Company Lore: The Silent Killer of Deals and Renewals

When the Story of a Company and Its Customers Doesn’t Keep Up with Reality

A venture-backed CEO whom I know well had an amazing intuition for the market his company targeted and the needs of that market.

He smartly nurtured that intuition via conversations with customers and prospects. And he saw where the market was heading better than anyone else.

Leveraging that intuition, he nimbly guided the product roadmap and helped drive strong growth.  

The company relied on that intuition, and it served them well quarter after quarter.

But as the company grew and the CEO got busy running the business, he met with fewer customers and his teams’ actions became largely driven by reacting to the demands of the noisiest customers and prospects.

Meanwhile, the market kept changing.

And as the market shifted, the company continued to rely on the lore that stemmed from the business’s origin and earlier days. 

Not surprisingly, the company growth rate slowed.

Why Company Lore Happens — and How It Prevents Success

A company that lacks a systematic, unbiased, and repeatable method by which to capture, interpret, disseminate, and act upon the voice of the customer ends up creating its own opinions and points of view for why those customers (prospects, too) think and act the way they do. 

These opinions are repeated so often within the organization that they become beliefs or truisms, also known as company lore. 

Inevitably, company lore worms its way into a company’s buyer journey, its customer journey, and its go-to-market plans…often generating low win rates, customer churn that’s too high, and new product launches that fail to meet objectives.

On the other hand, a company that develops customer insights from customer interviews benefits in multiple ways:

• Clarity on the best paths forward towards achieving top corporate initiatives, especially those associated with Marketing, Sales and Customer Success organizations
• Confidence on prioritizing a product roadmap
• Real customer stories that illustrate how the company’s solutions successfully deliver on business outcomes

Let’s Work Together to Tell Your Organization’s True Story

Carema Consulting develops, executes, and delivers customer insights research and programs for B2B technology companies. As a company’s outsourced customer research partner, Carema Consulting’s experienced team of tech leaders leverage their decades of interactive customer experiences to provide a company with a systematic process for achieving and maintaining an unbiased view of its customers and prospects. 

Through its customer findings, implications, and recommendations, Carema Consulting brings forward verified customer insights in a storytelling fashion that empowers a company to forgo reliance on biased, internally-generated beliefs (aka, company lore) as a primary source of knowledge about customer perceptions and beliefs.

If you think your organization has been struggling with relying on company lore and is considering a new approach to understanding and serving customers, our team is ready to assist you. Connect with us today to learn more about our process and capabilities.