Why CEOs and PE Investors Fail to Make Strategic Plan Shifts That Scale Revenue

 

Most CEOs and private equity investors do not fail to meet growth goals because they are not smart. They fail because they are making a strategic plan decision based on filtered, outdated, or politically safe information.

No smoke-and-mirrors insight: A leadership team cannot scale revenue on yesterday’s customer truths, internal opinions, and PowerPoint confidence. With current unbiased data, leaders make strategic decisions that scale companies.

The Real Problem: The Executive Echo Chamber Does Not Design Strategic Plans that Scale Revenue

Inside many B2B companies, the senior leadership team becomes an echo chamber. The CEO and or PE investors have strong opinions and visions of who the company is, where they are strong, and what makes them unique. People tell the CEO, owner, or equity partner what they believe the leader wants to hear. This is particularly true in underperforming teams.

Sales says, “The pipeline is strong.”

Marketing says, “Lead quality is improving.”

Operations says, “We can handle the growth.”

Customer service says, “Customers are happy.”

Finance says, “Margins are fine, could be better.”

Quality says,” We have the best quality in the industry; our cost of quality continues to decline.”

Product management says, “ Our products and services are the best-designed solutions in the industry.”

(Have you heard comments like this in your management weekly or monthly meetings?)

Then everyone leaves the meeting feeling aligned.

But aligned around what?

What was accomplished?

The PE Investor, if they were at the meeting, is frustrated… “What will we do differently to get back on track with our value creation plan?”

The leadership team is making sure the CEO is happy.

The CEO feels good about what they believe is true, but wants to know why sales are declining.

The CEO and CFO share- it must be the market, tariffs, the war, competitors who don’t know their costs…( I have heard it all)

What key insights were shared to help the company strategically scale or make the timely pivots to get growth and margins back on track?

So we plan to just do more of what we believe is politically safe and true, even though we know it is not working.( and we wonder why teams are not engaged and stress is at an all-time high with burnout?)

Often, the market truth and customer feedback were not discussed.

McKinsey warned that companies cannot rely on yesterday’s customer insights because customer behavior, value perception, buying expectations, and decision-making are shifting quickly. Their 2025 consumer research included more than 25,000 consumers across 18 markets and emphasized that leaders must understand how customers spend, trust, and define value now—not how they did years ago.

The same issue exists in B2B.

McKinsey’s B2B research shows that buyers now expect flexible, omnichannel interactions and fall into distinct decision-maker archetypes with varying preferences. That means the “way we have always sold” is not a strategy. It is often a liability.

Gut Feel Was Useful 20 Years Ago. Today, It Is Not Enough For Your Strategic Plan.

Many senior leaders built their careers through regular customer conversations. They traveled with reps. They knew the big accounts. They heard objections firsthand and unfiltered. They could feel market shifts early.

Then the company grew.

The CEO moved farther away from customers. The PE investor relied on dashboards. The VP Sales relied on CRM notes. The operating partner relied on monthly reports. The farther leaders get from unfiltered customer truth, the easier it becomes to confuse activity with insight. They rely on their teams to share the filtered raw data they need to make strategic business decisions. But communication breaks down, and if your organization lacks psychological safety, leaders hear what their teams believe they want to hear.

That is how companies miss strategic shifts.

Not all at once.

Slowly.

A death of 1,000 small cuts over time.

Then, suddenly… sales and net income stall or decline.

Why Don’t Teams Tell Their Senior Leaders the Truth?

The other side of the problem is psychological safety.

Many companies say they want candor.

Few reward it.

If a sales leader tells the CEO, “Customers are no longer seeing us as differentiated,” will that leader be thanked—or punished?

If a customer service manager says, “Our biggest accounts are frustrated with lead times,” will anyone act—or will the messenger get labeled negative?

If a plant manager says, “We cannot support that growth plan without breaking service levels,” will leadership listen—or push harder?

Harvard Business School research describes psychological safety as critical because people need to feel safe speaking up, admitting mistakes, and challenging assumptions. Without that, leadership teams lose the very information they need to make better decisions.

BCG also found a strong relationship between empathetic leadership and psychological safety, which helps employees contribute more openly and effectively.

