Why Insight is a Team Sport

Customer Insight is not just for Marketing teams, it’s the fuel every function needs to drive growth. Finance wants to know which customers deliver the strongest margins, Operations need to plan around the changing peaks and troughs of demand, and Marketing teams need to understand what really motivates customers to choose one option over another. When each function taps into the same insight, decisions stop being made in silos and start adding up to a bigger, coordinated growth story.

Take customer segmentation: it’s a great way to understand customers more clearly, but the real value from this tool happens when every team across the business uses it to guide decisions.

One of the best examples of this came when I worked with a growing hotel business. At first, segmentation was seen as a marketing tool, but when other functions started to adopt and apply it, the level of transformation was phenomenal… 

Finance teams started to weave customer segments into their revenue forecasts. No longer were they just reporting topline numbers, they were reporting and forecasting the quality of the revenue. They could see which groups booked longer breaks, upgraded to premium rooms, and drove higher margins, and which relied on discounts and created higher costs to serve. That shift in insight helped shape future capital investment decisions.

Operations also changed how they worked,  they began planning around the rhythms of different customer groups. For example increasing team levels when premium guests arrived on peak weekends, flexing F&B services for longer-stay customers midweek, and tailoring activities around what each segment valued most.

Marketing stopped pushing broad offers and started speaking directly to customer motivations for key growth segments. Campaigns became more relevant and acquisition began to grow quicker than before.

The hardest truth of the game is that simply having a customer insight team is not enough. The real challenge is embedding it cross-functionally and every level of the organisation. That’s where the work and ultimately the growth really happens.

In practice, it means creating shared scorecards so all functions measure success through the same customer lens. It means agreeing on common definitions (what “high value” really means, or how loyalty is measured) so there’s no ambiguity across teams. It means building bridges between data and delivery: opening up visibility, building trust in the numbers, and giving people confidence to act on them. And above all, it means relentless communication, because insight only makes an impact when everyone understands it and feels part of the story.

When you get this level of alignment, insight stops being “a marketing project” and becomes part of an organisation’s DNA. In other words, Insight is a team sport, and like any great team, success doesn’t come from individual brilliance, it comes from playing the same game, with the same goal. When businesses get this right, the results speak for themselves: stronger financial growth, deeper loyalty, and long-term customer value.