You've had this conversation before.

Marketing spend is up. Performance is inconsistent. Your team has explanations—there are always explanations—but the numbers don't move the way they should. You hired capable people. You're giving them real budget. You're doing everything you were told to do.

In the back of your mind, a question is forming you can't quite say out loud yet: Is this really how hard it is, or are these explanations turning into excuses?

That frustration is legitimate. The pressure you're putting on your marketing team to show faster results, cleaner attribution—that's accountability. And accountability is what got you this far.

You're not wrong to push.

But you're pushing on half the information. The other half is what changes everything.

Last year I was embedded with a founder-led company with a category-leading product, revenue was up and to the right. But performance was inconsistent month to month, and the founder kept pushing for faster feedback loops from campaigns that hadn't had time to develop.

The scene this email opened with was playing on repeat inside this company.

So I pulled the data to see what was really up.

What came back wasn't a clean distribution. It was a split. Two completely different customer populations buried inside the same funnel.

The first group: fast closers. 1-14 days from first touch to purchase, with a median of 9 days. Almost all referrals and direct traffic. People who already had context and a reason to move.

The second group: slow closers. 72-166 days. People who found the book first, sat with the ideas for months, and came back when the timing in their own life finally lined up and the desire was strong enough.

Average time to close across both groups: 98 days.

The company was evaluating campaigns on 7 day timescales.

See the problem yet?

When you're measuring a 98-day sales cycle on a 7-day window, two things happen at the same time. Both work against you.

The campaigns you kill look like they were failing. They're not. They're halfway through a conversion process you never mapped. The slow buyer who downloaded the book eight weeks ago, has been reading it every night, and is two chapters away from calling your sales team? She doesn't show up on this week's dashboard. Baller prospect. But completely invisible. So you pull the budget.

The campaigns you keep look like they're working. Some are. But some are riding revenue from leads generated 3-4 months earlier, with attribution credit flowing to whatever happened to be running when someone finally closed.

Killing winners. Funding ghosts. At the same time.

I flagged this early: "Stop asking Meta for a day-by-day answer on how many calls we booked and what each one cost. That's the wrong goal right now."

The founder didn't push back. "It actually is. Totally, you're right."

This isn't really about bifurcated buyers, though. The bigger pattern hiding underneath:

You don't have a funnel at all.

The marketing funnel is a construct. A useful one for slide decks, I guess, but still made up. Nobody actually moves through it cleanly. ClickFunnels, be damned.

The real buyer journey looks less like a funnel and more like a double helix. In and out, across multiple devices, over stretches of time your quarterly planning cycle doesn't account for.

Their budget has to align with their timing. Something in their life —a failed hire, a number that finally scared them— has to click into place before they're ready to spend real money. You can build conditions for that click. You cannot manufacture it on your timeline.

Google figured this out in 2011. They called it the Zero Moment of Truth: the specific nanosecond when a buyer's brain makes the actual purchase decision. They threw serious resources at tracking it.

Their conclusion: an average of 11 touchpoints before someone buys, most of them happening inside the buyer's brain where no UTM or tracking tool can reach. Until we let Neuralink hack our little cerebrums, the ZMOT is impossible to find.

Translation: the most sophisticated advertising platform on earth admitted that the exact moment a human decides to buy is fundamentally unmeasurable.

But you think your tracking tools have it handled. You have full confidence in your dashboard reporting. And you've been making real decisions—including which marketers to keep and which campaigns to cut—based on that confidence.

The tools didn't lie to you on purpose. They showed you what they could measure and let you assume that was everything worth measuring. It wasn't.

The founder at this company put it plainly on one of our calls:

"What's the fast game, what's the slow game?"

That's the right framing. The problem is most founders are unintentionally managing a slow game engine like it's the fast game…and then wondering why the results don't come.

The part that's hard to sit with: you cannot turn a slow buyer into a fast buyer. The person who needs six months of content before they trust you enough to spend $10,000 needs six months. Pushing the timeline doesn't compress it. Usually it ends it.

When this company finally committed to the slow game—brand-first, less pressure on cold traffic to convert quickly, stopped pulling spend before it had time to mature—volume of calls went down. But conversion went up significantly.

Fewer touchpoints. More closes. Because they stopped forcing cold leads to behave like warm referrals.

Forget the buyer types for a second. Where are you trying to turn a slow game into a fast game?

Some of those weren't failing. They were in month two of a sales cycle you didn't know you had. And whoever was running them probably got blamed for results that were just 30 days away.

I defend (great) marketers to founders more than I expected when I started doing this work. Marketers aren't always right. But the more common mistake is on the founder side.

Part of it's personal. I spent most of my career as a CMO before this, and the dynamic in this story was the most frustrating thing I lived with day to day.

It plays out like a script. The pressure mounts. The CMO holds the line. Explains why the strategy needs time to mature. Why a campaign needs another six weeks before there's signal worth reading. Eventually they cave. "Fine. I'll ship what you're asking for." And they produce it. Cheaper cost per lead, or whatever metric the pressure was about that quarter.

Then the founder looks at the result and says: "That's not what I meant. Where's the revenue?"

You didn't ask for revenue. You asked for cheaper acquisition. I gave you that. The strategy still needs time to mature.

Which one do you want?

Most founders aren't applying accountability. They're applying impatience and calling it accountability. The distinction is expensive.

The only question that matters

Think about what you're actually doing when you kill a slow-game channel because it doesn't look fast enough.

You're not just stopping something that hadn't matured yet. You're erasing months of conditioning already done on buyers who were sixty days into a ninety-day journey. They don't show up as losses in your dashboard. They just disappear. You never find out they were almost there.

Then you restart the campaign. And the clock resets—for them and for you.

You hired a gardener, planted seeds, and then dug them up every two weeks to check if anything was growing. The gardener keeps getting fired for the bad harvest.

Before you make the next change to your marketing — the next campaign pause or the next "I need to see something in 30 days" conversation—ask yourself one question:

Am I pulling up seeds?

— Chris Piper