No psychological safety means no market truth.

No market truth means a weak strategy.

A weak strategic plan means missed growth.

Missed growth means the enterprise value growth falls short of the plan.

 

Market Leaders Discuss Things That Matter, Discuss Customer and Market Trusts, and Adjust Their Strategic Plan

Market-leading organizations do not run on opinion. They build feedback systems. They regularly conduct Voice of Customer research.

Explosive Growth Organizations ask customers:

• Why did you buy from us?

• Why did we lose?

• What do we do better than competitors?

• In what ways are we difficult to work with?

• What would cause you to buy more from us?

• What has changed in your business?

• What do you need from suppliers now?

• What share of your business do we have?

• What does your growth look like in the next 6-12 months?

• What should we keep, stop, or start doing?

Then they bring those answers into strategy, sales planning, marketing, operations, and leadership meetings.

 

Bain’s Net Promoter System was built around this idea: customer loyalty and feedback can predict growth and customer lifetime value when companies actually manage the business around it.

McKinsey’s customer insights work makes the same point: companies need a 360-degree view of customers, market demand, brand impact, and competitor comparison to identify the most valuable growth opportunities.

The Strategic Shift CEOs and PE Investors Must Make With Their Strategic Plan

The shift is simple.

Stop asking, “What do we think?”

Start asking, “What does the market know that we do not?”

That requires:

• Voice of Customer research
• customer segmentation by profitability
• win/loss analysis
• current market trend review
• sales skills assessment
• manager and leadership training
• better communication systems
• trust-building tools like DISC and Motivators
• leadership meetings where hard truths are welcomed

Smart CEOs and PE investors do not need more opinions. They need unfiltered inputs. Once they have them, they can make excellent decisions.

The No Smoke & Mirrors View

CEOs, business owners, PE partners, and senior leaders are smart, experienced, and capable, from my experience over 40 years of helping leadership teams scale with our no smoke and mirrors sales enablement process.

The problem is not leadership team intelligence.

The problem is the quality of information reaching the decision table.

When leaders hear filtered feedback, outdated assumptions, and politically safe answers, they make slow or wrong strategic shifts.

When leaders hear the truth from customers, employees, salespeople, managers, and the market, they can adjust faster, grow faster, and protect margins.

That is how strategic plans become growth engines.

Not binders.

Not slogans.

Not wishful thinking.

Not smoke.

Not mirrors.

A real plan is built from market truth.

I hear some leaders feeling uncomfortable or downright angry about now.” Mark, we have leaders and managers paid to share the truth; this post does not apply to us.” Or “Mark, I am confident if one of the core tenets of our strategic growth plan was wrong or outdated, I would know.”  

You could say this (and likely feedback I do not want to share on my site)…but you would be wrong.

Example client case study B2B manufacturing company:

I was hired to help a manufacturing company that lost its largest customer, which represented 25% of its revenue. It was also their most profitable customer, so the hit to net income was painful, really quickly. The company president had someone at his Vistage meeting share he should meet with me because what his team is experiencing a sales problem we solved for their team years ago.

I had my discovery session with the company president, who was the only member of the leadership team who was not a family member of this 80-year-old company. He shared that he is under pressure from the family and the owners to turn around sales, win new customers, and increase net income and EBITDA. He shared in confidence, “ Look, we have grown steadily for years, and the last thing the family wants to do in our small town is lay off our factory workers. We are the largest employer here, and our owners are leaders in our community. If we don’t turn this around, we will have to right-size our workforce for the first time in our company history.”

I shared our no-smoke-and-mirrors sales enablement process, and he asked for past clients to speak with.

We met again with the senior leadership team, and I presented my statement of work and the project plan. The CEO quickly said, “ Mark, we do not need you to interview our customers; we know our customers and market.” I shared that if they want to fix their current sales problem, this is part of the proven process that will do so. I convinced him and others that it will likely validate what you know to be true. With some back-and-forth, he reluctantly agreed. I went on to interview the senior leaders about their market, customers, products, and perceived customer satisfaction, and why customers buy from them.

