December 4, 2025
Expert Series Guest blogs are written by leaders in our sector, sharing their expertise and insights through the DNS platform. This edition has been written by Melissa Hughes, President and Owner of Marketing Mile.
When results stall, marketing teams do not slow down. They start digging. Suddenly, everyone is a tactical archaeologist.
“Should we try TikTok?”
“Maybe it is SEO?”
“What if we add a chatbot?”
“Let us rebuild the funnel. Again.”
I have watched teams scramble through tactics as if they were hunting for something magical. I get it. When numbers dip, doing more feels safer than asking the harder questions.
Here is what actually shows up in founder and growth-stage teams:
The problem is not the tactics.
It is the understanding.
It is the actual context of the customer’s day.
The kind of context that explains why people buy, why they may not and which moments influence decisions or slow down decisions.
That is where these five questions come in. They look simple and obvious. However, they reveal more than any dashboard or monthly snapshot.
At the end of the day, better questions give you better information, and better information leads to better decisions. That is what we are all trying to do: make better decisions and, over time, get closer and closer to our goals.
Question One: Which customers drive the most revenue, and why?
This one sounds easy, but most teams struggle to recall it right off the top of their heads.
If you have ever been in a room where someone said, “Everyone is our customer.”
Then you know how ambitious that may sound. Unfortunately, without the right amount of behaviour data, it is also the quickest way to burn a budget.
When you dig into your sales data, you will learn that your highest-value customers always have something in common. Not just who they are, but why they buy. Once you see the pattern, you have the opportunity to sharpen everything. You get to provide more clarity to your ideal customers, and your messaging starts sounding like it is meant for specific people.
Question Two: Where do high-value prospects drop off the journey and why?
Every funnel has places where people fall off, as we know from our own experience, it is pretty easy to exit a sales process. The opportunity is to spend the time that is needed to figure out why.
It is not as simple as people “ghosting.” We can not use that excuse more than once!
Customers will back away, and it is rarely because they are rude. It usually means something did not line up with what they needed at that very specific moment.
So they paused:
- Maybe the CTA came too early.
- Maybe onboarding looked overwhelming.
- Maybe the offer raised more questions than it answered.
The journey was just not built with enough of an understanding of what they needed.
Question Three: What moments actually build loyalty (and which do not)?
It is fun and easy to talk about all the ways we can delight customers, but it is really tough to execute on them consistently. Understanding what truly delights your customers can really allow your business to move faster.
I once interviewed a customer who said the moment that sealed their loyalty was when support sent a short Loom video instead of a long paragraph.
“That video saved my day,” they said. They described it as something they will never forget.
Meanwhile, a company may be fixated on incentivizing customers to attend a big quarterly webinar they assume everyone will love.
This is why you ask. The moments that matter often are not the ones you spent weeks designing. They are the ones that make customers feel understood. When your product genuinely solves their problem, they feel relieved.
Question Four: What problem do you solve that makes customers buy faster or stay longer?
This question gets really real fast. You either solve a problem that has urgency around it, or you do not. I encourage companies to find this out as soon as possible. It has become very easy in SaaS to say things like:
- “Efficiency!”
- “Productivity!”
- “Better workflows!”
- “We make their lives easier!”
Those may all be true. However, it is unlikely that your customer will describe it that way. When you do not take the time to ask this question, you miss out on all the great language and cues you can add to your marketing.
Perhaps your customer would describe it this way:
“It stops things from falling apart when I am busy.”
“It helps me get my team on the same page without chasing them.”
“It saves me from another tool that made my life harder.”
There is always an emotional problem underneath the functional one. When you define that problem clearly, everything gets easier. With this, your positioning and messaging can work harder to create that urgency you are looking for.
Question Five: What unmet needs could unlock your next stage of growth?
Unmet needs are growth gold. When you understand your customers so much that you can predict where unmet needs exist today, you get to move into a leadership position within your industry.
Sometimes this can come from years and years of industry experience. It can also come from consistently taking the time to understand your customers’ problems and how they change quarter after quarter.
You will uncover ideas that no strategic session would have surfaced.
So what happens when teams cannot answer these?
This is where the poor performance symptoms show up:
Personalization falls flat, and no one is engaging with it.
Nurturing efforts get ignored, and customers fall out of the funnel.
Expectations are missed, and you may start experiencing churn issues.
Cross-sell opportunities disappear because customers do not fully understand the problem you solve.
Competitors suddenly start to look like they know something you do not.
The gap is never about effort from any team. It is always about understanding.
If you want to get results moving again, do not start with tactics. Start with questions.
Then you get to shift from “What should we do next?” to “What do our customers need in this moment?”
For more insights, tips and strategies for customer-driven marketing, head to Marketing Mile’s website.
With over 18 years of experience exclusively in marketing agencies, Mel has had the privilege of collaborating with talented professionals and partnering with established brands and new startups. Her journey has allowed her to build insight and strategy departments, lead multi-million dollar marketing initiatives, and design impactful customer research projects that improve results. Having progressed through various roles within the agency environment, from entry-level roles to COO, Mel has discovered that her true passion lies in making customer-informed decisions. She is well known for her customer interview and customer journey mapping capabilities, allowing her to provide high-value marketing strategies to all of her clients. Marketing Mile’s commitment is to ensure sustainable success.