When the Team Is Misaligned, the Customer Feels It

Most tech companies say they are customer-focused. Far fewer have built the internal systems to back that claim up. In Episode 016 of Go Beyond the Connection, Jordan Liebman, SVP Head of North America Marketing and Communications at Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc., makes the case that cross-functional collaboration in tech is not a soft initiative — it is a growth strategy.

Jordan has spent more than 20 years driving measurable results across agency environments, Verizon, BlueJeans Network, and Konica Minolta. The pattern he has seen play out across every organization is the same: when marketing, sales, product, and operations operate as separate units rather than a coordinated system, the first casualty is customer experience, and the second is revenue.

“Customer-obsessed silos don’t just slow you down,” he says. “They kill momentum and confuse the customer.” His solution is a disciplined approach to alignment built around shared goals, co-owned outcomes, and marketing that functions as the organizational conductor.

Messaging That Starts with the Customer, Not the Product

Jordan starts with a simple shift in perspective. Buyers are not looking for features. They are looking for outcomes: time saved, risk reduced, reputation protected, and growth enabled. When messaging focuses on product specifications instead of those outcomes, it misses what actually matters to the customer.

His approach to breaking through the noise is what he calls consequence-driven storytelling. Instead of explaining what a solution does, it highlights what happens if nothing changes. Saying a security tool delivers 20 percent faster threat detection is informative. Showing how a delay led to a five million dollar breach penalty is what makes it matter.

“If your story isn’t understandable in the first 30 seconds,” Jordan says, “you’re already losing people.” Clarity is not a concession to simplicity. It is the clearest signal that a vendor actually understands what the customer is facing.

The Bigleaf Connection

Bigleaf Networks exists at the intersection of network performance and business continuity — exactly the territory where Jordan’s frameworks play out in real time. When a business’s network degrades, the customer experience degrades with it. Alignment between IT infrastructure and business outcomes is not optional; it is the baseline.

Jordan’s observation that the buying journey in B2B technology is non-linear applies directly to how IT and business leaders evaluate connectivity solutions. Prospects move between content, demos, peer reviews, and sales conversations. If those touchpoints deliver inconsistent messaging or divergent experiences, credibility is lost. Bigleaf’s approach to network reliability and intelligent traffic management makes that consistency possible — for teams and for customers.

Episode Highlights

• Jordan’s three core principles: using data, doing great creative work, and focusing on the customer
• Why showing real-world impact works better than listing features in complex B2B sales
• How marketing connects product, sales, engineering, and finance across the business
• The four parts of customer focus: design thinking, research, teamwork across teams, and tracking customer success
• Why aligned companies grow faster than just agile ones, and how shared dashboards and goals help make that happen

Listen to the full conversation, subscribe to the Go Beyond the Connection podcast, and explore the companion blog post for a deeper look at Jordan’s consequence-driven storytelling framework.