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Customer centricity doesn’t mean treating every customer the same. In The Customer Centricity Playbook, co-authors Peter Fader and Sarah Toms argue that companies create stronger growth when they identify their highest-value customers, understand what makes them different, and invest accordingly. For B2B CMOs, that means moving beyond average CAC, average LTV, and generic retention strategy.
Most B2B marketers say they are customer-centric. Fewer are willing to say the quiet part out loud: Some customers are simply more valuable than others.
That’s the provocation behind The Customer Centricity Playbook by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms. The book pushes leaders to stop treating customer centricity as a vague promise to “put customers first” and start using customer value as a serious operating lens.
In a CMO Huddles Expert Huddle, Drew Neisser spoke with Peter Fader about what this means for B2B marketing leaders. The conversation is especially useful for CMOs because it challenges several comfortable habits: Optimizing for cheaper acquisition, celebrating average lifetime value, treating intent as enough, and assuming all customers want deeper relationships with the brand.
Fader’s argument is more disciplined. Customer centricity isn’t about loving every customer equally. It’s about understanding which customers create disproportionate value and building smarter marketing, sales, product, and retention motions around them.
That can feel harsh. It’s also where the strategy starts.
“All your customers are not created equal. They’re wildly different.” — Peter Fader
A lot of companies confuse customer centricity with customer equality. They try to serve every account with the same energy, the same messaging, the same success motion, and the same relationship ambition.
Fader’s view is more realistic. Many customers are transactional. They buy, they use the thing, and they leave when the value exchange stops making sense. That doesn’t make them bad customers. It means they may not want the deeper relationship marketers often imagine.
As Fader put it, “Most of your customers don’t want to have a relationship with you.”
That line is useful because it punctures one of marketing’s more romantic assumptions. Not every customer wants community. Not every customer wants intimacy. Not every customer wants to be nurtured into a brand advocate. Some want a fair exchange and nothing more.
The CMO’s job is not to force every customer into the same journey. It’s to understand the differences.
Which customers stay longer? Which expand? Which refer? Which influence others? Which create high support costs without long-term value? Which look exciting at acquisition but fade quickly? Which modest first deals turn into strategic relationships over time?
Those are the questions that make customer centricity operational.
One of the biggest traps for B2B marketing teams is relying on averages.
Average cost per acquisition. Average deal size. Average lifetime value. Average renewal rate. These numbers are useful at a high level, but they can hide the distribution that actually matters.
Fader wants leaders to look at the spread. Are customers clustered closely together, or is a small group creating a disproportionate share of profit and growth? Are newer cohorts improving or degrading? Do certain acquisition motions produce customers who renew and expand, while others produce accounts that churn quickly?
That’s where the customer base audit becomes powerful. Instead of treating the customer base as one blended block, CMOs can examine cohorts over time and watch how value changes.
This matters because a campaign that produces cheap customers may look efficient in the short term and destructive in the long term. A channel that produces fewer leads may be quietly producing better-fit customers. A segment that looks expensive to acquire may create expansion, advocacy, or enterprise credibility that never shows up in a simple CAC report.
For B2B CMOs, the point isn’t to make the math more complicated for its own sake. It’s to make growth decisions more honest.
“Let’s view marketing as a value maximization function instead of a cost minimization function.” — Peter Fader
B2B marketers are already collecting a mountain of pre-acquisition signals: Intent data, website behavior, demo requests, review site visits, content engagement, event attendance, title, company size, buying committee activity, and more.
The problem is that many teams use those signals mostly to predict conversion.
Fader’s challenge is to connect them to value after acquisition. As he explained, “We’re attributing value instead of just mere conversion.”
That’s a subtle but important shift. Instead of asking only which signals predict a meeting, opportunity, or closed-won deal, CMOs should ask which signals predict customers who stay, expand, advocate, or become strategically important.
This is where B2B teams may have an advantage. They often have strong transaction records, account histories, contract data, product usage, renewal information, sales notes, and win-loss insights. The data may be scattered, but the raw material is there.
A more customer-centric CMO can start by asking:
That last question matters because value is not always captured by revenue alone. In B2B, a customer can be valuable because they refer others, participate in events, act as a reference, provide feedback, or open doors in a market. Those behaviors should be part of the value conversation, not treated as anecdotal bonuses.
Fader also reframed win-loss analysis in a useful way.
Most win-loss programs ask why the company won or lost. That’s helpful, but it treats wins and losses as equal units. A small low-value win and a major strategic win both count as “one.” A low-value lost opportunity and a high-value missed account both count as “one.”
That’s not how the business experiences them.
A more sophisticated version asks: How much value did we win, and how much value did we lose?
That question changes how marketing and sales interpret the funnel. It also helps CMOs challenge pipeline conversations that reward volume over quality. If a team is generating plenty of opportunities but too few high-value customers, the problem may not be conversion rate. It may be fit, targeting, positioning, or channel strategy.
This also gives marketing a stronger way to partner with sales and customer success. Instead of debating whether a lead source “worked,” the team can look at whether it produced customers the business actually wants more of.
That’s a healthier growth conversation.
Customer centricity is a strategy that focuses disproportionate attention and investment on the customers who create the greatest long-term value, rather than treating every customer as equally important.
Customer service is about supporting customers well. Customer centricity is about understanding customer value and making strategic decisions about acquisition, retention, expansion, and investment based on that value.
Average LTV can hide major differences across customers. A small group may create most of the long-term value, while many customers remain transactional or low-value.
CMOs can connect acquisition channels, buyer signals, campaigns, and segments to long-term value metrics like retention, expansion, profitability, references, referrals, and strategic influence.
Want to hear more? Listen to the full conversation with Peter Fader on Renegade Marketers Unite.
CMO Huddles helps B2B marketing leaders win by bringing together peers, fresh perspectives, and opportunities to build stronger personal brands. Want to join the huddle? Learn more about CMO Huddles and apply to join the community.