The Shift to Customer-Led Growth

When your messaging falls flat—even though your product is solid—it’s easy to think you just need a stronger pitch.

What you need is a better story.

This post shares ideas on rebuilding your messaging from the ground up based on what we learned while rebuilding ours.

Over the past twenty years, we've employed several messaging approaches for our clients, each a step closer to what buyers want to hear. We’ve settled on a model for customer-led growth grounded in Jobs-to-be-Done insight, customer hero storytelling and conversational discovery.

The result? Messaging that empowers buyers to make informed choices—and a go-to-market engine designed to meet their needs.

Where the journey started

In 2004, I launched Advanced Marketing Concepts, a UK-based consultancy focusing on sales acceleration. One of the biggest challenges I observed was that sales reps defaulted to PowerPoint-driven product pitches, and most lacked the skills to run discovery sessions that served both buyer and seller. They were all one-sided and often felt like a game of 20 questions followed by a sales pitch.

Mike Bosworth’s CustomerCentric Selling helped lay the foundation for a new way of structuring conversations around business value. From there, I built messaging architectures to support consistent value-led sales and marketing dialogue. But sales adoption was slow. The content existed; it just wasn’t sticking.

Whiteboard storytelling: a breakthrough

In 2010, I teamed up with Corey Sommers, co-founder of Whiteboardselling, to learn the art and science of visual storytelling using whiteboards. The idea was simple: help salespeople explain value clearly, conversationally, and without slides.

This was a profound career experience and transformational for salespeople. One of my first experiences was facilitating four consecutive whiteboard storytelling sessions over two days, where 1000 VMWare salespeople learned to reposition the company and the lead products in their portfolio, and they loved it. Storytelling, conversation, drawing elements of a visual story, or presenting them in a visual confection built confidence. Salespeople stopped relying on scripts. Whiteboards engaged logic and emotion, invited collaboration, and made complex ideas accessible.

Customer Hero storytelling and the emotional shift

Later, through Mike Bosworth’s What Great Salespeople Do and live workshops, I was introduced to customer hero storytelling and another shift in thinking.

We flipped the lens: the buyer became the central character. That shift unlocked a new level of emotional clarity—stories that resonate logically and personally. It moved us from explanation to connection.

A wake-up call and a new path

In 2021, after wrapping up an interim sales role, I reflected on what was next. Around that time, Mark Littlewood at Business of Software introduced me to the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory. It was a red pill, blue pill experience.

JTBD structured the buyer’s journey, capturing what causes people to seek change, how they weigh options, and what outcomes matter most. I dove in deep, learning from experts like Bob Moesta, (JTBD), Ryan Singer, (Shape Up) Matt Lerner, (North Star Metric), Claire Suellentrop (Customer-led Growth), April Dunford, (Positioning and Conversational Discovery)

AI supercharged the process

Then, in 2023, I started using ChatGPT—and everything accelerated.

I trained with John Gusiff to shape prompts that mirrored our messaging logic. From there, I built my Customer Hero Storytelling GPT, a tool designed to extract JTBD insights and turn them into strong narratives, value propositions, and go-to-market assets.

That system now powers how we scale this work.

From product-centric to customer-led: what changed

1. We start with the customer’s struggling moments: Through customer “Switch” interviews, we explore what buyers are trying to accomplish, the struggling moments that drove them to seek alternatives, their motivation and pushes and pulls experienced in making the decisions to change vendors..
2. We write stories that centre on the buyer. These aren’t template case studies. We build narratives with tension, risk, and transformation, in which the customer emerges as the hero.
3. We use AI to scale execution: Interview insights feed into frameworks that generate messaging, conversational scripts, hero stories, web copy, and more..
4. We coach for adoption and consistency: Whiteboard stories and immersive roleplaying bring it all together. Sales teams learn to open strong, reframe challenges, tell relevant stories, position value, and confidently resolve objections.

What customer-led growth looks like

This goes beyond messaging. It’s about building a go-to-market engine that runs on real buyer insight based on the conversations with your best customers.

• Marketing speaks to what buyers care about
• Sales enter conversations with context and relevance
• Product teams get more explicit field feedback
• Customer stories align everyone across GTM
• Alignment around a North Star metric flattens organisational silos and helps companies deliver recurring impact across the customer lifecycle.

Most importantly, customers feel recognised—because your story reflects their reality.

Early results: what we’re seeing

From early-stage SaaS and services clients, we’re already seeing signs of traction:

• Higher engagement from early-stage prospects in the form of improved lead flow and pipeline
• Sales conversations that feel more relevant and personalised and win rates improving
• Shorter buying cycles as trust builds faster through buyer facilitation and better collaboration
• More substantial internal alignment around a shared narrative

We’re rolling this out across full GTM functions and tracking its effect on CAC, pipeline velocity, win rates and customer retention.

The bottom line: customers first, growth follows

Customer-led growth takes hold when it’s embedded in the rhythm of your GTM motion—not just your marketing deck.

Everything moves more smoothly when your message reflects real buyer goals and decision-making patterns. Conversations get sharper, content hits harder, and teams work better together.

And buyers don’t just listen—they lean in.

What might this look like in your business? Let’s talk.