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09/01/2026
If you ask a CEO whether CX is important, she’ll always say yes. But if you ask her what is important, she won’t say CX. She’ll say growth. And CX won’t even make her top 5.
That’s one of many lessons I learned while interviewing 34 C-Suite leaders last year. It’s changed how I approach CX—and it needs to change how you practice it, too.
I’m sure your CEO regularly talks with you about the importance of CX. So, why do I say they don’t find it important?
It’s not whether they tell you whether CX matters. It’s what they say when you’re not in the room. And I can say with confidence that CX isn’t top of mind for them.
When I asked the leaders what outcome they were responsible for, every single person gave the same answer: growth. B2B, B2C, non-profit, for-profit, the answer was the same: growth.
Hopefully that doesn’t surprise you. I was expecting it, because Gartner had the same answer. When they asked over 400 CEOs about their top initiatives and coded the responses, they found that growth was the most common answer. 62% referenced growth, the highest level in ten years.
Next, I asked them for their top initiatives to create this growth. Before getting to their answers, a little backstory. Every executive knew that I am a customer experience thought leader, and that the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) sponsored the research. For many, the meeting invitation even included customer experience in the title. So, with all that anchoring, how many listed customer experience as one of their top initiatives?
Five.
Ouch. But it gets worse. Because four interviewees were either Chief Customer or Chief Experience Officers. If you remove them, that leaves only one executive out of thirty who identified CX as a top initiative.
That’s what led to my first Tincher Truth:
What did they mention? The top five:
When they discussed growth, almost none of the participants meant new markets.
One distributor CEO walked me through his math. 10% of his customer sites generate 90% of his revenue. His first objective for the year wasn’t new logos. It was moving a thousand existing sites up a spending tier and getting the rest to buy a little more.
Another CEO pushed his strategic plan back a full year rather than open two new offices. He’d realized the markets he was already in were bigger than he could serve. Easier to grow what you have, he told me, than to chase the bright, shiny thing.
That’s expansion revenue, the least glamorous line in the plan, and the one they’re betting on.
A manufacturing president told me his industry launches 50 new products a year, so that’s what he’d been doing. Each launch costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and requires design, operations, and commercial teams.
So, he reorganized. Product development, product management, and pricing now sit under one leader. And he cut to roughly 10 launches a year.
Rifle shots instead of a shotgun.
A second CEO built a standing group for three-to-ten-year innovation, specifically because his business units are paid on short-term results and would never fund it on their own.
Several executives named a data project as their big bet. Not analytics. Not dashboards. Just getting the data clean enough that someone can act on it.
One transformation leader said her team burns a large share of its time assembling data before anyone can analyze it. The whole project is getting it to a standard so that this one-off work stops.
I asked which data she was prioritizing. Financial and operational first. Behavioral is harder. Customer sentiment—she wants it eventually, but it isn’t first on the list.
That’s the challenge. Executives don’t prioritize CX data, because they don’t think in terms of CX data. We need to show them why this is the missing metric in their analysis.
The same leader gave me the sharpest sentence in all 34 interviews. Her company had grown a lot. The headcount required to do the work had grown at exactly the same rate.
Growth that’s that expensive isn’t really growth.
So, the bet isn’t more volume. It’s changing how the work gets done, so the next 10% of revenue doesn’t demand another 10% of people. Two other executives were mid-reorganization for the same reason.
When organic growth stalls, the money moves to acquisition. One chief commercial officer said it as plainly as possible: if you can’t grow organically, buy other companies.
Another put it more carefully—maybe M&A or a partnership to start, instead of trying to build from scratch again.
Nobody offered this as a first choice. It’s what happens when the base stops producing.
FAQ 1: How can I connect CX with growth?
Let’s go back to why we send customers a survey in the first place: we use surveys to understand what our company needs to change for our customers to want to do more with us. Let’s start there. Analyze your current survey, but rather than using satisfaction or likelihood to recommend as the independent variable, use order velocity or margin growth. See which questions best predict growth. For the Advanced Manufacturing CX Consortium, we couldn’t use actual ordering data, so we had to rely on likelihood-to-grow, and we discovered that “feeling like a valued customer” was the key. Executives who reported feeling valued above expectations were 5x as likely to plan to grow with their supplier. So, then we took the next step—I worked with two of the 17 participants to validate the results with their own spending data, and they confirmed—2/3 of those who said they would grow did.
That’s the type of analysis your executives are looking for. Not just what customers say, but how that links to what they do.
FAQ 2: My CEO tells me CX is a priority. Isn’t that enough?
No. Stated support and funded priority are different things.
Here’s the test. Pull up your company’s operating plan for the year. If your work doesn’t appear in it, and no one’s compensation depends on it, you have verbal support. Verbal support only holds up until the budget conversation.
FAQ 3: I can’t get financial data. Can I still do this?
Yes—start with behavior. Order velocity, number of product lines purchased, quote-to-order conversion, time between reorders. That data sits in systems your sales ops team already runs, and every one of those measures is closer to money than a satisfaction score.
Then validate when you can. In the AMCX benchmark, we couldn’t access spending data, so we used stated growth intent. One founding member matched those responses against twelve months of actual performance. About two-thirds of customers who said they’d grow actually did. The more useful finding came from the other end: across hundreds of accounts that said they’d maintain, almost none stayed flat. Most declined. “Maintain” isn’t safety—it’s an early warning that you’re reading as good news.
FAQ 4: Executives named data projects as a top bet, but said customer sentiment isn’t first in line. How do I get on that roadmap?
Stop asking for your own lane.
The transformation leader I mentioned was cleaning financial and operational data first because that’s what her business needed to act on. That’s also exactly the data you need to connect experience to growth. Her project is your project.
Find whoever owns that work and ask one question: when you’re done, can I join customer feedback to it? You’re not asking for budget or headcount—you’re asking to be a downstream consumer of something already funded. That’s a far easier yes than a sentiment initiative competing head-to-head against growth.
