"When you understand how customers truly experience you, everything changes."
In many organizations, Marketing, Sales, and Credit are still managed as separate islands. Each team has its own processes, goals, and data. Historically, that made senseโbut in practice, it often obstructs one crucial truth:
Your side sees departments. Your customer sees one company.
And yetโฆ what your customer experiences and how you organize internally often differ painfully. Where you see 'handovers' between departments, your customer experiences friction. Where you optimize KPIs, your customer feels bureaucracy.
The customer journey is simple, but the internal organization rarely is.
Every customer goes through six recognizable phases, consciously or unconsciously:
- Prospecting โ "Iโve heard about you."
โ The first impression. This is where trust is gained or lost. - Targeting โ "You seem relevant to me."
โ Customers expect relevance, not noise. Data and timing determine whether you stand out or get lost in the crowd. - Onboarding โ "Iโm taking action. Make it easy."
โ The first real collaboration. Ease sets the tone for the entire relationship. - Usage and growth โ "I want to get value from what I use."
โ This is where you must prove that promise and reality align. - Collections โ "I understand I need to pay. Be clear and fair."
โ How you handle payments says more about your customer focus than many marketing campaigns. - Recovery โ "Something went wrong. Is there a way back?"
โ Itโs in this phase that you show character. Recovery isnโt a costโitโs an opportunity to restore trust.
Each phase contains critical moments, for both the customer and your organization. Yet these moments are often spread across different teams, systems, and goals, resulting in no one seeing the full picture.
Interesting read: The value of an Early Warning System (EWS) for companies
Silos create friction, delays, and risk
What happens if Marketing generates a lead without a risk assessment? What if Sales closes a deal without credit information? What if Finance contacts a customer without context on their value or history? You can already see it coming:
- Delays in onboarding
- Unexpected payment issues
- Disrupted customer relationships
- Missed growth opportunities
Not from unwillingness, but from a lack of shared insight and shared responsibility
Every department does its best, but the overall experience no longer aligns with the customer journey.
Interesting read: How brand preference shapes the B2B buyer's journey
The solution lies in perspective and shared frameworks
When you restructure the organization from the customerโs perspective, something fundamental changes. Internal processes start to follow customer logic instead of departmental logic. This leads to:
- Faster conversion โ because relevant leads get priority
- Improved customer experience โ because handovers feel seamless
- Less risk โ because everyone works with the same signals
- Higher lifetime value โ because the customer stays longer and pays better
This isnโt about a โsoftโ customer-centric ideal, but about hard process optimization guided by the customer compass.
A conceptual model for core commercial teams
Imagine mirroring your internal funnel to the customer journey.
That each team asks at every phase: โWhat is the customer experiencing right nowโand what should we do about it?โ What if data, signals, and decisions were organized across teams rather than within functional silos? Then youโre not building a linear process. Youโre building a growth engine.
In summary
In my work, I see it every day: organizations struggling to balance speed and diligence. They hit KPIs but lose customer trustโor the opposite. The key isnโt more tools, dashboards, or processes. The key is looking differently. Namely:
Through the eyes of your customer.
