Every tech leader we surveyed said they cared about understanding their customers, but they went about it in very different ways, and those differences turned out to matter more than any single statistic. When we analysed the answers from 163 B2B tech decision-makers, four distinct groups emerged, separated by how confident they feel about their customers and where they go looking for the truth. See which one sounds most like your team.

Four kinds of customer insight leader

Which one sounds most like your team?

14%Value-Driven Strategists“We win because we understand value, but we need to prove it.”

29%Operational Tacticians“We are fighting a price war without enough ammo.”

29%The Overwhelmed“We have too much noise and not enough signal.”

28%Secure Leaders“I know my customers. Everything is fine.”

Survey of 163 B2B tech leaders, AU/UK/US
Lightspeed Research (Kantar)

Value-Driven Strategists (14%)

“We win because we understand value, but we need to prove it.”

This is the smallest of the four groups. Strategists think in terms of value, differentiate on what they build and trust what customers tell them in interviews, and many have their own research capability. Their blind spot is getting sales, product and marketing to agree on why customers buy, which means strong insight can stay with the team that gathered it and never reach the market as a clear message. The most useful next step is usually to turn what they already know into a sharper value proposition and campaign themes every team can use.

Operational Tacticians (29%)

“We are fighting a price war without enough ammo.”

For Tacticians, customer insight sits with sales and the team works with very few tools. When they need a quick answer, an AI chatbot or an agency tends to fill the gap, and 21% of this group rely on AI chatbots as their main source of truth. The risk is that deals keep turning into price conversations, because the real reasons buyers choose them aren’t clear enough to sell on. They’d get the most from finding the genuine buying drivers in recent won and lost deals, then giving sales an ideal customer profile and value proposition they can actually use.

The Overwhelmed (29%)

“We have too much noise and not enough signal.”

The Overwhelmed have plenty of data and plenty of tools, and they lean on AI to make sense of it all – 40% rely on AI chatbots, the highest of any group. They’re measured on pipeline and spend a lot of energy getting stakeholders on side. Their blind spot is playing back the market average, adding more dashboards and more AI without ever arriving at one shared view of why customers buy. What they need most is a single evidence-based view of the customer, drawn from their own buyers, that the whole leadership team can agree on.

Secure Leaders (28%)

“I know my customers. Everything is fine.”

Secure Leaders are confident in their understanding of customers, rely on trusted third-party research and report few internal problems, seeing most of their challenges as external. Their risk lies in the things they don’t know they don’t know. Most leaders in our research said they understand their customers, yet more than half struggle to explain why those customers act as they do. For this group, the sensible move is to test their assumptions against what customers actually do, before the market shifts and retention takes the hit.

What they have in common

None of the four groups has this fully solved. The Strategists have the insight but struggle to spread it, the Tacticians and the Overwhelmed lack a real view of their own buyers and fill the gap with AI, and the Secure Leaders may not be looking very hard at all. What each of them needs, though, is the same raw material – their own customers’ account of why they chose, set against what those customers actually did. Where they differ is in what they do with it.

About the research: an online survey of 163 decision-makers in marketing, sales and product at B2B technology companies with annual revenue of $20m or more, in Australia, the UK and the US. Fieldwork by Lightspeed Research (Kantar).