When rushing decisions risks derailing the strategy
January has a habit of creating a sense of urgency in making changes.
Before long, familiar questions start to appear. Should we consider a new channel? Try a new tool? Maybe we need to rewrite the plan for the year?
Changing direction often feels productive. Much like taking a long detour to avoid traffic, the car is still moving, so it gives you the illusion of progress. However, if you have had to add twenty kilometres to the journey, are you really moving closer to where you want to be?
In organisations, activity reassures leaders. It creates this sense that something is happening, that control is being exercised, or that decisions signal the intent for the year. Yet in B2B marketing, particularly in technical and scientific markets, moving too quickly without interpreting the data beforehand can quietly undo the very progress you are looking to create.
Over the years, I’ve most often seen this play out in the channels, tools, and the full-year marketing plans themselves. Platforms swapped, campaigns paused or replaced, messaging rewritten. For no evidence-based reason, other than there is some discomfort with waiting.
The unintended consequence is that the original strategy quietly unravels.
Not because it is wrong or no longer valid, but because it hasn’t been given the space to work.
This is the hidden cost of making decisions too fast. Not in the missed opportunity, but in the insight, learning and feedback loops that were never given the chance to develop.
The time lag that most organisations underestimate
The problem is that change, when driven by fear or sentiment rather than evidence, can distort the very signals you need to learn from. If you constantly reset the dial, you never allow patterns to emerge. You lose the ability to attribute what worked, what didn’t, and perhaps most importantly, why.
In technical B2B markets, this is especially risky. Buyers take time. Trust builds gradually. Familiarity compounds. Abrupt shifts in presence or messaging don’t just affect performance metrics; they affect how credible and consistent you appear to the outside world.
One of the most common sources of frustration that drives this need to be seen as making changes (internally), is often a mismatch between expectation and reality.
If success is being measured in leads, you can often start to gauge traction within a few months. Engagement, enquiries, conversations, early interest. A door being opened. These signals are indicative.
However, if the expectation is to have received a significant number of closed-won orders within six to eight months, particularly for complex products or services with long sales cycles, then that is not precisely realistic. Decision-making in customer organisations is slower. Procurement processes are involved.
Marketing’s role here is to support, not shortcut, that process.
Judging too early, therefore, leads to false conclusions. A channel gets blamed when the issue was the positioning. A campaign is switched off when the real problem is the very definition of the audience and who the customer is. And again, the plan is abandoned before it has had a fair chance to work.
Learning to read the signals
We are not talking about never-ending patience or an infinite singularity where marketing budgets get sucked into infinity, here. Signals are critical.
If there is genuinely no engagement within a defined pilot or review period, it 100% deserves attention. The next step shouldn’t automatically be set to “stop”. It first needs to determine “why”.
Was the message clear enough? Did it resonate with the right audience? Were the expectations realistic? Was the landing page or channel effective? Did we add too many barriers? Were you measuring success in a way that reflected the stage you were at?
When you can objectively review the data and align the signals with how success was originally defined, that is when you can determine whether switching off and protecting precious budget and resource is the right call.
That decision needs to be rooted in understanding, not anxiety. Otherwise, all that happens is that you risk cannibalising the very foundations that you already invested in.
Before you change course, pause and ask.
What are we realistically expecting to see by now?
What is the data actually telling us? What isn’t it telling us yet?
Are we responding to evidence, or reacting to pressure?
This is the uncomfortable aspect of good leadership.
Knowing what to lock down, what to test, what not to change just yet, and how to review progress without falling into the panic trap.
When to take a breath.
Stepping back to look at the bigger picture. Pausing to ask the right questions on whether decisions are being driven by evidence. And being honest about whether expectations were realistic in the first place.
It requires resisting the urge to equate motion with momentum, and instead staying disciplined enough to let evidence catch up with ambition.
It will be in this discipline that progress is safeguarded.
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