Why teams define buyers and customers differently: Three leaders, one customer, three different answers

Halden Group is made up. The meeting isn't. If you've sat at the top of a commercial organisation for any length of time, you've been in some version of the room I'm about to describe.

Halden is a mid-market industrial-technology business, solid, well-run, a recognisable name in its field. On paper, everything is in order. The strategy deck is sharp. The numbers are respectable. There's an AI programme underway that the board is pleased with, and a pilot in one team that produced a genuinely impressive result. By every measure a leadership team usually looks at, Halden is doing the right things.

And yet. Growth has quietly flattened over two years, in a market that hasn't. The AI pilot that dazzled in one team has stalled everywhere it's been scaled. Initiatives launch with energy and land with a thud. Nobody can quite say why. The strategy is right, everyone agrees the strategy is right and somehow the strategy isn't translating into anything moving.

This is the part most leadership teams get wrong, and it's an honest mistake: they assume the answer is more. More strategy. More tooling. Another reorganisation, another transformation programme, another platform. The instinct is to add. It almost never works, because the thing that's broken isn't a missing piece. It's something underneath all the pieces.

The exercise

At an offsite, Halden's chief executive tries something simpler than another strategy session. The ask is almost embarrassingly basic. Each member of the commercial leadership team, revenue, marketing, operations, product, is asked, separately, to answer three plain questions. Who is our customer, really? How does this business actually make money? And who decides what, when the two of those things are in tension?

The answers come back, and they don't match.

The revenue lead describes one customer; marketing describes a meaningfully different one. Operations describes how the business makes money in terms that the product lead simply doesn't recognise. On who decides what, two leaders confidently name themselves for the same decision, and a third assumes it sits with someone who wasn't even in the room.

None of them is lying. None of them is incompetent. Each answer is true. True to the function that gave it, true to the part of the business that person can see from where they sit. The problem isn't that someone is wrong. The problem is that the business has been quietly running on several different versions of itself at once, and no one had ever put them side by side.

That's the moment the room goes quiet. And that silence is the most useful thing that happens all day, because for the first time the friction everyone has been managing around the re-work, the stalled deals, the initiatives that don't stick, is sitting on the table where people can actually see it.

What was really going on

Here is what had been happening at Halden, and what is almost certainly happening somewhere in your business too.

The strategy was never the problem. The tooling was never the problem. The problem was that the business had become hard to read. Different functions were operating on different pictures of the same reality, so every initiative was built on a slightly different assumption, and when those initiatives met in the middle they pulled in slightly different directions and cancelled each other out. All that effort, quietly working against itself. From the top, it looks like a performance problem. Underneath, it's a legibility problem, the business can't be clearly read, even by the people running it.

I call the day-to-day version of this hidden friction: the snags, stalls, hand-off failures, and re-work that everyone experiences and no one can quite locate, because the cause isn't in any one place. It's in the gaps between the functions, where three true versions of the business rub against each other. Hidden friction is expensive, and it's invisible precisely because everyone is too close to it to see the whole shape.

And here's the part that makes this urgent now rather than someday. Most leaders assume AI will help with this. It does the opposite. AI doesn't resolve the disagreement between those three versions of the customer, it inherits it. Point a smart analytics tool at Halden and you get a beautifully precise picture of the same confusion. Hand an AI agent the job of qualifying a lead or pricing a deal, and it quietly picks one of the three versions of the customer, or blends them in a way no one can audit. The technology isn't wrong. It's faithfully amplifying a disagreement the business never resolved and now it's doing it at machine speed. This is exactly why Halden's pilot dazzled in one team and died at scale: in one team there was one version of reality; across the business there were several.

The uncomfortable bit

There's a reason this work is rare, and it's worth being honest about. Surfacing the hidden friction means surfacing the disagreements a leadership team has spent years politely managing around. When two of your most senior people both believe they own the same decision, that isn't a tidy finding to put on a slide. It's awkward. It's the friction, named out loud, often for the first time.

But the awkwardness is the value. The disagreement was always there, quietly taxing every initiative. Seeing it is the only thing that lets you do something about it. A leadership team that can sit with that discomfort for an afternoon has already done more for its growth than another year of strategy decks would manage. The honest version of this work draws that line at the start — this will surface things you'd rather not see, and seeing them is the point, rather than discovering it defensively after the fact.

What it takes to fix it and what each part actually does

Once the friction is visible, two things matter, and there's a common misunderstanding about both worth clearing up.

The first is knowing where the friction actually sits, and whether you're closing it. This is the job of the Relativity Growth Index™. It is not a tactical scorecard, and it isn't a maturity badge you earn once and frame on the wall. Think of it as the instrument that reads the whole commercial system, how legible it is, what that legibility is producing in growth and margin and the return on your AI spend, and whether the organisation actually has the capacity to convert one into the other. Crucially, it's run more than once. It ladders: it shows you which stage each part of the business sits at, and re-run over time it tracks whether your growth is genuinely compounding or quietly slipping back. It's a spine you measure against repeatedly, not a snapshot you take and file.

The second is doing the actual structural work and doing it in a way that lasts. That's what the Relativity Framework™ is. The simplest way to describe it: end-to-end company alignment, made structural. Not a workshop that aligns everyone for a quarter and then decays the moment the business moves on, but a way of running the business so that the functions stay readable to each other, evidence travels, decisions hold, and the whole thing stays coherent as conditions change. It's the difference between fixing the alignment once and building a business that keeps itself aligned.

And the order matters. You see the friction first, you measure where it sits, and only then do you build. Trying to align a business you can't yet read is how most transformation work quietly fails, you can't fix what you can't see.

Where Halden ends up

Picture Halden a year on, having done the work in the right order.

The room doesn't have the same argument any more, because there's now one shared, honest picture of the customer, the money, and who decides what and where that picture is still contested, everyone can at least see the contest. Initiatives stop cancelling each other out, so the same effort produces more. The next AI deployment lands on a business it can actually read, so it scales instead of stalling, and the investment finally compounds rather than amplifying a mess. Growth starts building on itself again instead of restarting from cold each year.

None of that came from more strategy or more tooling. It came from making the business legible to itself and then keeping it that way. That's the whole game. The quiet in that room wasn't a failure. It was the beginning of the only work that actually moves the number.

© Hiya Marketing Ltd 2026. The Relativity Framework™ and the Relativity Growth Index™ are trade marks of Hiya Marketing Ltd. Halden Group is fictional; any resemblance to a real organisation is coincidental.