MARKETING
February 28, 2026
Alec Witham
Obsess over your customer. It's the key to get you growing, fast. And if your marketing team isn't doing that, it will hold you back.
It’s a lesson that has driven some of the biggest marketing wins in my career.
At one point, I helped turn around a 50% revenue decline with BASF, ultimately growing the account 380%.
In another role, conversations with trusted customer advisories like Gong, Seismic, and Bitly uncovered a major product gap in the market. Solving it reshaped our positioning and helped land some of the largest clients we worked with.
Both breakthroughs came from the same place. Not internal strategy sessions. Not guessing with product roadmaps.
This marketing lesson is true at 10 figures, 7 figures, or $0 in revenue.
Customer obsession.
Over the last three months, I’ve helped three organizations start from the ground up. Different industries. Different founders. Different missions.
But the same pattern kept showing up. The founders that succeed obsess over the customer.
Not the product. Not the pitch deck. Not the idea they originally fell in love with.
The customer.
And with every single one of these founders we discovered something important from the customer:
The product they thought they were bringing to market wasn’t exactly what the customer wanted.
That realization didn’t kill the business. It made it better.
Here are a few examples.
One founder built a therapy model based on working with people in the environments they live in.
The assumption was logical. Meet people where they are. But once they began speaking directly with customers, a different insight surfaced.
Many people didn’t want therapy in the same environment that caused their stress.
They wanted space. They wanted distance.
They wanted to escape the routine and context of their daily life so they could think differently.
That insight transformed the model into destination-based therapy experiences, where the setting itself becomes part of the healing process.
Same mission. Better product-market fit.
Now we are going to market and testing two hypothesis.
Individuals need this escape during a trigger period in their life.
Companies need this during a major transition in their organization.
Both need immediate escape from routine & change.
Another peer was launching a grassroots political campaign.
Their early messaging focused on large, statewide problems dominating the headlines. But when they began talking with neighbors and voters locally, the reality was different.
People weren’t opening conversations about macro policy debates.
They were talking about:
• Childcare costs
• Housing their kids could actually afford
• The future of their local community
The campaign adjusted.
Instead of broadcasting broad political talking points, we anchored the message in everyday realities.
And suddenly, conversations started happening.
One founder I'm working with launched a handyman service built around flexibility and fast access to skilled help.
Customers loved the idea. But feedback revealed something interesting.
Many customers didn’t just want someone to fix small issues.
They wanted someone they could trust with bigger projects.
Someone who could help them design & build.
The insight wasn’t to abandon the handyman model.
It was to expand the offering, turning the business into a trusted home partner rather than just a repair service.
That shift opened up an entirely new category of work, custom home builder.
Every one of these founders did the same thing well.
They obsessed over the customer experience, but we didn’t cling to their original assumptions.
We listened. We adjusted.
We treated the first version of the business as a hypothesis, not a finished product.
And I’ve seen this same pattern show up in later-stage companies too.
At one point, I was working with SaaS companies trying to solve a data attribution problem.
Through our trusted customer advisory at Gong, I unearthed a massive market need. Once we found it, I went to other customers at other likewise ICP's such as Seismic and Bitly, to see if this was a systematic need.
They confirmed. they needed bi-directional data syncs between platforms for attribution to obtain budget and show success.
The problem? Most tools in our market didn’t support it. Instead of ignoring the pattern, we leaned into it.
We identified an iPaaS solution that could solve the integration challenge and built a plan around it.
That gap became a strategic marketing advantage, because suddenly we weren’t just selling a platform. We were solving a problem customers had already been struggling with.
And when the trigger of customers needing to prove their budget showed up, we had the answer that locked down the partnership.
This role out helped reshape who we were working with. We grew existing accounts and it became a trigger that helped us land some of the biggest clients.
We then expanded into other markets that threw signals for this need. Without our customers, we likely would have never found the need for this feature, which became the selling point for the platform.
The clearest example of customer obsession came from one of the largest companies I’ve worked with: BASF.
When I stepped in, it was clear the eCommerce program we supported had lost over 50% of its revenue YoY.
Instead of starting with internal opinions, I started with the customers. Calling hundreds of them. Obsessing over their thoughts.
I read feedback. I analyzed behavior.
I studied what people were actually saying about the buying experience.
That work revealed several friction points that had been ignored.
Once we corrected them and aligned the experience with what customers were actually asking for, the turnaround was dramatic.
Revenue didn’t just recover.
It grew 380%, turning BASF into our largest account at the time.
Marketers who win don’t assume they’re right. They assume the customers will teach them something. And marketers support that by getting close to the clients. Really close.
Learn through phone calls, meetings, panels, and customer advisory events.
They test. They listen. They adjust.
Because the truth is:
Your first product idea isn’t the product.
It’s the starting point of the conversation with your customer.
And the companies that grow are the ones willing to let the customer help write the next chapter.
© Made by Alec Witham
