I know that's a funny thing to say coming from someone who has spent a significant amount of her career working on growth, marketing, and sales, but hear me out. 😂
One of my favorite things about business is trying to understand why people do what they do. Why does someone choose one company over another? What makes them finally decide to buy something they've been thinking about for months? Why do some customers purchase once and disappear while others become incredibly loyal, spend thousands of dollars over time, and tell everyone they know about a brand?
I could genuinely spend hours studying this stuff, and I have.
After years of owning businesses and eventually working across nearly every department of a growing company, I've developed a pretty strong opinion that one of the biggest opportunities for growth is often sitting right inside the business itself.
And sometimes we're so focused on bringing new people through the door that we don't spend enough time understanding what happens once they get there.
More leads aren't always the answer.
It's a really natural response when a business wants to grow. We need more traffic, more leads, more advertising, more people finding out about us.
And sometimes that's exactly what the business needs.
But before I'd recommend spending more money to attract new customers, I'd want to understand what's happening with the people who are already showing interest.
Are we attracting people who actually want what we're selling? Do they understand the value before they express interest? Are we making it easy for them to take the next step? What happens when someone isn't ready to buy today? And are we learning anything from the people who decide not to move forward?
These are the kinds of questions I love asking because they often lead to conversations that go well beyond the marketing department.
A customer might click on an ad, land on a website, fill out a form, speak to someone in sales, and eventually make a purchase. From the company's perspective, those might be five different processes managed by three or four different people.
But from the customer's perspective, it's one experience.
And if any part of that experience feels confusing, disconnected, or unnecessarily complicated, it affects everything that comes after it.
The customer journey doesn't end when someone buys.
This is probably the part I get most excited about. I love studying the customers who stay. The ones who keep coming back, who genuinely love the product or service, who recfer their friends, and who become so connected to a brand that they're practically doing its marketing for it.
Because I want to know why.
What did they experience that made them feel that way? What problem did we solve for them? What happened after their first purchase that made them want to return? What do those customers have in common, and are we actually using that information to influence how we attract and serve new customers?
That's where things get really interesting to me.
If you understand what makes your best customers valuable over time, you can work backward and start making better decisions about who you're trying to reach, what you're promising them, how you're selling to them, and what kind of experience you're delivering.
Marketing starts informing sales. Sales starts informing the customer experience. Customer experience starts informing the product. And the insights from all of it should eventually make their way back into marketing.
I think businesses are at their best when that information is constantly moving rather than getting stuck inside individual departments.
Sometimes the best research is a conversation.
I love data. I love a good dashboard, a well-organized CRM, and being able to look at a business and actually understand what's happening. But I also think there's a lot of information you simply can't get from staring at a report.
Some of the most valuable things I've learned about customers have come from talking to them.
Hearing someone explain why they're interested in something, what they've tried before, what's making them hesitate, or what they're hoping their life or business will look like after making a purchase gives you an entirely different level of understanding.
And sometimes what customers say is completely different from what the business assumes they care about.
I've had moments where I hear the same phrase come up in conversation after conversation and immediately think, Why aren't we talking about this in our marketing?
Or I notice that people keep asking the same question before they're willing to buy, and I wonder why we aren't answering it before they ever get on a call.
Those little observations matter.
They're also a reminder that the people closest to your customers often have some of the most valuable information in the company, whether that's someone in sales, customer service, education, or another customer-facing role.
The question is whether anyone is actually connecting that information to the decisions being made elsewhere.
I think this is why I've always loved business so much.
I've been fortunate enough to experience business from a lot of different angles, beginning as a hairstylist responsible for building my own clientele and eventually helping lead an organization with multiple departments, teams, and revenue streams.
And I think that experience has shaped how I see things.
When I look at a business, I don't naturally separate marketing from sales, sales from operations, or customer experience from profitability. I'm always thinking about how one decision affects everything else and whether there's an opportunity to make the entire experience work better.
Sometimes that means improving a process, sometimes it means changing the messaging, and sometimes it means realizing the business doesn't need another initiative nearly as much as it needs the existing ones to work together.
I'm not suggesting that acquiring customers is unimportant. Obviously, it is. Businesses need new customers to grow, and there are absolutely times when investing more in acquisition is the right decision.
I just think we should be equally curious about what we're doing with the customers we already have.
Because if you can understand why someone chooses your business, why they stay, and what makes them tell another person about you, you have information that can influence almost every decision you make.
And in my opinion, that's a pretty incredible place to start. 🤎