Before investing in your portfolio company's GTM plan, discover why customers buy, where customer truth gets lost and what could undermine growth.
Do you really know why its customers buy?
Private equity firms invest considerable time and money in accelerating portfolio company growth.
New leadership. Sharper positioning. More effective marketing. Better sales execution.
The value creation plan looks convincing. The initiatives make commercial sense.
But one question remains before committing to that investment.
How much of the growth plan is based on evidence of why customers buy, what they value and why they stay?
We've encountered this problem repeatedly in our work with B2B companies and in the portfolio company scans we've conducted for private equity firms.
Management teams often have strong convictions about what makes their businesses different.
Those convictions may be correct. But when we examine how the company presents itself to the market, the customer's buying reality can be remarkably difficult to find.
We recently reviewed the published positioning of six companies competing in the same market.
We assessed how clearly their propositions reflected the buyer's situation, the language customers use and the evidence supporting their claims.
All six received the lowest rating for buyer situation and buyer language. None scored above three on proof.
The assessment was qualitative and based on publicly available messaging. It tells us what reached the market, rather than what research the companies may have conducted internally.
The pattern was familiar.
We saw something similar when we examined the homepage hero sections of 30 IT services companies.
Their propositions were so interchangeable that we could swap the logos between websites and struggle to distinguish one business from another.
Different companies. Similar promises.
For an investor, that raises a question about the commercial foundation of the growth plan.
If customers cannot readily see why they should choose your portfolio company, what exactly will increased GTM investment amplify?
Understanding why customers buy is the starting point.
The next challenge is carrying that understanding across the business.
Customer evidence informs positioning. Marketing develops campaigns. Sales enablement creates training. Sellers take the story into customer conversations.
At each stage, the meaning can shift.
The customer's buying trigger becomes a generic market challenge. The capabilities they value become a product feature list. Their language gives way to the company's preferred terminology.
Leadership believes the organisation is telling one story, while customers are hearing several.
We've seen this happen in our own engagements, even when valuable customer interviews had been conducted.
It made us recognise that we needed to measure how effectively customer truth was being transferred across the commercial organisation.
The Shift90 Value Transfer X-Ray Diagnostic examines five commercial surfaces, three customer-facing sales conversations and the executive team's view of the joined-up commercial story.
It identifies where customer truth is present, where internal assumptions dominate and where value gets lost.
We use it before an engagement to establish the starting point.
We repeat the assessment afterwards to see what has changed and identify what still needs attention.
For a PE operating partner or portfolio company CEO, this provides a practical way to examine whether the commercial organisation is working from a shared, evidence-based understanding of customer value.
It also creates accountability for the work undertaken to improve positioning, messaging and sales effectiveness.
Do you have reliable evidence of why your customers buy, what they value and why they stay?
And how consistently is that understanding reflected across your commercial organisation?
Your website is a good place to start. It's the first publicly auditable commercial surface we examine in the Value Transfer X-Ray.
Curious how your website stacks up?
Take the Value Transfer X-Ray for a spin.
See how clearly your website communicates the customer's buying situation, what they value and why they should choose you.
It's a small first step towards understanding where customer truth is getting lost.
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