It is 3 o’clock in the morning. Your client — a premium caterer supplying hotels and Michelin-starred restaurants — receives a phone call. A chef needs thirty extra choux for an event the next morning. Absolute emergency.
Your client has run out of quality butter. The usual order will only be delivered at 8am. Their supplier — perhaps you — is not reachable until opening time.
This moment, invisible in any CRM database, is the reality of your client’s world. This is where their reputation is on the line. This is where the true strength of your relationship is tested.
The real question is not: ‘Do you know your client?’ It is: ‘Do you know their choux pastry at 3 o’clock in the morning?’
What we call the ‘client’s choux pastry’ is that revealing detail — often invisible from the outside — that tells you everything about what your client actually lives through. Their real constraints. Their real stress moments. Their real criteria for success. Their own clients.
Real customer centricity begins there. Not in strategy slides. Not in annual satisfaction surveys. In an intimate understanding of your client’s world.
Most companies believe they know their clients. They have data. Purchase histories. CRM profiles. Identified contacts, documented volumes, analysed order frequencies.
And yet they would struggle to answer questions like these:
What keeps your client awake at night? What promises have they made to their own clients that they are finding hard to keep? During which periods of the year is their margin under pressure? What happens inside their company when something goes wrong — and how can you, as their supplier, help them through those moments?
Knowing a client means having access to their data. Understanding a client means having access to their world.
Between the two lies a considerable commercial difference.
Here is an exercise we regularly use in our training programmes. We ask commercial teams to describe their most important client. They easily talk about their sector, their revenue, their organisation, their products.
Then we ask different questions.
Do you know what your client says about you to their colleagues when you are not in the room? Do you know which topic is currently the most sensitive in their executive committee? Do you know what has changed in their priorities over the past six months? Do you know how they present your collaboration to their own management to justify it?
The silence that follows these questions is often eloquent.
It is not a criticism. It is an observation. And it is the starting point for a genuine customer centricity approach.
One of the most powerful practices we observe among the best-performing commercial teams: regularly spending time in the client’s operational world. Not just in meetings. Not just in presentations. In the field.
Accompanying a logistics manager for half a day. Observing how a team leader handles an urgent delivery. Attending one of the client’s internal meetings to understand the tensions and priorities. Listening to what the client’s staff say about their suppliers — including about you.
These immersion moments are not wasted time. They are the moments when you finally understand what ‘good supplier’ truly means for this client. They are the moments when you discover unexpressed needs, invisible irritants, value opportunities that nobody would have articulated in a conventional commercial meeting.
The best commercial opportunities are not found in tenders. They are found in understanding what the client has not yet thought to ask for.
This is something that gets said often in companies: ‘the client is at the centre of everything’. And yet, in day-to-day reality, only a handful of roles — commercial, account manager, customer service — are truly in contact with that client.
Finance, logistics, technical, legal and HR teams? They process files, orders, contracts. Rarely clients.
This is a strategic mistake.
Every point of contact between your organisation and your client — a delivery, an invoice, a technical exchange, a response to a complaint — is an opportunity to strengthen or erode the relationship. Every employee who interacts, directly or indirectly, with the client’s reality contributes to the image that client forms of you.
Real customer centricity is when the entire organisation — not just the salespeople — asks itself the same question: what does our action add to, or take away from, the value the client perceives?
There is an image we like to use. Imagine spending an entire day in your client’s shoes. Not thinking about how to sell them more. But understanding what they live through.
What difficult decisions do they make every week? What pressure do they receive from their own hierarchy? What commitments have they made to their own clients? What innovations are they trying to achieve? Where are their real blind spots?
When you genuinely do this exercise — even mentally, even imperfectly — something shifts in your commercial posture. You stop trying to convince. You start trying to be useful.
And that is precisely where the client relationship changes in nature.
A supplier convinces. A partner understands. The difference is often simply a matter of attention paid to the other person’s world.
Customer centricity is not a philosophical posture. It is a concrete discipline, nourished by precise and regular questions.
The best-performing commercial teams we work with do not settle for knowing what the client buys. They seek to understand why they buy, in what context they use what they buy, what it enables them to achieve, and what they stand to lose if this relationship ends.
They also ask themselves: do I know the person my contact needs to convince internally to work with us? Do I know what would make our collaboration so obviously right that they would not even have to defend it?
These questions are not improvised during a routine call. They are prepared. They are maintained. They require a genuine discipline of listening and curiosity over time.
Back to our pastry supplier. The supplier who knows about the choux at 3am did not learn this from a client qualification form. They learned it by asking the right questions, at the right moment, with a sincere interest in what their client actually lives through.
That supplier is no longer competing on price. They are competing on understanding. On reliability. On the ability to be there when it truly matters.
And that position — built over time, through listening, through presence — is infinitely more solid than any product advantage or pricing argument.
Real customer centricity is that. It is not a method. It is a way of being with your clients.
Before you close this article, a simple invitation.
Think of your most important client. The one you have worked with the longest, or the one where the stakes are highest. And ask yourself honestly:
‘Do I know their choux pastry? Do I truly know what matters to them — not just in our commercial relationship, but in their business, in their commitments, in what makes or breaks their day?’
If the answer is yes, you have something rare and precious. Nurture it.
If the answer is ‘not really’ — this may be your best commercial opportunity of the quarter. Not to sell more, but to understand more.
Because in B2B sales, the relationships that last are not those with the best product. They are those with the deepest understanding.