Why Smart Advantage CEO Jaynie Smith says 95 percent of leadership teams misread their own customers

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Ask a company what makes it different from its competitors, and the answer comes fast. Ask them for proof, and they usually cannot.

Jaynie Smith has spent more than two decades closing that gap. Smith is the founder and CEO of Smart Advantage, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based consultancy founded in 2005 that works with companies to identify and prove their competitive advantage from the customer’s perspective rather than the company’s own. Across more than 250 client engagements, from single-location businesses to divisions of major global companies, the firm has documented the same blind spot again and again. By its account, 95 percent of leadership teams guess wrong about what their customers value most.

Smith frequently quotes Peter Drucker, who said, “90 percent of information used in companies is internally focused, with only 10 percent about the outside. That is exactly backwards.” Too many companies treat internal, anecdotal feedback as if it were statistically valid, projectable data, Smith says. It rarely is.

The specifics behind that number are just as stark. “Out of the last 200 of these surveys we’ve done, four got the top three right,” says Craig Mowrey, a senior consultant at the firm. “One got the order exactly right.”

Why the guess is almost always wrong

The process starts with what the firm calls a drill down, a full-day session that pulls in roughly 16 people from across a company: not just executives and sales, but plant managers, warehouse staff and anyone else who sees a different piece of the business. Structured exercises get the group talking, and regardless of industry, the session never produces fewer than 50 potential differentiators.

Many of those differentiators  do not survive what comes next. Smart Advantage designs a double-blind, third-party research study and hands the interviews to an outside call center, so neither the customer nor the interviewer knows who commissioned it. The study tests around 20 buying attributes with real customers and prospects. Before the firm shares results, it asks the client’s own team to guess first.

That guess is where the 95 percent miss rate comes from, and it runs in both directions. “About 40 to 60 percent don’t even know what’s least important to their customers,” Mowrey says.

Why the data cannot be trusted

Once the real priorities are identified, the firm checks them against what a company actually measures, and frequently finds the numbers themselves are broken. Smith says roughly half of the client data her team reviews has problems. Sometimes departments define terms differently. A plant manager, a logistics lead and a marketing director may each define on time delivery a different way, leaving a company with three answers to a question that needs one. Other times the data has never been organized at all, sitting in a spreadsheet somebody built years ago before leaving the company.

Smith calls the fix a Customer Relevant Indicator, a metric built around what customers have proven they value rather than the internal KPIs most businesses default to. It is the concept at the center of her books, Creating Competitive Advantage (Doubleday, 2006) and Relevant Selling (2012), and the reason she argues the problem is getting more expensive, not less.

The AI problem nobody is measuring

Bad data used to sit quietly in a spreadsheet. Now it gets fed into AI tools that repeat it back with more confidence, at the same moment prospects are using AI and search engines to research a company’s credibility before anyone picks up the phone.

Smith says, “AI inherits whatever discipline, or lack of it, already exists in your systems. Feed it a CRM full of inconsistent definitions and incomplete fields and it won’t pause to ask clarifying questions. It will calculate exactly what you asked it to calculate, with complete confidence using whatever inconsistent inputs it was given.”

That inherited sloppiness does not stay behind the scenes for long. It shows up on the same pages prospects are now vetting with AI and search before they ever pick up the phone.

“If AEO leads a prospect to your website, and your AI agent has populated your landing page with bad data, imagine what happens when your sales force is challenged to defend that bad data,” she adds.

Finding the answer is not the same as using it

Smith also runs three-hour workshops where a room of executives build several genuinely strong differentiation statements by the end of the day. It is rare for any executive to leave the room without a newly revealed differentiator, something they either did not know they had, or had but never used because they assumed it was only of interest internally.

So once the numbers hold up, the firm turns them into a direction a company can act on: what a website should lead with, what a sales presentation should open with and what a sales team needs to bring into a customer conversation. Smart Advantage says that phase, from correcting the relevant data to delivering that direction, usually runs between two to four months.

The process holds up at very different scales. One multinational insurer, a company Smith describes as a gigantic worldwide operation, brought Smart Advantage in to run the exercise separately across 12 divisions, since each one sold to different customers for different reasons. A competitive advantage lives at the level customers actually experience a business, not at the level of a shared logo on a letterhead.

A firm built to stay small

The team behind the work has stayed remarkably stable. Brian Neff, who leads operations, has been with Smart Advantage for 19 years. Mowrey has been there a bit longer. Smith has kept the firm intentionally small, built around a handful of people who do the research and client work directly, rather than scaling into an agency with layers between the founder and the findings. The firm’s website notes that its leadership has a minimum of 19 years each at the company.

The results, as reported on that site through January 2026: 91.9 percent of clients reported increased revenue or margins after going through the process, 86 percent implemented new metrics to track their competitive advantage, and 76.5 percent saw operational improvements in key areas. The firm bills itself as the only sales, marketing and management consultancy built exclusively around proving competitive advantage from the customer’s side.

Smith’s pitch to any company that thinks it already knows its edge is simple. The answer is not something a leadership team needs to invent. It is sitting inside their own customer data.

“Don’t take for granted that which is taken for granted,” Smith says. “Tell your customers with proof what you do for them and how well you do it. If you don’t value what you do for customers, they won’t value it either. Why should they?”