Stop Guessing What the Customer Wants

Every year, companies lose winnable pursuits for the simplest reason imaginable: they guessed what the customer wanted instead of knowing what the customer needed.

Yet this mistake is shockingly common. Teams pull together internal brainstorms, assumptions, recycled content, and legacy talking points... and then wonder why their proposals feel disconnected from the evaluator’s priorities.

The result is predictable:  

• bland solutions
• unfocused win themes
• proposals that read like technical reports
• scoring sheets that never break the threshold needed to win

Understanding the customer shouldn’t be a competitive advantage. It should be the baseline.

But the companies that do this well absolutely gain an edge.

In a saturated market defined by budget pressure, staffing shortages, delayed decisions, and shifting mission priorities, true customer insight becomes the difference between positioning that wins and positioning that gets ignored.

Here’s what teams need to stop doing... and what to start doing instead.

1. Customer Hot Buttons are Not Brainstormed... They’re Discovered

One of the biggest misunderstandings in capture and pursuit strategy is the belief that teams can sit in a room and “decide” what the customer cares about.

That’s not how it works.

Real customer hot buttons come from:  

• actual conversations
• repeated patterns in client feedback
• documented mission objectives
• performance gaps in existing systems or contracts
• pain points at the program and field levels
• operational challenges leadership is being judged on
• what budgets, audits, and policy shifts are signaling

If your customer hot buttons can be guessed in five minutes, they’re not real.

When teams skip this work, their entire pursuit becomes anchored in assumptions. When they do it well, every decision in capture, BD, marketing, and proposal development sharpens.

2. Strong Capture Teams Listen Twice as Much as They Talk

Winning teams don’t dominate conversations. They create space for the customer to share:

• what isn’t working
• what pressures they’re under
• how their environment is changing
• what success actually looks like for them
• what they wish their vendors would do differently

This is the intelligence that shapes a winning strategy.

When the customer’s voice informs the pursuit early, proposal teams stop writing from the corporate perspective and start writing from the customer’s point of view.

That shift is game-changing.

3. Stop Asking Generic Questions

“How can we help?” is not a useful question.

Great capture professionals ask questions that surface meaning:

• “What’s the biggest risk to meeting your objectives next year?”
• “Where is your current contractor struggling to keep pace?”
• “What would make this program run smoother for your internal stakeholders?”
• “What capabilities do you wish vendors brought to the table but rarely do?”
• “If you could remove one recurring issue from your workload, what would it be?”

These kinds of questions push past small talk and into insight... insight that shapes value propositions, solution design, and win strategy.

4. Your Proposal Should Sound Like You Understand Their World... Because You Do

When a proposal is grounded in genuine customer understanding, it shows up in the writing:

• clearer win themes
• stronger solution alignment
• tighter proof points
• better organization
• more credible storytelling
• evaluators who feel understood, not overwhelmed

Evaluators are human. When they feel seen, they score higher.

This isn’t persuasion trickery. It’s simply meeting the customer where they are and responding to what actually matters to them.

5. Customer Understanding is a Discipline, Not a Guess

Customer intel isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s a capture discipline.

Winning teams:  

• document what they learn
• share insight across BD, delivery, and proposal teams
• validate assumptions regularly
• update hot buttons as the environment changes
• refine their strategy based on new intel
• eliminate content that doesn’t reflect the latest understanding

When your internal story is aligned and accurate, your external message becomes sharper and more believable.

6. Understanding the Customer is the Real Differentiator

Most teams rely on buzzwords, corporate slogans, feature lists, and generic claims about “innovation” or “quality.”

None of that creates separation.

The real differentiator — the one evaluators feel — is when your solution consistently ties back to:

• their mission
• their challenges
• their priorities
• their pressures
• their future state
• their desired outcomes

That’s what makes you the low-risk, high-value choice.

Final Thought: Guessing is Fast. Understanding Wins.

Guessing is easy, comfortable, and fast. But it’s also the most expensive mistake in business development and proposals.

Understanding takes more work... conversations, research, curiosity, listening, and note-taking. But it builds the strongest advantage a company can have: relevance.

Relevant solutions win. Relevant proposals score. Relevant teams grow faster.

If you want to win more, stop guessing what the customer wants. Start learning what they actually need.