Most marketing teams talk about optimization as if it is a technical exercise and nothing more.
Measure the funnel, tune the ads, add more copy, tweak the call-to-action. All important, but only small pieces of a much bigger picture.
There is a critical skill that is often overlooked by the technical marketer, the use of empathy as a tactical instrument. Empathy is not kindness, it’s predictive modelling of human behaviour under uncertainty, achieved in real time. Not the soft skill. Not a brand attribute. Marketing Empathy is the leading indicator ahead of almost every effective optimization effort.
When we optimize an organization for customer acquisition, we ask the questions a real person would ask:
Are they confident they are in the right place to solve their issue?
Do they know the clear next step they should follow?
Can they trust that you can do what you claim?
Will working with you reduce friction or add it?
If the answers are unclear, lead volume drops, sales revenue drops, and growth slows. That isn’t just a technical issue but a failure to predict customer behaviour under uncertainty.
This concept spans beyond marketing, well into sales and even across operations as a whole, because the most effective customer acquisition is an organizational system, not a channel.
The same principle applies after a lead is captured, where many organizations quietly bleed revenue because poorly engineered customer journeys undermine trust at the exact moments it should be reinforced.
What prospects want in these moments is consistent: clarity, direction, and confidence that someone competent is handling the problem. These outcomes only emerge through deliberate process design, not chance.
We recently reviewed the process of one of our client-partners, where the front-line team handled inbound calls by directing prospects back to the website’s contact page so the customer could hunt for an email address and submit their request again by email. A historical process that our client inherited, but the outcome was still a customer experience that would frustrate any reasonable person. The cost is not theoretical. Leads grow cold, sales cycles stretch, and ultimately, hard-earned leads are lost. All because the organization is optimizing for its own convenience instead of the customer’s reality.
Fortunately, the fix is seldom complex, but simple doesn’t mean easy. A high-performing customer acquisition process requires a shift in mindset.
Instead of asking “Does this process work for us,” ask “Would this experience be painless if I were the customer?” (Pay special attention to process steps that cause your customer to experience “the waste of waiting.” Waiting around, listening to a pre-recorded phone system, waiting for a response to an email, etc.)
Instead of forcing people to navigate your systems, meet them where they are and give them a concrete, clear next step toward their solution. Your processes shouldn’t force your customers to sit in uncertainty. While uncertainty can be a powerful tool in both marketing and sales, the unintentional presence of uncertainty is almost always a mistake.
Counterintuitively, technical marketing thrives when empathy is applied with precision. The more accurately you can predict how someone thinks and feels in a moment of need, the more effectively you can engineer outcomes.
If you want better marketing performance, better sales performance, and ultimately better business performance, treat metrics and dashboards as confirmation tools. Use empathy to predict where uncertainty or waiting is likely to exist, then use data to validate, prioritize, and remove those points of friction from the customer journey.
Empathy precedes measurement, and metrics lag behind the human experience.
