Have You Allowed Marketing Latency To Make You Nearsighted?
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Are you familiar with the term “marketing latency?” It’s the time between a prospect noticing your company and buying from you.
Latency is a funny thing because our sales managers push us to shrink it as much as possible. Ironically, they are most likely doing us a big disservice. Long marketing latency surprisingly has many things going for it.
The Reasons Sales Managers Love Short Latency
- Sell ‘em fast and move on to the next order!
- Our region isn’t going to make its numbers this month. Close, close, close.
- Sell this prospect something quickly so we can get our foot in the door.
- I just bought a new home and you need to do something pronto to bump up my sales manager’s commission. (I actually had a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company who would say that exact statement. Who could make this stuff up?)
The Advantages You And Your Company Will Realize In Longer Latencies
These are presented in no particular order.
- A prospect that throws you all of their business very quickly is normally looking for a supplier to finance their business. This is the kind of financing where they don’t feel obligated to ever pay their bills. All of your competitors have already shut off their credit.
- Prospects that are truly looking at you and your company for things like TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), ROI (Return on Investment) and value in general will take longer to sell. They aren’t buying on price; your margins will be higher as a result.
- Prospects that have a high latency are stickier (i.e. more faithful) to you once you start selling them. They are also more competitor resistant.
- Longer latency gives you more time to explore all the selling opportunities within a company. When we’re not looking for the quick sale, it’s amazing how often we can find additional products and services to talk about with the prospect beyond the obvious.
- Sometimes we’re in such a hurry to sell that we sell to the first person who can order from us, thinking we’ve found the mother of all decision makers. Not always true. Especially in large companies. Finding and building relationships with high-level decision makers can’t be done in a few days.
- Prospects know when we’re trying to close them as quickly as possible. They don’t like it. Who wants to buy from someone who has an attitude of, “Let’s get this over quickly so I can close this deal and move on to the next”?
Sales Tips Wrap Up
Whenever we take a myopic view of prospecting, we make compromises. Any time we only focus on how fast we can get an order, we usually leave a great number of possibilities on the table.
©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer


