If Your Customers Aren’t Brand
Ambassadors, You’re Doing It Wrong
As a
new business builder, you learn sometimes that it’s not just your competition
that stands in your way, but your own customers and their agendas.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Dec 9,
2025
Many years ago, when I
was starting my first business helping insurance companies do a better and more accurate
job of settling their vehicle loss claims, we began to acquire national
brand-name clients. Initially, we would deal only with their local offices or
branches, either as a pilot project or because other parts, locations and
divisions of the same companies were handled by different managers or
administrators. The plan was “land and expand” and we were anxious to grow. But
the insurance industry is composed of a million different fiefdoms.
When you’re an
entrepreneur trying to expand your revenues, especially once you’ve
demonstrated the real economic value and operational benefits of your products
and service, you want to go after the biggest volume opportunities within the
given organization. We started our company in Illinois working with State Farm
and Allstate, but we knew from the beginning that the home run volume states
were California, Texas, and Florida. New York and New Jersey also had great
volumes, but they were hyper-regulated and rife with fraud problems. Even back
in the 80s when we started, there were only a dozen or so giant insurers that
mattered, and everyone knew who they were. State Farm and Allstate were among
the top five by any measure, and their claims, volumes and customers were
matters of public record. They were the biggest fish in the pond, and you
always want to fish where the fish are. If fishing were easy, they’d call it
catching.
In our case, we were
delivering—speeding up claims’ operations, eliminating adjuster errors and
fraud, and, most importantly, saving the companies serious dollars on each and
every claim. Once we started to process large claim volumes, the savings were so
substantial that the insurers were actually worried about negative media
attention and asked us to change the terminology on our monthly results reports
from “savings” to “variances” so it wouldn’t appear to an outside reader that
they were shorting their insureds and claimants by settling their claims for
less than they were entitled to receive. But by every measurement, using our
service was a win-win (more accurate settlements completed more quickly) and we
found local supporters and sponsors in all of our customers. We were, however,
in for a rude awakening.
We assumed that our local champions would be interested in and excited about
our plans to expand to their other offices across the country in the major
markets. Expanding the financial benefits we were delivering locally to some of
their largest offices would create even larger and more dramatic savings and
other efficiencies for their firms. But they weren’t remotely interested in
anything other than expanding within their own areas of responsibility and
benefiting their own bottom lines. Their bonuses and promotions depend on the
results in their own regions and on their own turf. Plus, they loved the
service and attention they were getting and didn’t want that diluted by our
focusing on our expansion elsewhere. And they made it very clear that going
over their heads to pitch the decision makers at the corporate level would be
really bad news for us.
So, it was all about Decatur and forget about Dallas. Peoria was fine with
them, but Pasadena was a hard pass. As a new business builder, you learn
sometimes that it’s not just your competition that stands in your way, but
often it’s your own customers and their own agendas as well. It’s easy to find
people who will say “no” but difficult to figure out who within any given
organization can say “yes.” Our champions often turned out to have cotton in
their mouths when their peers from other regions called for references.
I encountered another somewhat less obnoxious, but no less costly, version of
the problem where the left hand had no clue what the right hand was doing when
we worked with a company starting in 2015 called Knowledge Hound that
built systems to help large organizations manage and keep track of their own
information. CPG companies in particular did countless customer surveys and
focus groups over the years and literally didn’t know that some group,
division, client or other partner had spent substantial sums of money on
research like this and then buried the results in the bottom of someone’s
drawer never to be seen again. It wasn’t deceptive; it was just that the
various players didn’t understand the immense value that even older behavioral data and time-lapse results could have
for ongoing and new projects and products. These businesses didn’t know how to
find and employ expensive and important information within their own
organizations or how to bridge the data gaps and silos that existed in their
own companies.
It’s going to be very
interesting to see how well and how quickly A.I. tools are going to address and
remedy this particular kind of problem. It should be one of the most
appropriate and easily implemented applications, but the businesses are going
to have to understand the critical need to share data and to build small
language models of their own rather than getting sucked into costly attempts
to boil the ocean with LLMs.
Smart companies don’t silo or sequester their information assets; they share
them broadly for the greater good. Spreading the word – like lighting one
candle from another – doesn’t diminish the first, it just doubles the
illumination for all.
