IDEAS / POST
Your Customers Know Why Your Growth Stalled. You Probably Don't.
A conversation with Jason So on why talking to customers is the most uncomfortable, most important thing a stalled company isn’t doing.
Jason So is a digital and revenue growth strategist. He works with PE-backed portfolio companies and established B2B companies navigating modernization.
He started his career in the late-90s dot-com boom. Having done the hyper-growth thing (and having watched it implode) he’s spent decades translating what he’s learned into something his clients can benefit from.
Lorraine McGregor and I brought him to Where Growth Stalls because he operates inside the stalled growth problem every day. One thread kept pulling everything together: it’s often the companies most convinced they know their customers, that most need to discover what isn’t working.
“We Know Our Customers.” The Four Words that Should Make Any Leader and Investor Nervous.
Jason has a ritual. Early in every engagement, he tells clients he wants to go talk to their customers. The response is almost always the same.
“No need to… we already know what they want.”
He hears it so often, the resistance has become a data point.
It isn’t a lie: these companies do know a great deal about their customers. They know what the long-time clients say at dinners. They know which complaints come up on renewal calls. They have a rich internal mythology about what customers want, built up over years of accumulated impressions.
What they may be missing is objectivity. And objectivity changes everything.
“I’ve never seen it NOT be a game changer,” Jason reflected. “Whenever we present the findings from real customer conversations, it could be stuff they already sensed or thought they knew. But hearing it from outside the building, in the actual language customers use, lands completely differently.”
As Lorraine observed, companies think they’re creating value, but may be working with dated intel. Customers know if the business is delivering what they need, in the moment. The gap between those two realities is exactly where valuation goes to die.
The Language Problem that Stalls B2B Growth.
Jason walked us through a typical type of case that illustrated a language problem.
A successful, established distribution company was going through a rebrand, trying to modernize its market positioning. They brought Jason in to review the new direction.
The new positioning was full of words like solutions.
“I had to tell them: the guy who cuts my hair has hair solutions. That word means nothing. You’re not an IT company. You’re in distribution. Use language that actually differentiates you instead of language that makes you sound like everyone else.”
This is a pattern Jason sees constantly: companies that have built internal fluency – their own terminology, their own shorthand, their own way of describing what they do – and then use that internal language in the outside world, thinking it makes sense.
It doesn’t make sense to outsiders. Customers simply won’t follow along.
Personally, I’ve seen this from the branding side for years. Companies use language and stories that feel self-evident on the inside, but don’t make sense or resonate with customers. (Fun fact: no customer in the world has ever gone to the counter at McDonald’s and asked for a 16 oz beverage – but you still see that term crop up in promotions).
“This Looks Really Complex. I thought Digital was Supposed to Make Everything Easy.”
Complexity in the quest for simplicity is a paradox Jason highlighted. He described how company execs often have difficulty framing the complexity associated with getting the business operating faster, selling smarter, and phasing out outdated manual processes.
One executive quote encapsulated it: “This looks really complex. I thought digital was supposed to make everything easy.”
For companies in sectors that pre-date the tech revolution (distribution businesses, professional services firms, manufacturers,etc) going digital isn’t about becoming a tech company. It’s about table stakes: mapping and improving the basic operational infrastructure that lets them compete, scale, and eventually attract a buyer. Aging companies have gaps in operations that can’t be bridged just by ‘going digital.’
The wrinkle, however, is that many of these businesses built their success on organic growth and founder relationships, without ever going through a modernization cycle. So when the digital enhancement work begins, so does the anxiety. Changing how systems work requires habit changes people don’t naturally adopt.
“They don’t know what they don’t know. They’ve never been through it. I used to be surprised by some of the questions. Now I realize this is the norm for non-tech industries. That’s my starting point.”
The knowledge gap isn’t the problem. Knowledge gaps can be closed. The problem is jumping to conclusions… reaching for implementations and tools when what’s needed first is strategic thinking, alignment and clarity around the actual problem.
Improperly diagnosed and treated, the problem doesn’t go away. Lorraine’s framing: investors, banks or prospective buyers will see the gap between what leadership believes and what gets delivered through operations. The problems they unearth are rarely new. You’re looking at the bill arriving for decisions made when things still felt fine.
Customer-led Strategy. Why the Fix Is Bigger Than You Think.
Jason works a great deal on alignment. This sounds like it should be a given, but almost never is.
He described a fast-growing professional services firm with a few big enterprise wins under its belt, now trying to figure out how to scale. The real issue wasn’t strategy. It was that the leadership team, the board, and the investors were each operating with a different picture of what “scaling” meant.
His prescription: talk to customers to find out what’s driving interest and demand. Confirm that what you’re building will generate the demand that scales.
“Part of our strategy is looking at the business from a customer lens. Not from my perspective, or the leader’s perspective. What does customer-led strategy actually say? That’s how you remove the internal bias these companies swim in.”
What customer-led strategy tends to reveal is uncomfortable precisely because it’s specific. It reflects the gap between what was promised and what actually got delivered. Customers aren’t asking for more bells and whistles. They want their problems solved. The emphasis on features, driven by what’s newest rather than what’s needed, is often exactly what’s creating the gap. Customers intuit this. Leaders, listening to their own internal narrative, often don’t.
Recognizing the gap is just the start of the work. Jason used a metaphor: you can’t go from sitting on the couch to running the Boston Marathon in three months. Training for a marathon means overhauling what you eat, how you sleep, how you structure your days, not just running more.
Revising your value proposition from the customer’s perspective, and then actually delivering on it, demands a similar overhaul. It touches sales workflow, delivery, messaging, and the customer experience end to end.
The C-Suite often resists because the scale of effort feels overblown. Isn’t this just a messaging problem?
It isn’t a messaging problem. It’s a transformation that requires the right people, a new way of working… and a realistic timeline to match. Jason called this the cascade effect.
- Fix the messaging, and you reveal the sales team isn’t equipped to deliver on it.
- Fix the sales team, and you discover the product doesn’t match what customers actually need.
- Pull on any one thread, and the whole picture shifts.
Suddenly, it isn’t surprising that systems-based fixes (the kind that treat stalled growth as an operations problem or a sales problem) rarely reveal the actual cause.
The Stall Isn’t the Problem. The Signal Is.
What I’ve noticed, across every conversation we’ve had on this podcast, is that the moment of stall is rarely the moment the problem began. By the time growth visibly decelerates, the underlying cause is usually years old.
Jason’s instinct, which matches Lorraine’s and mine, is to move upstream to examine how and if the value promised is both what is still needed / delivered. Not because looking upstream feels decisive. It doesn’t. It feels slow and uncomfortable and the opposite of action. But it’s the only move that addresses the cause rather than the symptoms.
The companies that invest in these steps tend to make a valuable discovery. As Lorraine says, every problem you uncover is like discovering gold. Seeing the issue and addressing it gets you back on the ‘growth’ path. Ignoring the problem keeps you on the ‘stall’ path.
A stall is not a ceiling. It’s a signal to pay attention. And an opportunity.
Full video episode coming soon.