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Why Understanding Startups as Customers is the Key to Winning in BizDev

CalmInterview · 2026-01-11T03:07:58.715156+00:00

Topic: Panel review of Customer Obsession response. Panel Consensus: The panel unanimously agrees that the candidate's 'hoodies to suits' insight from the CEO chat reveals a spark of customer empathy and obsession, but criticizes it as surface-level and undermined by poor story preparation, reactive rather than proactive engagement, and lack of depth in outcomes, ROI, and scaling. They converge on shared concerns like missing multi-threading, hypotheses, metrics, trade-offs, and systems thinking, though some (e.g., Jordan, Elena) see L6 potential masked by prep while others (e.g., Sarah, Alex) push back harder on insufficient strategic rigor for the role. Disagreement centers on optimism about hidden depth versus evidence of fundamental gaps in complexity handling and cross-functional impact.

Customer Obsession

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