How to turn customer relationships into a go-to-market advantage
In SaaS, most go-to-market strategies tend to focus on acquisition. But did you know that your most powerful GTM engine might already be sitting right in front of you? We’re talking about your existing customers.
Too often, companies treat customers as endpoints in the funnel instead of collaborators who can refine your product, sharpen positioning, and fuel stronger advocacy.
In fact, in airfocus’s latest industry survey, we found that only 16.9% of strategic decisions are made with market or user feedback. That means most businesses are still building and selling based on assumptions rather than evidence. By embedding customers into your GTM motion, you can build better products, refine your ideal customer profile (ICP), and strengthen your market credibility.
But it all starts with how you manage the relationship.
Build relationships that go beyond support tickets
Healthy customer relationships are the foundation of any customer-led GTM strategy. You can’t leverage insights from your customers if they don’t trust you enough to share them.
As one of airfocus’s customer success leads tells us, the first priority is to ensure clients reach their goals, maintain regular contact, and make them feel valued, heard, and understood. Regular check-ins, whether through quarterly reviews, feedback sessions, or informal calls, help clients see that you’re invested in their success, not just their renewal.
“When I onboard customers, I really get to know them – their workflows, their needs, their pain points, says Julia Baumgartner, Customer Success Manager at airfocus. “Every team works differently, so our job in Customer Success is to make sure the tool adapts to them, not the other way around.”
She explains that during onboarding she focuses on understanding each team’s unique needs and ensuring the platform really works for them. “It’s not one-size-fits-all,” she says. “Our role is to help customers reach their goals by adapting the tool to their way of working.”
When customers feel genuinely supported, they become open collaborators rather than passive users and are more willing to share ideas, test new features, and participate in case studies or advisory boards.
Turn insights into product alignment
Once you’ve earned their trust, customers become your most honest and valuable source of insight. They use your product every day, lack sentimental attachment to it, and typically understand the real value it delivers better than you do.
The challenge often isn’t collecting feedback, but rather making sense of it. Support tickets, sales calls, Slack messages, and NPS surveys all contain valuable signals, but without a system to centralize and analyze them, they remain noise.
That’s where airfocus Insights can help. It consolidates feedback from multiple sources and helps you detect patterns and themes across customer conversations. From there, you can use airfocus’s Prioritization tool to score and rank potential initiatives based on customer impact, business value, and development effort. The result is a product roadmap that reflects real user needs while staying strategically focused.
"With airfocus, we've been able to bring all our different sources of feedback into a single platform for us as product managers," says Paul Lefevre, Product Manager at Powell Software. "This makes it easier to identify patterns and prioritize changes based on real customer needs."
Refine your ideal customer profile (ICP) with real data
Your ideal customer profile isn’t something you decide once and stick to. Successful clients can help you shape and update your ICP over time.
Start by analyzing your most successful customers. These will be the ones with high retention, low churn, and strong adoption. What do they have in common? Which industries, team sizes, or use cases see the most value? These insights can reshape your targeting, messaging, and even feature priorities.
By integrating customer feedback directly into your product and marketing discussions, teams can align on who your best-fit customers really are and why they choose you.
Platforms like airfocus make this alignment easier by connecting customer insights, prioritization, and objectives all in one place.
Co-create and co-market with your customers
Customer relationships don’t end once someone signs a contract. That’s where the collaboration begins!
Companies that co-create with their customers build stronger products and communities. That can take many forms:
Customer advisory boards: Invite decision-makers within your ICP to share strategic input and influence your roadmap.
Webinars and events: Feature customers as speakers or panelists to add credibility to your narrative.
Case studies and ebooks: Tell stories that focus on outcomes, not features.
Tools like airfocus’ Feedback Portal make this kind of collaboration easy. Customers can submit, track, and vote on ideas directly in one place, seeing how their input shapes the roadmap. This transparency builds trust and turns your customers into advocates who feel genuinely part of your evolution.
“By listening closely to customer needs and ensuring the platform adapts to them, airfocus helps you build a foundation of trust that encourages ongoing collaboration and open feedback,” Julia says.
Turn customer stories into sales enablement
Testimonials and case studies are more than marketing collateral. They’re also high-impact sales tools. In some cases, they can even replace reference calls, providing proof and credibility at scale.
You can repurpose these stories across your organisation:
As battle cards for sales teams to address objections.
As training material for onboarding new hires.
As ad content or social proof in campaigns.
Each story is a signal of product-market fit and a source of insights for your roadmap. Understanding why customers chose you, and how they articulate your value, helps refine both your messaging and your next development priorities.
Create a continuous communication loop between Product, CS, and Marketing
The most effective GTM strategies don’t end with acquisition, they loop continuously between teams and customers. In practice, this means shifting from a linear handoff model (marketing > sales > success > product) to a truly circular one where every department both contributes to and benefits from customer insight. This might look like:
Customer Success gathers ongoing feedback and identifies emerging patterns in customer behavior, satisfaction, and unmet needs. They are the eyes and ears of your product experience.
Product uses tools like airfocus’ Insights, Feedback Portal, and Prioritization tool to translate that feedback into data-backed roadmap decisions, ensuring new features align with both customer goals and business strategy.
Marketing and Sales take those learnings and turn them outward, crafting stories, case studies, and positioning that reflect real customer language and outcomes. This alignment not only strengthens campaigns but also attracts more of the right kind of customers.
To make this loop work, teams need transparency. Shared dashboards, integrated communication channels, and visible roadmap updates help every department see the impact of their work. The goal is for everyone, from CSMs to product managers, to understand how customer insights feed directly into GTM decisions.
When executed well, this cross-functional loop becomes self-reinforcing. Better collaboration leads to more relevant product improvements, stronger customer relationships, and marketing that resonates with authenticity. It’s the essence of being a customer-led company.
Your customers are your most strategic asset
While we mostly think of customer relationships in terms of retention, we must not forget that they’re also about acceleration. When you bring your customers into your go-to-market motion, you unlock more than loyalty; you find clarity.
Your best customers do more than just buy your product. They help shape it, define your market, and sell it for you.
airfocus helps teams make this collaboration tangible. With features like Insights and Prioritization, you can connect your customer feedback to product strategy and make smarter, faster, more customer-driven decisions.
Emma-Lily Pendleton
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