I’ve just returned to Cape Town from a trip to the US, and as travel often does, it forced me to notice small changes with fresh eyes. Buying a coffee, catching a ride, checking into a hotel… each moment showed me something about how the world is shifting. The strongest impression I brought back is this: the companies that are thriving are not only building better products, they are reimagining the way we buy those products.
We often throw around the term “customer experience.” It can sound abstract, even overused. But when you zoom in, you realise that the buying experience itself, the moment when a customer actually hands over money, is the sharp edge where growth is won or lost. That’s where expectations are formed, loyalty is tested, and decisions are made in seconds.
Breaking Buying Into Seven Levers
To make this practical, let’s take the big, messy idea of “buying” and break it into parts. Every transaction you’ve ever completed, whether ordering sneakers online or renewing a piece of enterprise software, can be understood through seven levers:
Payment – How easy is it to pay?
Ordering – How easy is it to place the order itself?
Delivery – How convenient is receiving the product or service?
Costing – How clear and simple is the price?
Access – How available is the product to someone outside your immediate geography?
Selection – Is there enough choice, but not so much that it overwhelms?
Tailoring – Can the offer be adapted to a customer’s unique situation?
Think of these as dials on a control panel. Every business, whether a small retailer or a global SaaS company, is making choices about where these dials sit. When one of them is clumsy, say your payment process requires four steps of verification, customers feel it instantly. When two or three are smooth and cleverly integrated, customers talk about how “easy” or “convenient” you are. That’s differentiation in practice.
A Simple Diagnostic You Can Run Today
Here’s a quick exercise you can do with your own business or team. Answer the following honestly:
Is our payment process simple and trusted?
Can customers place an order without getting stuck?
Do they feel confident about how and when delivery will happen?
Is pricing transparent, or do they need to call for a quote?
Can people buy from us if they’re outside our immediate market?
Do we give enough choice without drowning them in options?
Can they adapt what we offer to their specific needs?
Even without sophisticated analytics, this exercise will show you where friction lives. More importantly, it will highlight opportunities to innovate. Because in today’s market, buying ease is not a nice-to-have—it’s an expectation. Customers are trained by the smoothest experiences they encounter anywhere. Uber and Airbnb redefined entire industries not by reinventing the core product, but by reinventing how it was bought.
Go-to-Market Innovation vs. Product Innovation
This brings us to an important distinction: not all innovation happens at the product level. Some of the most disruptive companies of our time did zero product innovation. Uber didn’t invent the taxi. Airbnb didn’t invent the hotel room. What they did was rethink the go-to-market (GTM): the way these products were positioned, accessed, paid for, and experienced.
When you digitise the go-to-market, you’re not tinkering with the product itself. You’re reengineering the path to the customer. And because buying is where value crystallises, GTM innovation often delivers more impact than a marginal product improvement ever could.
Choosing Which Levers to Pull
Of course, you can’t do everything at once. Resources are finite, and chasing every shiny object quickly burns out teams. This is why positioning matters. A Positioning and Messaging Framework (PMF) forces you to answer: Which of the seven levers will we emphasise? What promise will we make to customers that competitors cannot or will not match?
A strong positioning statement is not marketing fluff. It’s a practical tool that aligns your entire business. It tells the product team what to build around, the sales team what to emphasise, and the customer what to expect. When your buying experience flows logically from a clear positioning choice, the market notices.
The Sneaker Test
Let’s illustrate with something simple: sneakers. A sneaker is the core product. But the offering, the thing that customers actually buy, is shaped by how it’s taken to market.
One company might sell the shoe only in a faraway store, in limited quantities, with slow payment processes. Same shoe, low adoption.
Another might integrate data from a running app to automatically size the shoe, let the buyer tailor features like fabric density, and ship it on a predictable subscription. Same shoe, but now it feels like performance apparel engineered just for you.
The difference is not in the stitching. It’s in the buying experience. That difference can move millions.
Balancing Wow With Reality
At this point, a common objection arises: “But we don’t have unlimited budget to wow customers at every step.” That’s true, and important. Businesses operate with constraints. But rather than seeing this as a dead end, I see it as the creative frontier.
Two forces are always in tension:
The desire to make the buying process so effortless that it feels like a no-brainer.
The need to manage resources responsibly.
Managing this tension means keeping two workflows alive:
A system that keeps you in touch with what customers value most—through data, frontline insights, and feedback.
A discipline of finding inventive ways to deliver more value with the same or fewer resources, often through clever use of digital platforms.
These loops never end. They are not once-off projects. They are how modern companies stay relevant.
How to Start
If this feels overwhelming, don’t try to transform all seven levers overnight. Pick one and experiment.
Payment: Add a payment option your customers already trust and track how it affects conversions.
Ordering: Bundle common purchases to reduce decision fatigue.
Delivery: Offer accurate time windows and proactive updates.
Costing: Publish a simple pricing calculator online.
Access: Open a sales channel where your audience already spends time.
Selection: Curate instead of overwhelming, sometimes fewer choices are better.
Tailoring: Create one meaningful customisation option that resonates with a specific segment.
Each experiment becomes proof. Once you see momentum, stack another lever. That’s how “easy to buy” becomes your reputation.
Meeting the Real Bar
On the plane home, I wrote down this reminder: Customers don’t benchmark you against your competitors. They benchmark you against the best buying experience they’ve ever had, anywhere. That bar might have been set by a streaming platform, a grocery app, or a ride-hailing service.
You don’t control that bar. But you can meet it, one lever at a time.
So here’s my invitation: run the seven-lever diagnostic with your team this week. Choose one dial to turn. Write to me and tell me what you see. I’m back at my desk in Cape Town and would love to compare notes.
Make it rAIn, KG