When Passion Turns Against You
If you’ve built a company from the ground up, chances are you know your product, your market, and your customers better than anyone else. That deep passion is what fueled your growth. It’s what helped you power through those early years when sleep was scarce and risk was high.
But here’s the hard truth: that same passion is now your biggest liability when it comes to customer insights.
In The B2B Marketing Revolution®, I say it plainly: “You are wonderfully biased and subjective. From a research perspective, that’s the kiss of death. Here your passion doesn’t help.”
Your passion blinds you. It convinces you that you know your customers better than you really do. And in Battle 2 of the 12 Battles™ Framework, we call that what it is: bias.
Recognize the Trap of “Knowing” Too Much
Confidence can quietly morph into arrogance. You’ve lived in your industry so long you think you see the full picture. You hear your sales team echoing customer sentiments and assume that’s all you need. You run marketing campaigns built on gut instinct and past wins.
And yet, time and again, I’ve watched smart leaders double down on flawed assumptions. Their “knowing” becomes the very thing that blocks them from discovering what’s actually true.
“It’s that beautiful passion that creates bias.” It’s not malice. It’s not laziness. It’s simply that your closeness to your business makes it nearly impossible to see it with fresh eyes.
Spot the Symptoms of Bias in Action
How do you know if bias is sabotaging your customer insights? Look for the telltale signs:
- Dismissing bad news. You discount negative feedback as “an outlier” instead of considering it might reveal a deeper truth.
- Over-relying on sales anecdotes. You trust what your top salesperson says about customers as if it’s a comprehensive study.
- Clinging to old positioning. You resist changing your messaging because “it’s always worked.”
- Treating assumptions as facts. You state opinions about what customers value without a shred of recent data to back it up.
These are blind spots, and they distort everything that follows—your strategy, your spend, and ultimately your growth trajectory.
Why Bias Is More Dangerous in the Middle Market
Enterprise companies often have the luxury of robust research budgets and specialized teams dedicated to market intelligence. Startups, out of necessity, tend to stay close to the ground and listen intently to every signal from early adopters.
But middle-market companies? They’re in the danger zone. They’re big enough to think they already know their customers, but not always disciplined enough to invest in objective research. That’s why bias runs rampant here.
And it’s costing millions.
Replace Bias with Objective Research
The antidote to bias isn’t more confidence. It isn’t louder opinions. It’s disciplined, objective research.
When you bring in unbiased, third-party research, the blind spots start to fade. You uncover the truths your passion was obscuring. You hear customers talk about friction points you didn’t know existed. You see competitors positioning themselves in ways you had underestimated.
That’s the power of Battle 2: accepting that your own closeness to the business makes you the least objective voice in the room, and then choosing to torch that bias in favor of evidence.
What Objective Research Looks Like
- Qualitative interviews with customers, lost deals, and prospects to uncover truths hidden behind surface-level feedback.
- Quantitative surveys designed to measure patterns across larger sample sizes.
- Competitive audits to reveal positioning gaps and missed opportunities.
- Win-loss studies that show you why deals really close—or don’t.
Each of these inputs brings objectivity where bias once ruled.
Why CEOs Must Model Curiosity Over Certainty
Bias thrives when leaders pretend they already have the answers. Objectivity thrives when leaders model curiosity.
When a CEO says, “I want to hear the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable,” the entire culture shifts. Your marketing team feels empowered to question assumptions. Your sales team feels safe admitting when their anecdotes don’t fully reflect the full story.
Curiosity doesn’t weaken leadership—it strengthens it. It signals that truth matters more than ego. And that shift is what unlocks stronger, smarter strategies.
Build Strategy on Truth, Not Assumption
Bias is beautiful in the sense that it comes from a place of passion. But passion without research is like building on sand. Sooner or later, the foundation crumbles.
When you strip away bias, you’re left with a clear-eyed understanding of your customers—their pain points, their priorities, and their decision-making triggers. That clarity makes every dollar you spend in marketing exponentially more effective.
It’s not about killing passion. It’s about harnessing it, channeling that energy into strategies that are grounded in truth.
Because in the end, the only thing worse than not knowing your customer is thinking you know them when you don’t.
By Lori Turner-Wilson, RedRover CEO/Founder, Internationally Best-Selling Author of The B2B Marketing Revolution™: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes
Taking Action
The above insights are part of hundreds of best practices found in The B2B Marketing Revolution™: A Battle Plan for Guaranteed Outcomes — the playbook that middle-market B2B CEOs and marketing leaders lean on to scale. Backed by a groundbreaking research study, this book offers time-tested best practices, indispensable KPIs for benchmarking, insights on where your dollars are best spent, and, above all, the proven 12 Battles™ Framework for generating guaranteed marketing outcomes. The B2B Marketing Revolution™ is a battle-hardened approach to becoming an outcomes-first leader who’s ready to shake up the status quo, invest in high-payoff market research and optimization, and — yes — even torch what’s not serving your endgame. Download more than 50 templates, scripts, and tools from the book on the Battle Reader Hub.
If you’d like to talk about how to build a marketing engine that delivers predictable results — whether you want to build it yourself or tag in our team to lead the way — we’d be delighted to help you get started.
