Your Spouse Knows Why You’re Losing Bids (Even If You Don’t)

After losing a must-win opportunity, Michael, the Chief Growth Officer at a mid-tier firm, finally understood what had gone wrong. The customer feedback stung: “Your team kept telling us how you’d fix our problem, but we never felt you fully understood what we were actually up against.”

Michael’s team was brilliant—top-tier engineers, seasoned business developers, and strategic thinkers who could architect complex solutions faster than anyone. But they had a fatal flaw: they couldn’t read people.

Michael had the same problem at home. When his wife came home excited about successfully handling a difficult client situation, Michael half-listened, but the moment he heard a “problem,” he jumped in.

“Here’s what I would have done,” he interrupted, launching into a detailed solution before she could finish her story.

“What’s wrong?” he asked when she went quiet.

“Nothing,” she whispered, her excitement completely gone.

She had wanted to share her victory and feel supported after a stressful day. Instead, she felt dismissed by someone who wasn’t listening and had no context about the situation. The man who prided himself on being agile and innovative couldn’t see how his compulsive need to “fix” everything was slowly destroying his marriage.

Your growth team faces the same issue, and it’s limiting the customer intelligence you desperately need to win.

Why Your Smartest People Can’t Read a Room

We spend decades teaching our future workforce calculus, programming languages, and financial modeling. We invest thousands of hours in technical competencies and analytical frameworks. Yet Carnegie Institute research shows that 85% of career success stems from well-developed soft skills; however, emotional intelligence, active listening, and empathy are rarely taught in school.

Instead, our education system rewards the fastest hand, the loudest voice, and the correct answer. We condition students to excel at technical execution and self-expression but rarely foster the psychological safety needed for others to open up about what they’re facing.

Picture your top engineer in a customer meeting. When the customer mentions budget constraints, your engineer immediately launches into discussing a potentially “cheaper” solution. What they miss? The frustrated sigh, the glance at their watch, the subtle shift in body language that signals this isn’t really about money—it’s about political pressure from Leadership they can’t discuss openly.

Your team has learned to be brilliant (and quick) problem solvers, but they were never taught the people skills needed to fully understand the problems they are trying to solve.

We train people to solve equations, but not emotions—then wonder why they fail at the human side of business.

The Expert Trap That’s Killing Your Customer Intelligence

Your team’s identity is likely wrapped around being technical experts. Fatal mistake.

When customers share concerns, your team immediately jumps to solutions. “Here’s how we’d solve that,” they interrupt, launching into their approach.

The customer thinks: “They don’t understand our situation.” The conversation shuts down. Your team walks away feeling they dazzled the customer with their expertise. The truth is they’re more impressed by your competitor who asks, “Help me understand what you’re up against here.”

Research shows that when people share problems, they want to feel understood before they want solutions. Even among professionals, there is a documented tendency to prioritize problem-solving strategies over empathetic communication. However, studies indicate that empathy is especially crucial when issues involve psychological barriers rather than mere knowledge deficits—which describes most customer concerns in complex government procurement decisions.

Your team’s rush to prove they’re smart is proving they can’t listen—and that intelligence gap is costing you contracts.

The fastest way to end a conversation is to solve a problem nobody asked you to solve.

Why Your Team Can’t Learn What They Need Most

Most CGOs believe their teams already have good engagement skills (and relationships). After all, they’ve been working with customers for years, right?

Think about your last team meeting where someone complained about a difficult customer. Did anyone ask what made them difficult, or did the team immediately start providing their thought on how to deal with them?

The denial is staggering. While 61% of businesses rate their customers as “very satisfied” with their experience, only 23% of customers share the same sentiment. This perception gap exists because professionals have never actually seen themselves in action with objective feedback.

The real barrier isn’t skill—it’s mindset. Your team has been conditioned to believe their value comes from being the expert with all the answers. This expert mindset creates an identity crisis: admitting they need to improve at reading people feels like admitting professional weakness.

The problem extends beyond poor listening skills. Research shows that offering solutions prematurely fails to address the underlying emotional or psychological drivers, which are often the actual roadblocks to implementation. When your capture manager dismisses a program manager’s budget concerns with “Here’s how we can cut costs,” they’re missing the real issue: the program manager’s fear of justifying their decision to Leadership.

