Moving Too Fast

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while, as a few months ago a chum shared his frustration with the responses he was getting during a job search.

The process was going well, but as you’ve probably experienced, as he described it, it felt like the organization was moving at a different speed. Like the very concept of time was different for them.

Then today I saw a post in a fractional marketers group that talked about a potential client that had got close to a purchase, then went radio silent for 7 months, while they, apparently, went away and re-organized and prepared. Then came back, ready to engage.

Seven months is a bit extreme, but I’ve been on the buying side as a CMO and it is ridiculously easy to lose 3 or 4 weeks in a decision process at any point.

As a seller it’s often hard to reconcile that this deal is one of the top 5 things on your mind, but it may not even feature in the top 50 of the buyer.

If the need to solve the problem is not urgently in the top 5 things the buyer needs to fix that day, time is a sellers problem, not the buyers.

It’s also a reminder that silence doesn’t mean rejection, something that drives sellers insane.

And, it doesn’t mean what you are offering isn’t important to the buyer, it’s just not as important as something else.

This moving at different speeds thing also manifests in our marketing.

Especially around brand and messaging, as B2B marketers, you can work on something for months, it’s in the top 5 of things you think about every single day, you get it to market and within six weeks you are bored with it and ready for the next campaign.

But, the market hasn’t noticed it.

It might take years of constant drip to enter the consciousness of the buyer who, for a start might not be in market for another 18 months.

You’ll need to compete with the 50 or 500 business problems that are swirling around their mind, and then the timeframe of the right set of circumstances falling into place that means they will act on it.

The phrase “trust the universe” comes to mind as a I write this, often the market is not moving too slow, it’s moving at its own speed and you need to wait a bit.

So the tune, providing our subject line this week is a classic late nineties garage track - Moving Too Fast, by Artful Dodger.

What do you think? Is your world moving in time?

Have a splendid week!

Cheers!

Ian

More from me, friends at Rockstar CMO and what’s caught my eye…

Are you moving too fast? You might be listening to this! :-)