Octavio Couto is the highest level Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt I've ever met, and the lineage I train under. He said something once that I've been applying to businesses ever since.
People talk about instinct in a fight. They'll see red, something takes over, their instincts will handle it. Anyone who has rolled with a black belt knows how that goes.
His answer: if it was all about instinct, everybody would be a black belt.
It isn't instinct. It's process, a plan, a strategy, and knowing which tactic fits the moment you're actually in. Instinct is what's left over after all of that, and on its own it's a coin flip.
The Version of This in Your Company
You have two people on the same team, running the same playbook, working comparable books of business.
One of them gets customers moving. Onboarding completes, milestones get hit, accounts grow. The other one has the same accounts, the same documentation, the same tools, and their customers stall.
The usual explanation is that the first one is better. True, and useless, because it doesn't tell you what to do next besides hire more of that person.
The useful version: the first one has an instinct the second one doesn't, and nobody has ever written it down.
Instinct made that person good. It also made them unrepeatable, which means you can't hire for it, train it, or put it in a forecast.
So the question stops being why is she better. It becomes what is she doing that never made it into the playbook.
What the Naturals Are Actually Doing
In my experience it's usually one thing, and it doesn't look like a skill from the outside.
They make the customer feel seen, heard and validated.
That sounds soft until you watch what it produces. A customer who feels understood does the unglamorous work in the middle of onboarding. A customer who feels processed does not, and the difference shows up two quarters later as an account that never adopted what it bought and wants to right-size at renewal.
Salespeople are extremely good at this, and sniffing at it is how you avoid learning it. A rep makes somebody feel understood inside a few conversations with no prior context at all. That's a real competence and it's most of why customers keep going back to them.
Post-sale you have an advantage the rep never had, and almost nobody uses it.
You Already Have the Context
The customer spent weeks telling somebody at your company what they're trying to do, why it matters, what happens if it doesn't work, and who internally is going to be difficult about it.
All of it is sitting in the sales conversations.
Which means the kickoff call has a move available that a sales call never does. You don't have to ask.
Validate, Don't Interrogate
Here's the operational version, and it's the whole point of the context.
You open by saying what you understand. Their situation, what they're trying to achieve, why it matters to them specifically. Not the requirements list. The reasoning.
Then: I want to make sure I've got this right, so tell me where I've misunderstood.
Three things happen at once and only one of them is obvious.
They don't repeat themselves. Customers hate unknowns, surprises and repeating themselves, and a handoff usually delivers all three. This removes one of them outright.
They get validated. Not their feature checklist, which is a status update. Their reasoning. Somebody at your company understood why they did this, and said it back to them.
You made yourself correctable. Asking to be corrected is a trust signal, in a controlled dose. People who are trustworthy are willing to be a little bit wrong in public.
And be honest about the source. Say you got the debrief, or that you went through the calls. Don't claim a conversation with the rep that didn't happen, because that's a small lie sitting underneath a relationship you're trying to build on trust.
The Reason Discovery Doesn't Work Like It Used To
There's a second argument for this, and it's newer.
Sales moved from pitching to consultative selling, and discovery questions became the expected move. Everybody knows the questions are coming. Chris Voss has written about what happens when somebody decides you're extracting rather than helping, and the answer is they close up.
Buyers now prepare for discovery. Increasingly they prepare with AI: what will this vendor ask, what do I need to give them to get a real number, and what should I withhold so it can't be used against me later.
So the ritual designed to build rapport arrives at somebody already braced against it.
Post-sale, you're not in that position at all. You're not extracting anything, because you already have it. The move isn't asking better questions. It's not needing to ask.
The Uncomfortable Way to Say It
Making somebody feel seen, heard and validated is the most effective influence tactic there is.
I'll go further. It's the greatest manipulation tactic in the world, and it's completely positive, because the thing you're influencing them to do is succeed with what they already bought.
If that word bothers you, sit with why. You are trying to get another adult to do something they didn't especially want to do, on a timeline that suits your business, using no authority whatsoever. That's behavioral engineering, and pretending otherwise doesn't make you more ethical. It makes you worse at it.
What This Costs to Build
Less than the version where you keep hiring for instinct.
The context already exists. What's missing is a step that turns it into something the person taking the kickoff can read, and a norm that says you open on their reasoning rather than on your task list.
That's what the tooling is for. Not removing the human from the conversation, which is the version everybody fears and some companies are building. Handing the human the context that lets them walk in already understanding the account.
Scale the humanity. It's the only part of this that doesn't commoditize.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.