Most training focuses on addressing symptoms rather than the root causes. Traditional sales approaches often focus on manipulation techniques, including overcoming objections, handling resistance, and closing tactics that can create adversarial relationships. Even emotional intelligence training teaches concepts without addressing the fundamental identity shift required.

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you don’t know what threatens your professional identity.

What Your Team Needs to Master

A real competitive advantage comes from mastering the engagement skills that your competition ignores. Active listening that uncovers root causes instead of rushing to address symptoms. Strategic questioning helps customers clarify their thoughts and ideas, enabling them to articulate their needs more effectively. Empathy fosters psychological safety, enabling authentic sharing. Collaborative solutioning makes customers co-creators rather than evaluators.

When the program manager says, “Budget is tight,” an untrained team hears: “We need cheaper solutions.” A Hi-Q trained team hears: “I’m worried about justifying costs to leadership.” That’s the difference between features and intelligence.

These aren’t “soft skills” they’re competitive intelligence-gathering methods. When your team learns to ask, “Tell me more about the impact of that challenge,” with genuine curiosity instead of “Here’s how we’d solve that,” everything changes.

Even well-intentioned attempts at validation can fall short of expectations. Saying things like “Don’t worry, we’ve solved this before for other customers” can inadvertently dismiss or trivialize genuine concerns, leading to frustration and disengagement. This explains why your team’s capability briefings feel like lectures rather than conversations.

Effective professional development requires practice where participants witness firsthand the gap between their perception and actual performance. They learn to replace their instinct to immediately solve problems with the discipline to first understand context, develop comfort with silence, and validate concerns before offering solutions.

True expertise isn’t knowing all the answers—it’s asking the questions that reveal what really matters.

While You Pitch Solutions, Competitors Are Shaping Requirements

Your team believes they are gathering good intelligence. But while they focus on a laundry list of questions needed to get through the next gate review, your competitors are being invited to “help” the customer understand the art of the possible.

Picture this: Your BD manager walks into a meeting with a 20-slide capability deck. Your competitor brings a single question: “What keeps you up at night about this program?” Guess who leaves with actionable intelligence?

While your team gathers some intel, your competitors are digging deeper and learning about how congressional pressure, budget reallocations, and performance metrics are shaping the acquisition strategy and program. The difference isn’t technical capability—it’s their Human Intelligence Quotient.

Meanwhile, your team is stuck in a vicious cycle: Capture managers pressure staff to fill out intelligence checklists instead of building trust. Project managers shut down the venting customer, choosing to focus on today’s agenda items and missing a potential opportunity to help. Business developers default to capability briefings instead of asking diagnostic questions because it’s easier for the customer to select what they need.

Sarah’s team of brilliant engineers lost a recompete because they thought they would get ahead of the RFP by making assumptions and prematurely developing a solution rather than fully understanding the customer’s emerging priorities and constraints.

The result? Game-changing intelligence goes uncaptured, and you continue to lose to competitors who make customers feel understood rather than lectured or sold.

While you’re busy being impressive, your competitors are busy being interested—and that’s why they’re winning.

The One Skill That Trumps Technical Excellence

As Maya Angelou observed, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This isn’t just inspirational wisdom. It’s a competitive intelligence strategy. In markets where technical capabilities are commoditized, the team that makes others feel heard and supported wins the intelligence that drives growth.

Real competitive intelligence emerges when customers feel safe enough to share what they’re truly facing—not just the sanitized version they share with everyone. It happens when a program manager confides that their biggest fear isn’t technical failure—it’s explaining to Leadership why they chose your solution if something goes wrong. It happens when they reveal the unwritten evaluation criteria that matter more than what’s in the RFP.

None of this occurs when your team is perceived as “the smartest people in the room.”

Your technical superiority means nothing if customers don’t trust you with their real problems.

The Million-Dollar Question Every Growth Leader Must Answer

How much pipeline is your team losing because they treat relationship-building like a nice-to-have instead of a core competency?

How many competitive wins are slipping away because your rivals understand something about human connection that your technically superior team completely misses?

The uncomfortable truth: your bonus and next promotion likely depend on growth numbers that require skills your team has never been taught. In competitive markets, the real edge belongs to teams that can create psychological safety for customers to share intel they wouldn’t tell anyone else.

Research shows that 82% of government decision-makers believe winning relationships are a key factor in awarding contracts, yet most teams treat relationship-building as an afterthought.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in developing these skills; rather, it is whether you can afford not to.