John Gusiff, Founder and Managing Partner of Customer Centric Solutions LLC. Twenty-five years spent finding what actually moves buyers — and building the go-to-market that acts on it. Design for customer progress, and growth follows.
Not stages in a sequence — goals a team designs for, usually several at once. Each one fails for a different reason, and each one needs a different kind of evidence to fix. Most of what I do is finding which goal is actually the binding constraint, then getting the evidence that moves it.
Attracts new customers, users, partners, or opportunities by making adoption more likely.
Increases the frequency, depth, or quality of interaction, creating more value with each use.
Increases the likelihood that customers continue using the product by raising realized value or switching costs.
Enables additional growth from existing relationships through more users, use cases, products, markets, or revenue.
Creates structural advantages that become increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate or overcome.
The one goal you don't pursue directly — it's what the other four produce when they compound. Loop & moats diagnostics →
Conversion data tells you a deal died. It won't tell you the buyer was never going to move, or that the message was aimed at a struggle they don't have, or that the thing blocking them had nothing to do with your product. A funnel is a record of what already happened.
It's also a shape that ends. A funnel converts a prospect and stops — next quarter starts empty. A loop takes the output of one cycle, a customer or a review or a piece of usage, and turns it into the input of the next one.
So most go-to-market work treats demand as something you capture. I treat it as something you have to see first, and then something you can compound. The reasons people switch and the reasons they stay put are knowable — they just aren't in your CRM.
Named by what compounds and what the customer retains — not by the channel it runs through. Co-created with Krzysztof Czubak.
Whether a company actually has a loop — or a funnel dressed as one — is what the loop diagnostics are built to answer. There's a free one you can run on yourself in about three minutes.
Most of my career was spent alongside CX and CMO leaders — strategy and execution both, across the full arc from acquisition to defensibility.
Advisory, strategy, research, and experience design — ecobee, Porch.com, ModeSens, Stillaton, Narrio, erom.io.
American Honda, lululemon, Canada Goose, Citibank, Disney, eBay, G Adventures, TransAlta, Kaiser Permanente.
Working across both ends taught me something I didn't expect. The budget changes, the stakes change, the buying committee changes — a consumer deciding alone in thirty seconds is not a committee deciding over nine months. But the psychology barely moves. What differs is the time and money available to act on it.
Nobody wakes up wanting your product. They hit a point where the way they're currently getting something done stops working well enough — and that struggling moment is where demand actually begins. Find it and you find the market. Miss it and you're writing messages aimed at people who aren't looking for anything.
Everything I run is built to find those moments and read the forces acting inside them. Six forces, not four: pushes, pulls, and desires move people toward change; habits, anxieties, and avoidances hold them still. Most practice concentrates on the first three, because those are the ones people volunteer. The second three are usually where the answer is — and they're the reason a market with an obvious problem still won't move.
But naming a barrier doesn't remove it. Research explains why people hesitate; design changes what they actually do. That's why I trained as a certified instructor in the Make It Toolkit, Massimo Ingegno's behavioral design framework — practical strategies for removing friction rather than describing it.
Underneath all of it is something fairly simple. There are people behind every number on the dashboard. They're trying to make progress on something that matters to them, and something is standing in the way. Find the progress they're after, find what's blocking it, design the block out. Everything else — the interviews, the loops, the moats — is machinery in service of that.
Whether you need research, which method fits, or whether you need research at all. If the answer is that you don't, that's a fine outcome for a short call.
Boutique means assembled, not small. I lead every engagement and do the analysis myself. Around that I build the team the work requires — recruiters, moderators, quantitative analysts, designers — drawn from people I've worked with for years. Senior judgment on every project, the capacity of a firm, and no bench to pay for between engagements.
