Your buyer decided in March.You showed up in June.

The quarterly sales meeting. The order book’s light, so someone asks marketing to “switch something on”. A campaign goes live in June. It catches a few buyers who were already looking. It misses everyone who chose a supplier in March, signed off a budget in April or shortlisted three competitors in May.

Every business knows when it needs the revenue. Very few know when the customer starts making up their mind. The second date is the one that should run the marketing calendar.

Most of the decision happens without you

Gartner’s research on B2B buying found buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time meeting potential suppliers. Spread that across the several suppliers they’re comparing and any one supplier gets around 5% or 6%. The rest is research, internal debate and quietly building a shortlist.

Then there’s timing. Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute points out that in categories bought infrequently, most potential buyers aren’t in the market at any given moment. His 95:5 rule is a heuristic, not a law, but the logic holds. In a typical quarter, most of the people who’ll eventually buy from you aren’t looking yet.

Put those together and the problem is obvious. The June campaign is talking to a small group already shopping, competing hard for them, while ignoring the much bigger group who’ll decide next.

Capture and creation are different bets

Demand capture is the straightforward part. A buyer searches for emergency pump repairs, you show up, you answer the phone. Protect it. When someone’s workshop is under water, they’re not in the mood for a brand film.

Demand creation works further back. You help maintenance managers recognise an avoidable failure before it happens, or give them a reason to put you on the approved supplier list before the next shutdown. You make sure that when the need arrives, your name is already on the list.

Both pay. They’re different bets, measured on different clocks.

My view: a business that only funds capture is renting its pipeline. It pays full price every time and owns nothing when the lease runs out.

Define the thing before you sell it

Demand creation starts before the media plan. Cinch came to Hum with a genuinely clever new kind of hook and a launch ahead of it. The obvious job was channels and timing. The bigger risk was that people would see a familiar shape, file it in a familiar category and judge it against products that looked similar but solved a different problem.

So the work started with the job the product did in busy, hands-on moments. Positioning and the brand idea were built around that. Launch and investment modelling then gave the founders a disciplined way to decide how hard, where and when to go to market.

That’s creating demand: giving people a reason to want something on its own terms, early, instead of hoping they find it in the wrong aisle.

Don’t confuse moving demand with making it

Be honest about what you’re actually buying. A Black Friday sale can pull a purchase forward without creating an extra one. A retailer, an illustrative one, that clears a record number of coffee machines in November and sells fewer in December should check units and gross profit across both months, including the margin handed to people who’d have bought anyway, before calling it growth.

And be honest about what marketing can’t fix. It can’t conjure a budget, put crews on site or rescue a proposal that’s sat unanswered for twelve days. Before calling a soft quarter a demand problem, ask sales about the last five lost jobs. If three wanted to buy and couldn’t get a delivery date, invite operations to the meeting.

Measure across the right window

Short windows make demand creation look like waste, because most of its effect arrives later. Thinkbox’s Profit Ability 2 modelled 141 UK brands and found profit per pound of media of £1.87 within 13 weeks, rising to £4.11 once effects out to two years were included. Those are averages across 141 UK brands, on media cost only, not a forecast for your business. The point is the shape. Judge the work at 13 weeks and you’ll miss more than half of what it does.

So write down what normally happens before you start: qualified enquiries, orders, margin. Then decide which outcome you’re paying for. Extra buyers, buyers choosing you over someone else, or buyers simply buying earlier. They aren’t the same, and only one of them is growth.

What to do on Monday

1. Pick your most important sale of the next six months. Ask the person closest to the buyer when that decision actually gets made: budget, shortlist, contract.

2. Work back from that date. What does the buyer need to see first, and when does it need to reach them?

3. Split this quarter’s marketing spend into capture and creation. If creation is close to zero, you’ve found your June problem.

4. Keep a fast lane open for buyers who are ready now. Don’t starve capture to fund creation. Fund both.

5. Set a baseline and a measurement window that matches your buying cycle, not your reporting cycle.

The best June marketing happened in March.

Sources & notes

• Gartner, “Win More B2B Sales Deals”, 2018 (B2B buyers spend 17% of buying time meeting potential suppliers; 5% to 6% with any one supplier when comparing several)

• Professor John Dawes, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, on the 95:5 rule (a heuristic that varies by category)

• Cinch case study, Hum. Hum’s role covered the job to be done, positioning, brand foundations, go-to-market planning and launch investment logic.

• Thinkbox, Profit Ability 2. UK econometric modelling across 141 brands and £1.8 billion of media spend, published by Thinkbox, the marketing body for UK commercial TV. Return is profit per pound of media cost, so creative production costs may not be included.

• The pump repairer and coffee machine retailer are illustrative.

Continue with The best thing about your business never leaves the building. If you want a next step, see Hum’s fractional CMO page.