I was reminded of this story while talking to a former colleague, who now works for a firm that helps B2B companies understand supporters and detractors in their user bases.
Some years ago, our company supplied billing services for a mid-sized telecom provider. It was old technology, and we were very interested in migrating them over to a new platform we'd just begun to offer. They were referenceable and complimentary of our work with them. The IT group, our liaison, was happy to set up a meeting with the various groups that would be involved in a decision to change platforms.
At that meeting we learned the other groups didn't hold us in such high esteem. Not only were they not ready to migrate, they had a list of issues with our current system they wanted fixed. And while we were there, they let us in on a lot of other ideas they had about what we could do better, ideas they had clearly been storing up for years.
We (me included - I headed the group that managed our customer relationships) had made a big error - we had mistaken good feedback from our direct customer, the IT group, for good feedback from the whole user base. Needless to say, we never sold them on that new platform we were offering.
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