I'm done with moving fast and breaking things

Five or six times a football season, I travel to Anfield to watch my beloved Liverpool Football Club. My old school friend Jon has a season ticket he shares with a few mates.?The ticket is for a seat high up in the main stand between two women. I don’t know for sure but I’d say they’re in their late 60s or early 70s. They’re diehard fans: they go every week; they’re in their seats ten mins before kick-off and are among the last to leave.?

They’re not passive. They like to get involved. They sing all the songs and encourage others to do so. We’ve come to know one another and it’s always great to catch up.?One of the women told me she’d only started coming to Anfield after her husband died. Rather than give up his precious season ticket, she chose to carry on his Saturday 3pm tradition. She’d not been particularly interested in football before. Now she’s an adoring and hugely knowledgeable Liverpool supporter.

Sometimes I go to the game with Jon rather than instead of him. That happens if we can secure the ticket of another guy we know who sits on the opposite side of the ground.?That ticket costs the same as Jon’s but is of far less value.?Firstly, I don’t get to sit with my regular people, the two women. Instead, the ‘lesser’ seat is placed among people who’d probably also describe themselves as diehard regulars. After all, they too go every week.

However, they’re annoyingly and weirdly uncommitted.?They barely seem interested in the football, often taking their seats well after kick off in both halves of the match. They leave a bit too loudly and proudly, well before the final whistle, presumably to ‘optimise’ their stadium exit and homebound journey.?Last time I sat with them I silently counted a total of 17 minutes of the match that were missed by these two young guys next to me: they missed more than 18% of the event they’d paid to see.?

In the explosive (and expensive) theatre that is Premier League football any moment of the game can deliver the joy or heartbreak that matters. In fact, the last five or 10 minutes which these two gents habitually opt out of, is THE most likely period of the game for significant drama.

So much of marketing seems to celebrate efficiency and ‘short cuts’ above all else.?‘If it’s fast it’s good’.?

For me they’re like a lot of B2B marketers who invest focus, resource and energy in optimising for speed and efficiency but end up missing the thing they actually pay for - the result.?

So much of marketing seems to celebrate efficiency and ‘short cuts’ above all else.?‘If it’s fast it’s good’.?In reality though, speed or immediacy rarely correlates with meaningful or better experiences.???

The instant ping of an email doesn’t trigger a fraction of the excitement elicited by a hand-written letter arriving through the front door in an envelope so beautiful you open it slowly to prolong the anticipation. Fast food is great but is it ever better than the meal you’d wait for while a brilliant chef prepares the sort of dish you’ll still be talking about years later??

In ‘Boring2Brave: the ‘bravery-as-a-strategy’ mindset transforming B2B marketing’, I wrote about ‘Two-Speed Marketing’ and how successful marketers understand when they need to slow down to speed up. In the same chapter I challenge the enormous value placed on people in the workplace who carry a reputation for “getting shit done”.

‘Getting shit done’ is often used to describe the ability to cross tasks off a list and move on. As workplace skills go, it’s an alluring and seductive one - noted and celebrated regularly by colleagues and bosses. The problem is that the skill of ‘getting shit done’ often tends to go hand in hand with an indifference for planning and process. A suggestion that things might be slowed down to accommodate strategy, craft or originality is easily disregarded by people in a hurry.

The need for speed is because we’re all under pressure to perform. I get it. And yes, ‘done’ is often better than ‘perfect’.?The problem though of a culture that values marketing people with the ability to get shit done is that it risks measuring its impact in shit.?And why would we treat our marketing simply as ‘shit’ we need to get done? Why would we not bother to do it properly?

We’ve actively participated in a pseudo-cool glorification of Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ credo. We pretended it applied to marketing.

?How many of us as B2B marketers can show our CEOs a proper piece of segmentation, targeting and positioning work to precede a plan for communications campaigns that hang off a distinct story designed to appeal to our ICPs, measured against the business’ agreed objectives? If you can answer yes to this question? Well, you’re as rare as hen’s teeth.

?Most of us are pushed and harried by our organisations into spending marketing budgets on an ill-thought through channel-based strategy dominated by Google. Content, events and sponsorships are activities you do when you can afford them; they’re also the first things to be cut when budgets disappear.?

Paid ads win, partly because they don’t require much of a headcount; Nor do paid ads require anyone to take time to explore a USP or distinctive positioning.?Mostly though, paid ads win because they’re perceived to be quick.

Like you, your CFO almost certainly prefers a handwritten letter to an email. But when it comes to marketing they seem to care less about quality or craft than they do about speed.? A paid ads strategy promises to tell you tomorrow how well you did today. CFOs love that. Particularly those in B2B SaaS businesses. And because they hold the budget (or because we love to please), we’ve let them dictate our marketing ‘strategies’ and indirectly, our reputations and careers.?

In fact we’ve not merely let them win. We’ve actively participated in a pseudo-cool glorification of Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ credo. We pretended it applied to marketing.

Well, not me. After more than a decade running B2B SaaS marketing functions I’m done with working for folks who love to ‘break’ things. I can no longer be arsed pretending to buy into it. Not least because when something ‘breaks’, colleagues lose jobs; jobs in which they’d have more likely exceeded their goals if only they were trained, resourced or even encouraged to do marketing properly.??

The most encouraging response I’ve seen to all this is DemandWEBS?; the flagship product created by the team at OrbitalX . A DemandWEBS? cycle starts with proper market orientation and impressively deep research aiding high value segmentation and targeting for each client. A DemandWEBS? team then develops a go-to-market story and builds around it a series of monthly events. Specialist SDRs call a newly-identified and super rich list of prospects and bring them to these events to benefit from highly relevant content and exclusive offers.

Real demand - the sort upon which you build a business - is generated quickly (for all you speed-demons) but then also compounds over time. In September I saw three separate clients watch as more than a hundred fully qualified sales leads registered for their first events.?And if I told you how much clients currently pay for a fully resourced DemandWEBS? team you simply wouldn’t believe me. But put it this way, it’s probably less than you used to shell out to fill your pre-covid office fridges and snacks cupboards every month.?

OrbitalX has created an affordable, scalable and hugely effective way to do B2B marketing properly. And it’s still innovating.?The time for feigning pride in breaking things is over. Yeah, let’s hold on to experimentation, but let’s do it within the context of a proper marketing model. One that encourages the right behaviours.

For football fans, I guess it’s the equivalent of using your marketing budget to hire an Arne Slot as opposed to an Erik Ten Hag.?