Reading body language is something I train salespeople to do. It gives us an unfair advantage over untrained salespeople. Each person on the leadership team shared what felt like politically current opinions. As each person shared their opinions, their eyes quickly checked in with the CEO and CFO for confirmation, and they received nods and smiles in return. Everyone around the table was saying what they felt the leader wanted to hear.

We are the best in our industry at _______

No one can match our quality.

We are the only one in our industry that can manufacture______( a unique size part)

We sell based on value.

When we win a customer, they enjoy working with us, particularly because of our investment in engineers and engineering systems.

People buy from us because of our attention to detail, quality, and on-time delivery, as well as some of our unique manufacturing capabilities and experience.

We spent ½ a day helping me understand the leadership team’s opinions, and they shared their “ strategic” plan. Like many B2B companies, they maintained a detailed Excel spreadsheet tracking year-over-year sales. Sales by product category, sales by their top 20 customers, and sales by parts. They had a clear vision of growth, the culture they wanted, and their functional accountability organization chart. What their plan lacked was a strategy. How their team was to achieve the growth goals year over year. I was reminded of another company I helped that trained product and marketing managers who gave their clients coffee mugs that said: “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.”

We conducted voice-of-the-customer research, and I met with their top 20 customers.

What did we learn?

1. They were not the only ones in North America that could manufacture that unique part today. (It was true 10 years ago)
2. Several customers were unhappy that their orders did not arrive on time.
3. The quality managers we interviewed at their customers shared that they had so many issues in the past three months that they were forced to move their key parts to a competitor
4. Communication from customer service was poor regarding late shipments or incomplete shipments
5. A new industry quality requirement was introduced last year, and they were not meeting it or providing the required documentation, so some businesses had shifted, and more would soon.
6. Customers valued their value-added engineering recommendations
7. Senior leaders, along with some of their large customers, had strong friendships with some of the family leaders.
8. Customers were shifting to a new raw material due to cost and part life in demanding applications, and this company had the capability to use it, but it did not.

I met with the senior leadership team, and as I shared several very positive comments, I also shared customer and market insights that ran counter to their beliefs.

The two senior family members became obviously angry; they felt I was telling them their baby was ugly. The company that their grandfather started years ago was not as impressive as they had believed.

How can this be?

This company had more reports and dashboards than most of my clients.

How could senior leaders not know this information?

The tea lacked psychological safety.

They did not discuss what matters and did not hear market and customer feedback that was contrary to their beliefs.

Fast forward. We wrote a strategic pan and corrected the areas customers felt the most friction. We identified our ideal customers and trained the sales team how to win new customers. After 18 months we added over 200 new customers, some leaders in their markets and we identified a new market. Sales and profits grew, and we continued to meet with the large customer they lost and shared the improvements we made. We eventually won back their large customer slowly and the company grew profitably.

We did not layoff manufacturing works and had to hire more workers for a second and third shift.

The managers and line workers knew the issues but were afraid to share them. Salespeople did not log customer complaints in their call reports or CRM because of fear.

I would like to say this was a unique situation.

It is not in many B2B manufacturing companies small and large.

We have seen this will multibillion dollar global manufactures as well. Often the flow of real customer and market data is even more diluted with large companies.

Could your team not be sharing unfiltered customer and market feedback?

Are your senior leadership teams an echo chamber?

Have your revenues and net income stalled or is declining?

I shared a quick quiz for you below to determine if your team is talking about things that matter or just politically current conversations.

Quick 5-Question Echo Chamber Assessment

Answer yes or no:

1. Do we conduct formal Voice of Customer interviews at least annually?

2. Do customers tell us things in interviews that surprise our leadership team?

3. Do sales, service, operations, and marketing openly challenge assumptions in leadership meetings if they find they are not true today?

4. Do we review why we win, why we lose, and why customers stop buying?

5. Do we make strategic decisions using current customer data—not just internal opinions?

If you answered “no” to two or more, your company may be operating in an echo chamber.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Truth: Senior leadership echo chambers do not scale revenue; they protect assumptions.

Let’s schedule a call if you would like to experience explosive growth in sales, margins, and enterprise value with our no-smoke-and-mirrors sales enablement process.