This is a reprint of an article originally published in Forbes as part of Jonathan Wagner’s TRUSTED DISRUPTION series.
I don’t believe in unique selling points as a durable advantage—not because differentiation doesn’t matter, but because it rarely lasts. Features get copied, architectures converge and today’s edge becomes tomorrow’s checkbox. What actually endures is how a B2B2X company behaves when things get hard.
Customer experience isn’t defined by what ships when conditions are favorable. It’s defined by the decisions that leaders make under pressure, when trade-offs are real, economics shift and the easiest path is protecting internal comfort instead of long-term customer trust. I call this “trusted disruption”: the discipline of designing for those moments in advance, so growth, change and scale don’t silently erode the very experience leaders claim to protect.
Own the behavior. Not the narrative.
Oftentimes, an organization’s customer experience strategy focuses on narrative. They prioritize messaging, like being customer-first, valuing partnership or engaging in long-term thinking. But customers aren’t judging us on our narratives. They’re judging our behavior, the things we do when margins tighten, timelines slip or trade-offs become uncomfortable. Technology, systems and people will always matter in the customer experience. But what compounds is how an organization behaves under pressure.
We operate in B2B2X, so our decisions affect our customers and the people they serve. In practice, that means a decision that looks efficient internally, like tightening onboarding timelines or limiting support scope, can create friction two layers down, where we don’t have visibility but still carry the consequences. In B2B2X, you don’t just inherit complexity. You amplify it. That’s not a responsibility you can delegate to a roadmap or support ticket. It lives in the pattern of decisions leaders make, every day, when no one is keeping score.
5 Strategies For Designing With Disruption In Mind
B2B2X customers’ experience with your organization is formed by your decisions. In the aftermath, the classic “How likely are you to recommend us?” survey isn’t asking for a spreadsheet analysis. It’s asking for a gut reaction. It’s a litmus test, and trusted disruption is what prevents drift and calcification.
1. Establish one leader for one experience.
At scale, ownership of the customer experience becomes fragmented. Sales closes, onboarding hands off, support resolves tickets and success chases renewals. Every team can hit its KPI, but the customer feels the rub of the seams and starts quietly losing faith. That’s not a process failure. That’s a leadership failure.
I’ve been that leader—the one who built the team, celebrated the specialists and assumed coordination was enough. It wasn’t. I’ve learned since that the customer experience needs a single accountable owner across the full lifecycle. Not a committee or a coordinator, but an owner who carries the whole journey and feels the customer’s experience as one continuous thing. Without that, disruption happens to customers, not with them.
In practice, this means making ownership explicit. One person becomes accountable for the full lifecycle, and they apply a shared set of success metrics to all teams. Then, incentives are set to reward end-to-end outcomes, not functional wins.
2. Replace heroics with systems.
Early-stage companies tend to celebrate the hero who stays late and saves the account. But those employees are an early warning sign. If your best customer moments depend on individual effort, you don’t have a strategy. You have a vulnerability, and you won’t see it until it breaks.
People working harder isn’t the same as the system working better. The hero who saves the account this quarter is simply masking the process failure that will lose three accounts next year. When your best outcomes require extraordinary effort, you’re operating on borrowed time. Trusted disruption requires building infrastructure that makes the right outcome repeatable through clear principles, aligned incentives, clean handoffs and shared definitions of success.
3. Design for the second customer.
In B2B2X, we don’t just serve the buyer. We affect the user. But it’s dangerously easy to become indispensable to procurement and invisible to the market. You can win RFPs all year and still lose relevance if your customer isn’t succeeding.
Here’s how I think about it: In our business, we sell an ingredient, like flour to bakers. Our customers bake the cake, and their customers eat it. If the cake isn’t good, it doesn’t matter how strong our relationship with the baker is. The market doesn’t care who’s at fault.
Trusted disruption forces leaders to look past bookings and into outcomes. Don’t stop at asking “Did we renew?” Consider whether your customer was able to grow. If your integration went live successfully, follow up on whether it’s actually working for the people who use it every day. If you can’t answer those next-step questions, you’re not actually customer-centric.
4. Treat truth-telling as a core customer capability.
There’s a version of customer centricity that collapses when things get hard. It’s easy to say “Our customer comes first.” But if that turns into “The customer is always happy,” then it’s appeasement. And appeasement isn’t advocacy.
Pricing shifts expose this faster than anything else. No one welcomes pricing increases. They’re uncomfortable, and they test relationships. But the temporary sting of a pricing conversation is nothing compared to what happens when an unsustainable model finally breaks. Products get under-invested, roadmaps stall and eventually customers are forced into migrations they didn’t plan for. This introduces cost, complexity and risk into systems that were supposed to be mission-critical.
I’ve made difficult pricing decisions customers didn’t like, resetting economics that had been comfortable for years. But protecting comfort isn’t true leadership, and it’s not sustainable. Longevity only happens with hard conversations. In these moments, some customers walk and some relationships reset. But the ones that remain are stronger.
5. Lead visibly through the grey zone.
I’ve never had perfect certainty before making a hard call, and neither have you. Most meaningful change happens in the grey zone, before the roadmap is perfect and while trade-offs are still real. What builds trust in moments of change is visibility. It’s being honest with customers, then moving forward with clear steps. It requires saying openly, “We got that wrong,” and fixing it quickly. When leaders own uncertainty, customers lean in and trust strengthens.
This isn’t just a mindset. It’s an operating model where you break change into visible milestones, communicate what is and isn’t known and create fast feedback loops that allow course correction in real time. The grey zone becomes manageable when it’s made visible, and visibility is something you can design.
Trusted disruption is accountability under pressure.
Customer centricity doesn’t live in your value statement. It lives in the decisions you make when protecting the status quo would be easier. Trusted disruption is the discipline of challenging comfortable internal truths before the market forces you to. Customer experience doesn’t survive scale by accident. It survives because leaders decide that comfort will not outrank durability. And that’s true ownership.
