“Customer Consensus” is the decision-making state of teams where every person understands and agrees on their Ideal Customer Profile – including every personas, detail, and nuance that goes into that ICP definition – and it’s the foundation of trusting, aligned, high-performing teams.
When your team makes decisions from this state, you’re in alignment, marketing and product aren’t bumping into each other but supporting each other, sales is having the quarter of a century and product has more demand than they know what to do with.
Teams get to Customer Consensus intentionally and over time, first by researching and understanding their ICP. Then by building trust and alignment around how that ICP fuels a broader strategy.
However.
If you ask your team members, “Who is your ICP?” and one person says one thing and someone else says something different and your marketing copy says something else and your customers have entirely different ideas to share, there is no consensus. Not within teams. Not across teams. Not between your team and your customers. You have many different versions of the same story.
“Customer Folklore” is the decision-making state of teams where multiple different versions of the customer exist around the organization where, in many cases, no version is technically wrong – nor is any version technically right.
When you’re making decisions in this state, there is some truth in who you understand your ICP to be. But your truth isn’t the same as the truth sales sees or the truth product sees.
Product leaders resist insights from sales because they don’t see the same findings reflected in their data. Sales leaders can’t get the assets they need to show prospects they’re onboard. Leaders wonder if they need to hire someone, fire someone, or quit.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Many teams cycle through 3 different customer stages as they grow, like a play in 3 acts.
Act 1: “Customer Chaos”
Act 2: “Customer Folklore”
Act 3: “Customer Consensus”
Act 1: Customer Chaos
At this stage, if you ask 3 people who you serve you might hear 3 different answers. “Designers” “Workshop hosts” “…idk”
Truth be told, few teams *start* here. Yours probably didn’t. But as you grew, you were, by definition, bringing people onboard who didn’t understand your customer. And you were asking these folks to build things for that customer. Which means chaos, or confusion, or at the very least a lot of shaky guesses about what to build and who to build it for.
Act 2: Customer Folklore
As the team grows and shared understanding breaks down, someone says, “Hey let’s do an ICP project” and then they do it in their department. Maybe they send the deck around.
Someone else says, “We need a FT user researcher” and gets someone in to start running interviews. Maybe a soundbite or 2 gets shared.
Now you have at least 2 groups of folks with at least 2 different frameworks for understanding your customer and at least 2 different sets of data.
Put another way:
You have Santa Claus in one department, with his sleigh and Rudolph.
You have Saint Nikolaus in another, with his white horse and Krampus.
Similar! Veeery similar. Not the same.
When this happens, you get clamoring behind closed doors.
Sales says, “We can’t close this deal without this feature.”
Product insists, “Our users do not need this feature more than they need other things.”
Marketing is like, “How do we build pipeline when one of you is selling Donkey Food and the other is making Reindeer Treats??”
Act 3: Customer Consensus
Until one day, a new sales leader gets hired. A sales strategy shifts. A product release gets more attention than anything that came before it. Something changes, but the momentum that this event should generate doesn’t materialize.
For a while, everyone blames everyone else.
Until someone, somewhere, sees it.
“Wait a minute, our sales team has to please 10 people on the buying committee but I’m only building for 2.”
“Hold up, THAT’S why we don’t have that feature? Okay now I can say so when a detractor asks.”
“Hey boss, how do I write about this feature when product and sales can’t agree why it matters?”
And now, you have it: A moment that pushes leaders across your org to want to get to Customer Consensus, a decision-making state where you and your teammates agree on who you serve – including all the nuance, all the stakeholders on the buying committee, all the special quirks that mean obvious features don’t always get built and features without obvious demand go to the top of the roadmap.
When that moment arrives, reach out to me to ask for help.