The difference is rarely better information. It’s earlier information, better connected to decisions.
I’ve been right about things before my competitors were.
I’ve had ideas that later became products someone else shipped. I’ve seen market moves coming that my organization was too slow to act on. I’ve sat in rooms where we had the insight, had the data, had the argument, and still ended up second. Or third. Or last.
Being right too late it’s a specific kind of frustration.
After a while, you stop blaming the competitors and start asking a different question: how did they move when they did?
The easy answer is that they knew something you didn’t. A secret insight, a better research team, a lucky read on the market. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, it isn’t.
Most companies operating in the same market have access to roughly the same information. The same industry reports. The same customer complaints floating around on social media. The same signals from the sales team about what prospects keep asking for. The same gut feeling that something is shifting.
The difference it’s what happens to it afterwards.
In most businesses, customer knowledge lives in silos. The sales team knows
why deals are lost. The support team knows what breaks. The product team knows what features nobody uses. Marketing knows what messages land and which ones don’t. And the CEO knows what keeps coming up in board meetings.
Nobody connects the dots. Or rather, by the time someone does, the window
has closed.
So who should connect the dots?
If you’re running a business of 20-100 people, the honest answer is: probably you. Not because you’re the smartest person in the room, but because you’re the only one with both the visibility across silos and the authority to act on what you find. Nobody else has that combination. The temptation is to hand it to marketing. Resist it. Marketing will filter every insight through what serves marketing. That’s not cynicism , it’s just how incentives work.
You don’t need a new hire for this. You need a structured rhythm you own personally. A weekly practice, not a function. In some businesses a Chief of Staff fills this role naturally. In most, it’s the founder who hasn’t yet accepted that this is their job.
The function can come later. The discipline needs to start immediately. As the business grows, this eventually becomes someone’s formal job, a strategy function, a research team, a CMO with the mandate to synthesize across the organization. But at your current size, that’s a future problem. The present one is simpler: someone needs to read across the silos every week, and right now that someone is you.
Your competitors who move faster aren’t necessarily smarter. They’ve built, deliberately or by accident, a shorter distance between what the customer says and what the business decides.
That distance is everything.
A company where customer feedback reaches a decision-maker in two weeks moves differently from one where it takes two quarters. A team that talks to ten customers a month before a product decision thinks differently from one that commissions a research project after the roadmap is already locked.
Speed of insight isn’t a research budget problem. It’s a habits and structure problem.
Start with a simple exercise. Map the distance. Pick one customer insight that surfaced in your business in the last month: a complaint, a lost deal, a feature request, a comment from a sales call. Then trace it: where did it land, who saw it, and how long did it take to reach someone who could act on it. If you can’t trace it at all, that’s your answer.
Then ask one question in each part of the business that touches the customer:
- Sales: why did we lose the last three deals, and what did those customers say they were looking for?
- Support: what’s the one thing customers complain about that we’ve stopped being surprised by?
- Product: what’s the feature we keep postponing that customers keep asking for?
- Marketing: what message gets the most response, and does the rest of the business know that?
You don’t need a workshop to do this. You need an hour and four honest conversations.
Then make it a rhythm. One hour a week (call it whatever you want, put it in the calendar, protect it) dedicated to nothing but staying close to the market. Read the lost deals. Talk to one customer. Check what the competition shipped. Write down what shifted in your thinking.
No research budget required. No consultant. Just a commitment to not letting the distance grow.
The crisis version, the emergency research project, the urgent customer survey, the consultant brought in after a bad quarter, always arrives too late. You’re not gathering intelligence anymore. You’re doing damage control.
One caveat worth mentioning: knowing faster is only half of it. The other half is being able to prepare, plan and execute before the window closes. That’s a different conversation, and a different post.
So what do your competitors know about your customers that you don’t?
Probably not much, if you’re honest. But they might have heard it three months earlier. And in most markets, three months is the whole game.
The question worth asking isn’t what you’re missing. It’s how fast what you already know travels from the customer to the person with the authority to act on it.
If the answer is “slowly” or “I’m not sure”, that’s where to start.
Further Reading
- Roger Martin & A.G. Lafley — Playing to Win
- Clayton Christensen — Competing Against Luck
- Rita McGrath — Seeing Around Corners
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