The best marketing decisions I made in my in-house days weren't based on clever campaigns or brilliant creative ideas. They came from having true customer insights at my fingertips.

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At Skype, we had a dedicated insights team. At Starling Bank, we had the budget to commission research agencies for each major decision. Having that depth of customer understanding made the difference between launching something that might work and launching something we knew would work.

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But when I started The Scale Up Collective as a one-person company, I lost that advantage. And I felt it immediately.

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The problem with going solo

Those early days of running a fractional CMO business were a reality check. I was working with brilliant founders who had amazing products, but we were all making decisions based on assumptions or basic customer interviews rather than evidence.

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Sure, we'd run the odd survey and do a few customer interviews. But it was surface-level stuff - the kind of research that confirms what you already think rather than revealing what you don't know.

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The breakthrough moments - the insights that help businesses go from good to great - simply weren't happening. We were missing the depth that comes from proper, systematic research.

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I kept thinking about all those in-house campaigns where a single insight had completely shifted our approach. Like when Skype's research revealed that people weren't scared of using video calling on mobile - they were embarrassed about how they looked. That insight led to filters, stickers and features that changed everything.

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The landscape was changing too

Three years ago, when I was grappling with this problem, the research landscape looked very different. If you wanted quality insights, you had limited options:

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• Expensive research agencies (often at least £20k+ for decent work)
• Survey platforms that charged per response
• Tools like UserTesting that were out of budget
• Long wait times for any meaningful sample sizes

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Most startups simply couldn't justify the cost or timeline. So they went without.

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But I kept seeing clients miss massive opportunities because they didn't really understand their customers. They'd build features nobody wanted, target the wrong audiences, or position themselves in ways that completely missed the mark.

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Enter Anna and the insight revolution

Three years ago, Anna Sandford-James came on board as Head of Audience Insights. She came from a product management background and then research so had evolved into someone who could bridge the gap between research and commercial strategy.

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Anna saw what Ness and I were seeing - that the traditional approach to customer research was broken for growing businesses. Too slow, too expensive, too disconnected from actual business decisions.

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But there was also something else: the research landscape was evolving rapidly.

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New tools were emerging that made research more accessible:

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• Prolific for better quality survey respondents
• Clay.com for data enrichment
• AI-powered transcription tools that could analyse interviews at scale
• Social listening platforms that gave us access to real customer voices

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More importantly, we could combine these tools in ways that the big agencies weren't doing yet.

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Our new Intelligence Framework

What we built was something quite different from traditional research. Instead of starting from scratch every time, we developed what we call our Intelligence Framework.

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It starts with Social Intelligence - scraping forums, social media, review sites. Real customers talking about real problems in their own words, at scale.

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Then we layer in Internal Knowledge - all the insights that companies already have buried in their CRM, support tickets, and sales calls, but have never properly analysed.

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Next comes Audience Interviews - but we're not just asking "do you like our product?" We're digging into the context around customer decisions, understanding the alternatives they considered, and mapping their actual journey.

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Finally, we use AI-Powered Analysis to find patterns across all this data that would take humans weeks to identify.

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The result? We can go from brief to actionable insights in days, not weeks. And the insights are deeper because we're looking at multiple data sources, not just one survey.

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The results speak for themselves

Take one of our clients, a financial wellbeing app. Traditional research might have told them their app was "confusing" or that people "didn't understand the value proposition."

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Our approach revealed something much more specific: people understood what the app did, but they didn't understand how it did it. They were hesitating at the point of sign-up because they couldn't visualise the actual experience.

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That insight led to redesigned onboarding that walked people through the journey step by step. Conversion from download to subscription increased by 300%.

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Or another client, a digital health company. Surface-level research would have told them that weight loss customers want "support and guidance."

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Our deep-dive revealed that patients specifically needed "proactive, personalised support throughout their journey" - and they wanted to track progress using personal metrics beyond just weight. That insight became their entire positioning.

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What this means for your business

The gap between companies with proper insights and those flying blind is getting wider.

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Businesses with access to deep customer intelligence can:

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• Spot opportunities before competitors
• Launch with confidence rather than hope
• Build products people actually want
• Position themselves in ways that truly resonate

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Meanwhile, companies still relying on guesswork are wasting time and money on initiatives that miss the mark.

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The good news? These insights are now accessible to businesses at any stage. You don't need a corporate budget or six-month timelines.

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But you do need to approach it systematically. One-off surveys or occasional customer chats won't cut it. You need frameworks that can surface insights quickly and translate them into business strategy.

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Looking ahead

The research landscape will keep evolving. AI tools will get better at finding patterns. New platforms will emerge for reaching customers. The cost and complexity of gathering insights will continue to fall.

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But the fundamental principle won't change: businesses that truly understand their customers will always outperform those that don't.

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The question is whether you'll invest in building that understanding now, or whether you'll keep making decisions based on assumptions and hope for the best.

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Want to see how insight-led growth could work for your business? Drop me a line - I'd love to chat about what we might uncover.

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P.S. We've documented our entire Intelligence Framework in a case study series. If you're interested in seeing the specific tools and processes we use, let me know and I'll share the details.

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