You Can't Read the Label From Inside the Jar

A question you may have asked yourself as a business owner: How do we get the market to view us the way our customers do?

Maybe a lost bid put it in your head. Maybe you feel like you don't have the market share you deserve. Either way, you named the gap. That was step one, and most companies never get that far.

So you did the reasonable thing. You went to check it. You asked the people closest to you, your team, your best customers, “How you see us?” You are reading Voice of the Customer.

And you got a warm answer. And other than glowing testimonials, a mostly useless one.

But why, you ask?

Industrial buyers shortlist on reputation and digital presence before they pick up the phone. In 6sense's 2024 buyer study, roughly 81% of B2B buyers had a preferred vendor in mind before first contact. The moment the market decides whether you make the list is a moment you're not in the room for. A blind spot there isn't abstract. It's deals lost in conversations you never knew were happening.

I'll concede the obvious up front: you know your business better than I ever will. I've never run your floor, sat in a production meeting, or worked with your marketing team. The reason you can't see this particular thing is that you know it too well.

So, if the gap between how your customers see you and how the market sees you is real, why can't you just close it yourself?

Because it isn't a competence problem. It's perspective.

You know the backstory. The constraints. The forty years of why-we-do-it-this-way. You carry so much context that you cannot see what a stranger sees in five seconds. The market doesn't get the backstory. It reads the label cold: the name, the first impression, whatever surfaces when someone who's never met you goes looking.

And this isn't a soft observation. It's measured. Bain surveyed 362 companies: 80% believed they delivered a superior experience; only 8% of their customers agreed. Not because leaders are vain but because they're inside. The distance between how you think you come across and how you actually come across is the rule, not the exception. And it runs in one direction every time.

So, fine. You'll just ask people.

The question is who.

Here's where what seems to be the obvious move turns into the trap.

The instinct is to ask your customers. Run a survey. Listen harder. That's reasonable. Also, exactly backwards. Especially if you are experiencing more churn than usual. Churn isn't a reason to listen to customers more. It's the moment the bias becomes dangerous. When accounts are walking out the door and you reach for customer feedback to find out why, you're asking the ones who stayed about a problem owned by the ones who left.

Your customers already cleared any friction that exists in working with you. They found you, vetted you, chose you, likely built their workflow around you, and learned to trust your team. Ask them, and they'll tell you something legit to them, what it's like to work with you after they committed. That's not what the market sees before it commits. Two different questions. Only one of them is your immediate problem.

Asking your happiest customers and expecting to get answers about how the market perceives you is reading the label from inside the jar. It's confirmation bias wearing a friendly face: you're asking the people most likely to validate you whether you deserve to feel validated. The answer comes back yes. It's almost always yes. And it's almost always incomplete.

The honest understanding doesn't live with them. It lives with the buyer who didn't choose you. The prospect who never called. The shortlist you didn't make and were never told about. Not one of those people is in your building.

There's a name for chasing down that other answer, too. Call it Voice of the Market. The counterpart to the Voice of the Customer you started with. Same idea, opposite direction: instead of the people who stayed, it asks the people who walked, the ones who compared you and passed, the ones who never showed up at all. The catch was never that it can't be done. It's that it points straight at the people you have no easy line to.

So the people closest to you can't give you what you want to hear. And the people who can give you what you need to hear are the ones you never hear from.

What does that leave a leader with?

You've seen the headline that half of CEOs report feeling isolated, and that of those, 61% say it hinders their performance. It usually gets filed under wellness. Lonely at the top? Take care of yourself.

Let's look at it from a different perspective.

The real cost of the top seat isn't sadness. It's the slow loss of an honest perspective. The higher you climb, the fewer people give you unfiltered insights. Your employees can't. You're who they manage up to. Your board can't. You're the one they hold to results. Your competitors won't. And your customers, as we just covered, are the wrong perspective.

The research behind the loneliness stat names the missing thing plainly. It isn't reassurance. It isn't a roomful of "Yes" and "Soft-pushback" people. It's unvarnished feedback before your thinking hardens into a decision the whole company has to live with. Isolation is the enemy of good decisions because it erodes the perspectives that would have corrected them.

If you can't find an unbiased, honest perspective from the inside, the fix has to come from outside. So what does that look like?

An outside-the-jar read is exactly what it sounds like: the view from outside the jar. That's the Voice-of-the-Market work, and nothing about it requires hiring anyone: win-loss interviews, blind buyer research where your name isn't on the survey, a structured look at why the deals you lost actually went the way they did. The discipline exists, and it's yours to run. Most companies just never do, because it points at the people who didn't pick them.

There's one spot where doing it alone gets genuinely hard. The prospect who passed on you will rarely give you the unvarnished version to your face. Nobody enjoys telling a company why they said no, so you tend to get the polite edit instead of the real answer. That's the narrow place a neutral party earns its keep, not because they know your business better than you (nobody does, and anyone who says otherwise is selling), but because people tell a stranger the truth they'll soften for the person standing right in front of them.

Either way, the job is the same: an honest read of how your world looks from a vantage point you can't occupy, because you're standing in the middle of it. It doesn't replace your judgment. It feeds it. You still make the call. It's your name, your floor, your decision. You just stop making it half-blind.

You built something good. The risk was never your work quality. It's that you're the last person who can see how the market reads it, and so is everyone you'd ask first.

So go get the read you can't take from inside. Call the prospect who picked someone else and ask them why. Ask the buyer who never called what they thought you did before they decided not to. You won't like all of it. That's the point. The honest answer is the one that doesn't come from the people who already chose you.