Voice of customer assumes the answer
Voice of customer is one of the most settled ideas in SaaS. Customers pay you, so you listen to customers, build for customers, and measure customers. Nobody questions it.
That reminds me of something from housing. Until 2007, the standard term for how home prices moved was HPA, which stood for house price appreciation. The name assumed the direction. Nobody needed a word for prices going down because everyone knew they didn't.
Voice of customer carries the same hidden assumption: the people already paying you are the best guide to what you should build next.
Customers know what the market valued when they bought
We are in a time of tumult and massive market change. In AI especially, churn is much higher than SaaS has been used to, because buyers are trying lots of new things. A customer who signed a while ago evaluated the market a while ago. They have not looked around recently, and in this market a short break from looking leaves you out of date.
Prospects are in the market right now. They are comparing you to tools that did not exist last spring. They know what the market values this quarter, and their objections are a live read on where the bar moved.
That makes prospects a better guide to the future than customers are. Customers represent your past decisions. Prospects represent the buyers you are trying to win next. I made a version of this argument in Why B2B SaaS PMs Should Weight Buyer Needs Over User Requests, and voice of prospect is where it leads.
What voice of prospect means
Voice of prospect is the structured record of what prospective buyers ask for, object to, and walk away over. It lives in your sales calls, your lost deals, and your stalled pipeline.
Customers still matter. Retention and expansion depend on them, and customer feedback is still valuable. The shift is that customers stop being the only source of product signal. Prospects get a seat at the same table, with the same weight.
The evidence that sales has something to say is strong. When I looked at why top reps lose deals, the most common reason was missing product features. I wrote that up in The Top Reason Sales Reps Lose Deals. Each of those losses was a prospect telling you what the market wanted.
Measure it or it will not count
Product teams act on what has a number next to it. If voice of prospect only exists as anecdotes in a Slack channel, it loses every roadmap debate against a customer escalation. Four things make it measurable:
- Capture the ask with its context. Every feature request and objection from a call should carry the account, the deal size, the stage, and the outcome.
- Weight by revenue. Ten prospects asking for something small should not outrank one large deal blocked by a gap. I covered this in Why Feature Votes Lie.
- Separate product-fit losses from price losses. Lost deal reasons in the CRM are usually vague. Lost Deal Analysis Beyond Sales Reasons walks through how to split them.
- Report it beside customer data. In your product review, put the prospect view on the same slide as the customer view. When they disagree, that disagreement is the most useful thing in the room.
Sales has to pass the signal back
Customer success already has a pipe into product. There are QBRs, support tickets, health scores, and escalation paths. Sales has a CRM field and an occasional Slack message, so product mostly hears from CS.
The fix is not to ask reps to do more. I argued in Your Highly Paid Salespeople Are Not User Researchers that reps should not be doing structured research on top of selling. The system should do it for them by reading the calls they already take. That is why we built integrations with Gong, Fathom, Fireflies, Read.ai, and Granola. If you are drowning in transcripts, Voice of Customer Automation for B2B SaaS covers how to filter the noise into signal product can use.
Then close the loop in the other direction. When a feature a prospect asked for ships, tell that prospect. Most teams never do. How Do You Connect Feature Launches to Revenue? explains why that loop stays open and what it takes to close it.
Start with one slide
At your next product review, put a list of the top prospect asks next to the top customer asks, weighted by revenue. See how much overlap there is. Wherever the lists differ, you have found either a blind spot or a bet worth making.
Voice of customer got us this far. Voice of prospect is how we keep up with a market that moves faster than our customers can see.
Want to see what your prospects are asking for? Book a demo and we'll show you what Arkweaver pulls from your own calls.