of their larger customers shared an idea to grow his business and our client’s revenue, but his salesperson did not seem interested in discussing it.

The CEO and senior leaders created a plan that focused on rebuilding relationships and following up on quotes that did not close.

By year’s end, sales were trending upward, and the team was receiving significantly more projects to quote. Sales created account development plans for customers who were identified as dissatisfied after discovering what customers needed they were not experiencing.

 

 

The Gold Standard: Independent Voice of the Customer Insights Interviews

 

The fastest-learning organizations use independent third-party VoC interviews to inform growth strategy, alongside real-time customer insights.

Why?

Because they deliver:

• No filters – customers speak freely

• No internal bias – no incentive to spin the story

• No politics – just patterns, themes, and truth

• Data you can act on – not anecdotes

• Fast actionable insights

Customers say things to neutral interviewers that they will never say to sales, product, or executives.

This isn’t a “nice-to-have.”

It’s a strategic advantage.

 

Why Voice of Customer Insights Matter to CROs Right Now

Here are the questions every CRO should be asking:

How long does it take for customer feedback from your sellers to influence a real product decision?

Is the customer feedback raw or filtered data?

If the answer is:

• “Months”

• “A couple of quarters”

• “I’m not sure.”

• Feels filtered, politically correct

Your feedback loop is a competitive liability, and your team is dropping the baton of understanding your customer.

The companies winning in AI-driven markets aren’t just deploying faster.

They’re learning faster.

And learning speed is a direct function of feedback loop length.

 

Don’t Drop the  Understanding Your Customer Baton.

Leverage Voice of Customer Insight Interviews With Sales Structure Remodels That Shorten Sales Customer Insight Loops.

Sales is running the first leg of the race. The product is running last.

If the handoff fails, it doesn’t matter how strong either team is.

When I was the managing director of Pragmatic Marketing, the company that has trained most leading product managers and marketing executives in the world, product managers often shared that sales would not give them time to be customer-facing. They had to rely on customer insights from sales feedback.

In our product management training, we asked product leaders to practice “ NIHITO.”

Nothing

Important

Happens

In

The

Office

One of the best team members to spend time with customers is a product manager… if your salespeople let them.

Sadly, having customer-facing time with customers remains a challenge for product leaders, and I would argue it has grown even more challenging in the last five years.

 

Microsoft is shortening the distance by restructuring leadership, but have they created the psychological safety to discuss politically incorrect feedback when it arrives? That is yet to be seen. Large companies have an internal understanding of what the senior leaders believe and want to be true. The larger the company, the more prevalent it is. Restructuring is a great first step, but there are other roadblocks and batons that will be dropped if they believe doing voice of customer internally through sales will deliver the actionable insights their leaders expect. However, Microsoft has a team of experienced, talented leaders who are likely keeping this on their radar as well.

The best-in-class companies go one step further with voice of customer insights research:

• They remove filters

• They remove bias

• They create a culture of psychological safety and discuss what matters

• They let customers speak directly into the strategy

• They have psychological safety and discuss real, unfiltered customer data

 

CEOs, CROs, and PE investors, ask yourself:

How compressed is your customer-to-product feedback loop?

Are we dropping the customer insights batons?

Could our competitors have insights from voice-of-customer research that we missed?

If you shorten the communication loop, will you receive unfiltered feedback?

Because in today’s market, the company that learns fastest wins.

 

Does your team want to understand customers and leverage these insights to develop new products and services, increase sales, improve profit margins, and enhance customer satisfaction? If so, have an independent firm conduct voice-of-the-customer interviews. Never have your salespeople do interviews for research, as I shared in my book Voice of Customer.

Or

Do you want feedback that echoes what senior leaders presented to your shareholders recently? To validate an internal belief someone in the C-suite has shared?

Profitable, scalable growth is driven by the right sales structure and by insights from customer voice interviews.

 

Let’s schedule a call if your team wants to capture actionable insights from voice of customer insights interviews to improve customer satisfaction and increase your enterprise value.

If you would like to learn more about voice of customer insights, you can view my book, Voice of Customer, here.

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