Customer Growth
Most teams interrogate every loss and celebrate every win. The problem is, the win is hiding some hugely valuable intelligence, and almost nobody goes looking for it. If you do not know why you are being chosen, you do not know what you are about to lose.
We ask ‘why me?’ when we lose, almost never when we win
“Why me?” is a question we usually ask in the wreckage. Why did I lose that deal? Why did they go with the other lot? Why does this keep happening? It is the question of a bad day, and it gets a lot of attention.
The thing is, the same question matters even more on a good day. When you win, the dopamine kicks in, the team high-fives, and the learning walks straight out of the room with the celebration. Nobody stops to ask why the yes happened, because yes feels like enough.
It is not. A win you cannot explain is a win you cannot repeat. And it is almost certainly a win you are about to lose to someone who works out what you are doing before you do.
Your best clients can’t actually tell you why they chose you
Ask a client flat out, “Why did you choose us?” and watch what happens. You will get a polite pause, then something that sounds suspiciously like the top line of your own website. Professional. Reliable. Good fit. Thanks for asking.
That is not them being lazy. That is them reaching for a logical answer because business, in their head, is supposed to be logical. Zaltman’s work out of Harvard put it bluntly: around 86% of B2B decisions happen at an emotional level. We decide on feeling, then we post-rationalise with logic so we can defend the decision in a meeting.
Nobody wants to stand in front of their team and say, “I just trusted them.” It sounds like they skipped the due diligence. So they hand you the tidy version instead, and you write it down, and you believe it, and your marketing team goes and builds a campaign on top of it.
“A win you cannot explain is a win you cannot repeat. It is almost certainly a win you are about to lose to someone who works it out before you do.”
Trust is the real reason, and trust is a feeling
Strip it back and the answer is almost always the same. They trusted you. They trusted you could deliver what you said, that you would not leave them with egg on their face, that you would be a decent human to work with on a Wednesday afternoon when something had gone sideways.
Every pitch, every proposal, every recommendation is a request for trust. That is the bit doing the heavy lifting. The case studies, the methodology, the pricing structure, all of it is scaffolding around a feeling. Make trust visible and you win. Leave it implied and you are gambling.
The challenge is that clients will not hand you the word “trust” on a plate. You have to ask in a way that gets them somewhere near it.
Ask questions that evoke the emotional reasoning
This is where the reframe matters. Stop asking, “Why did you choose us?” Start asking questions that get people back into the room where the decision was actually made.
Try: “When you told the team you were going with us, what was the feeling in the room?” Or: “When you first started working with us, what were you quietly worried about, and what made that worry go away?” Or: “Who else was in the conversation, and what did you have to reassure them about?”
The answers will not always sound emotional on the surface. They will sound like, “Honestly, you felt like a safe pair of hands,” or, “A couple of the team had been burnt before and I needed to know that wouldn’t happen again.” That is gold. That is the logical decision being unwrapped back into the feelings that drove it.
Even the boring answer is data
Sometimes you will ask and the answer will be, “Honestly, you were the cheapest.” That stings for about three seconds, and then it is the most useful sentence you have heard all quarter.
Because now you know. Maybe you have been undercharging. Maybe price is doing more of the work than you realised, and the moment a competitor moves on price, you are exposed. The follow-up writes itself: if we had been 15% more, would you still have chosen us? If not, why not?
And if every client gives you the same answer, that is data too. It tells you that you and your competitors are starting to look like the same thing from the outside. That is the signal to do something about it now, while you are still winning, not later when you are not.
Stop manufacturing more of something you have not confirmed
Here is where it gets uncomfortable for marketing teams. If nobody is asking the question, the brand is being built on assumption. You are pouring budget into messaging about reliability, expertise, partnership, whichever word is fashionable this quarter, and you genuinely do not know if that is what is landing.
If I were sitting in that marketing team, I’d be cheeky about it. Run a campaign that says, “These are the reasons our customers tell us they work with us. We think we know. They might disagree. If you want to be one of those customers, and tell us what we’re getting right or wrong, come and talk to us.” Curiosity as a positioning move. Colombo energy. One more thing.
The mechanical version is simpler. Build the question into your process. After every win, after the first 90 days, at the end of a programme. Create the space and the moment for the thing that needs to be said to actually get said. What can be seen is being managed. What gets asked is what gets understood.
The commercial point
Win-Keep-Grow does not start at Keep. It starts the moment someone says yes, and you decide whether you are going to find out why, or whether you are going to enjoy the moment and move on.
The teams with commercial confidence are the ones who know what they are actually being bought for. Not the version on the website. The real reason, named by the people who paid. That is the difference between a brand that grows on purpose and a brand that grows by accident until it stops.
So next time you win, before the celebration, book the conversation. Ask the better question. Listen for the feeling underneath the logic. That is the bit I’d pay attention to.
