Where failure happens. Sometimes, the organisation knows everything about its products — software, equipment, services or technology – but produces little that demonstrates an understanding of the customer’s world.
This is especially damaging in specialist markets. A capital-markets software decision-maker expects fluency in market structure, workflows, regulation and operations; an industrial buyer expects understanding of uptime, maintenance, throughput and capex economics; professional services need to see evidence you understand their sales cycle dynamics; medtech audiences expect clinical and health-system context.
In a contrasting (but just as frequent) scenario, sometimes there’s lots of knowledge about the customer’s pain points, but far too little granular explanation of how your products or services solve them. You know the kind of thing. Content is fluent and beautiful, but bland, lacking thought-out detail and ultimately useless. Target audiences want recognisable solution detail if they are going to progress through the sales funnel.
Why. Product experts are internally accessible; independent industry expertise is scarcer and sometimes uncomfortable because genuine experts introduce nuance that doesn’t neatly support the sales proposition. Your people don’t really learn about their products. Or they don’t bother to get into the reality of the customer’s world. They need to be hungry to learn. They cannot rely on their induction or ongoing training.
What can you do? Get your people (or agencies) to up their knowledge on both fronts. Then build content around the intersection of customer domain expertise + commercial insight + technical expertise. Recruit customers into the content operating model and give marketers enough domain education to challenge and interview them intelligently.
