Your Customers Are Always Telling Better Stories Than You Are

Businesses spend an enormous amount of time trying to work out what to say about themselves, usually in rooms where someone has written words like innovative, collaborative, customer-first and transformative on a whiteboard. At this point, everybody nods as though they have just uncovered a previously unknown truth about the company rather than assembled the same four words as roughly half of LinkedIn.

Then a customer sends an email saying: “You just made something really complicated feel easy.”

There it is - your proposition.

Six words, no brand workshop, no messaging matrix, no lengthy debate about whether “trusted partner” feels too generic, although for the record, it does.

Customer feedback is often far more revealing than anything a business says about itself, partly because customers are not remotely interested in preserving the language you have spent three months approving internally; they tell you what changed for them, what they valued, what surprised them and, if you are lucky, what they have already started telling other people about you.

A business might think its greatest strength is strategic thinking, but your customer only remembers that you really listened before suggesting a solution.

You might think your service is differentiated by innovation, but the client keeps coming back because you are the only supplier who does not make every conversation feel like an episode of The Apprentice.

You might proudly describe your team as agile, while the customer is telling colleagues, “They sorted it without making it my problem.”

I know which version I prefer to put on the homepage.

There is, however, one fairly inconvenient flaw in the theory that your customers are your best storytellers, which is that you have to turn them into customers first.

This is where messaging earns its keep.

Good messaging is not really about selling yourself at all, despite what a lot of business websites would have you believe. It is about showing somebody you understand what is happening in their world well enough for them to trust you with it, which means the first thing they should recognise in your story isn't you, but themselves.

That distinction is easy to miss.

Businesses naturally want to talk about what they do, how long they have been doing it, how many awards they have won, how passionate they are, how experienced their team is and, if everyone else in the sector has already used those things, something involving a “360-degree approach”.

Customers are usually thinking about something much less polished.

Why does nobody understand what I actually need?

Why am I still doing this manually?

Why has my website not generated a decent enquiry since the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee?

That is the conversation your messaging needs to enter.

The businesses that do this well make you feel understood before they have even spoken to you, not through some spooky display of clairvoyance, but by demonstrating that they have spent enough time with people like you to understand the frustrations, ambitions and trade-offs that actually exist behind the job title.

Messaging built around assumptions usually ends up talking to an imaginary customer, while messaging built around understanding makes a real one stop and think, finally, someone gets it.

That is what gets them through the door.

After that, unfortunately, marketing has to hand over to reality.

You can have the most beautifully written website in the world, a brand deck that makes everyone in the room slightly emotional and enough thought leadership to make LinkedIn buckle under the weight of it, but if the actual experience is dreadful, nobody is coming back.

This is where the second part of the story begins.

Your service decides whether the promise was true.

Did you listen?

Did you make their life easier?

Did you do what you said you would do?

Did you deliver something they would genuinely want to tell someone else about?

That last question is the one businesses underestimate most, as great customer experience does not just create retention; it creates language.

People start giving you the words that explain your value better than you ever could, and that language is useful far beyond a testimonials page that nobody has looked at since 2022.

It can shape your homepage, sharpen your sales deck and can tell you which case studies are actually worth writing. It can even reveal the gap between what you think you sell and what people are really buying. It can even uncover a proposition you have been sitting on for years without noticing.

There is a very simple exercise I think every business should do occasionally, particularly if the messaging has started sounding a bit too polished to be believable.

Go back through your last ten testimonials, reviews, client emails or pieces of feedback and ignore the bits that sound like they could belong to anyone. Instead, look for the phrases that are specific enough to make you stop.

·       What did the customer actually notice?

·       What did they value that you did not expect?

·       Which words keep appearing?

·       What do they tell other people about you?

·       Most importantly, what are they saying that you are not?

There is usually something hiding in there.

The best brand stories are already sitting in somebody’s inbox, buried inside a customer conversation or lurking in the middle of a testimonial, and your job is to notice them.

The cycle, when it works, is beautifully simple: your messaging shows people you understand them, your service proves that you do, then your customers tell the next person why that mattered.

At that point, marketing stops feeling quite so much like shouting about yourself and starts becoming what it should have been all along - a good story, told by enough people that others want to become part of it too.