We have more data on our customers today than at any point in history.
You have dashboards. You have NPS scores. You have entire departments dedicated to "Customer Success" and "User Experience."
So why do so many initiatives still land with a thud?
Why do product launches miss the mark? Why do sales teams struggle to close deals despite having the "perfect" solution? Why does marketing copy feel like it was written by a committee instead of a human?
Here’s the deal: You don’t have a data problem. You have a mindset and vision problem.
The issue isn't that you can't hear your customers. It’s that you are listening to them through a filter that distorts everything they say. That filter is the Inward Mindset.
When we operate with an inward mindset, we are self-focused. We might think we care about the customer, but underneath, we are focused on our objectives, our timelines, and our quotas.
We see customers not as people with their own struggles, but as vehicles to help us hit our numbers—or obstacles standing in our way.
When that happens, we stop being curious. We stop seeing the reality of their situation and start projecting our own needs onto them.
Let’s look at how this plays out in the real world.
Do either of these sound familiar?
Meet Alex. She is grinding. She’s first in the office, last to leave. She makes more calls than anyone else. She sends perfectly formatted follow-up emails.
But her numbers are down.
Because Alex is worried about her quota, her "check-ins" feel pushy. Her pitch feels generic. When a prospect raises an objection, Alex doesn't hear a genuine business problem; she hears an obstacle to her commission check. She doubles down on activity, but the customers feel unheard. She’s working hard, but she’s working inward.
Your marketing team needs to get content out. They have a deadline.
Instead of doing the heavy lifting to understand the actual headaches of your buyers, they ask colleagues down the hall what to write about. They produce content that people inside the company love. It uses all the right internal acronyms. It celebrates your features.
But to the customer? It’s jargon. It’s irrelevant. It solves a problem they don't know they have while ignoring the fire currently burning down their house. The team met their deadline (inward objective), but they missed the human (outward impact).
When you get this wrong at an enterprise level, it’s expensive. Resources are wasted on features nobody uses. Marketing budgets evaporate.
But sometimes, the cost is even higher.
There’s a famous story about a nonprofit working to improve lives in rural villages. They saw that women in one village spent hours every day walking to a distant river to fetch water. It was grueling, inefficient work.
So, the nonprofit built a well right in the center of the village. Problem solved, right?
Weeks later, the well was destroyed. Sabotaged.
The nonprofit was baffled. Why would these women destroy something that saved them hours of labor?
Because the nonprofit didn't ask what the women actually wanted. They assumed the walk was a burden. To the women, that walk was the only time in their day they were free from their husbands and children. It was their social hour. It was their sanctuary.
The nonprofit saw a logistical problem (distance to water). The women had a human need (connection and freedom).
By fixing the logistics without seeing the people, the nonprofit actually made the women's lives worse.
How do you avoid building unwanted wells or launching products that flop?
You have to shift your teams from an inward mindset to an outward mindset. You have to stop obsessing over your solution and fall in love with their problem.
At Arbinger, we use a simple framework to operationalize this shift. We call it S.A.M.
Stop assuming. Get curious. Instead of relying on internal assumptions, go to the source. What is the "job to be done" for your customer? not just the functional job (e.g., "I need software"), but the emotional and social job (e.g., "I need to not look stupid in front of my board").
Once you see the real need, you have to be willing to change your plans. This is where many organizations fail. We love our ideas too much. We love our product roadmap too much. An outward mindset leader is willing to scrap a "great" idea if it doesn't actually help the customer.
Did it actually help? Don't just measure output (did we ship the feature?). Measure impact (did it solve their problem?). Establishing a feedback loop where you constantly check your impact against their needs is the only way to stay aligned.
You cannot script empathy. You cannot mandate "customer obsession" in a memo. If your teams are operating with an inward mindset, no amount of customer data will save you.
Here is how you start leading this shift today:
Audit your "Certainty." Where are your teams sure they know what the customer wants? That certainty is often a mask for an inward mindset. Challenge it.
Change the Conversation. In your next pipeline review or product meeting, stop asking "How do we close this?" and ask "What is the struggle this person is facing right now, and have we actually helped them with it?"
Equip Your Leaders. This isn't a soft skill; it's a strategic capability. Give your managers the tools to recognize when their teams are turning inward and the language to guide them back to an outward focus.
The market is noisy. The only signal that cuts through is genuine relevance. And you can only be relevant when you actually see the people you are serving.
Q: Is an "inward mindset" just being selfish?
A: Not exactly. You can be very hardworking and well-intentioned (like the nonprofit in the story) and still have an inward mindset. It’s about focus. Are you focused on your good intentions and your solution, or are you focused on the actual impact you are having on the other person?
Q: Can we use this approach with thousands of customers?
A: Yes. While you can't have coffee with every single customer, you can build systems and surveys designed by an outward mindset. Most surveys are designed to validate the company's internal biases. Outward surveys are designed to uncover the customer's true struggle. It changes the questions you ask and the data you value.
Q: How do I get my sales team to adopt this? They just want to hit quota.
A: Show them the math. Inward-mindset selling feels like friction—it’s pushy and transactional, which actually slows down deal cycles. Outward-mindset selling builds trust faster, uncovers the real budget holders, and leads to higher close rates and larger deal sizes because the customer feels understood, not sold to.
Q: Doesn't this take longer than just executing our strategy?
A: It takes a moment longer to think, but it saves months of wasted execution. Building the wrong product or pitching the wrong message is the most expensive thing you can do. Slowing down to "See Others" creates velocity later because you aren't fixing mistakes or rebuilding trust.