The Big Mistake B2B-tech Leadership Can [and often do] Make
I'll get right into it: growth marketing takes time, and effective leadership requires patience. These two elements are inherently related, yet time and patience are often not a forte of leadership at companies needing growth.
The Nature of Growth Marketing
Long-term Strategies vs. Short-term Tactics: Growth marketing is about creating sustainable strategies, not just quick wins.
Building a Sustainable Growth Engine: It's essential to focus on long-term goals that will drive consistent growth.
Reminding Others That Growth Takes Time: Constantly communicate that growth efforts require time to bear fruit.
The Leadership Dilemma
High Expectations and Pressure for Quick Results: Leaders often expect immediate outcomes.
Prioritizing Immediate Gains Over Sustainable Growth: There's a tendency to favor short-term wins.
Impatience Leading to Hasty Decisions: Rushed decisions can undermine long-term growth.
If the nature of leadership is to focus on quick wins and fast growth, how do you get them to accept that marketing strategies take time to take effect?
Strategies for Aligning Leadership with Growth Marketing:
Set Expectations and Get Buy-in: Before kicking off new growth strategies, ensure leadership understands the timeline. Results, such as better quality leads, will start to show at the awareness/engagement level in about 4-6 weeks. These leads will then follow your typical deal cycle, which can be weeks, months, or a year+ for some true enterprise products.
Provide Early Metrics to Monitor: Leadership needs to know what early signs of success to look for. Awareness campaigns won’t show conversion metrics immediately, so CTR is a good indicator that your ICP is interested in your content and potentially your product.
Launch Short-term Tactics: Mix in some low-hanging fruit tactics to generate immediate conversations and pipeline while waiting for the broader program to take effect. Examples include creating a webinar series to engage dormant prospects, launching a new nurture flow to engage this audience, and sending the subsequent engagement signals to the account owners.
Conclusion
The solution to the perpetual tug-of-war for time and patience is communication and compromise. Good communication means clearly aligning expectations with leadership and providing regular updates. The compromise involves marketing also delivering short-term wins while the broader strategy builds momentum.
Finally, a note to leadership: to avoid making reactive decisions too soon, do the due diligence that supports the strategy you create, and trust the results. Identify the ICP and TAL, ensure the product messaging and positioning are competitive, and be confident that the product addresses the pain points as promised. Unfortunately, I’ve seen leadership greenlight a strategy only to lose confidence and patience too soon, and backtrack just two months into the launch.
